Beliefs, Experience, and What Lies Beyond
Creencias, experiencia y lo que está más allá
A question about how to uncover beliefs we don't know we hold, leading into an exploration of the relationship between experience and being.
Beliefs, Experience, and What Lies Beyond
A question about how to uncover beliefs we don't know we hold, leading into an exploration of the relationship between experience and being.
Can you repeat that?
When you take a belief to be reality. Basically, when you take a concept, an idea, a thought to be reality, that is a belief. And that creates the curtain. But when this is happening, you don't know it's happening.
That leads to my next question: what is the best way to confront beliefs that we are unaware we have?
One way, which is very simple, is just to look at what you think reality is, and consider everything that comes up as a belief. Any answer to that question. Another simple way is to look at what is missing right now, and be honest with yourself.
Obviously this process takes some form of radical honesty.
Yes. Because you could completely have a belief that everything is okay right now. But if you're honest and you connect to something that is not okay, then look at that. It will be based on belief, and those beliefs will be in service to not experiencing something, something that is present now.
Beliefs protect against present experience
Something that confuses me is that you say this is beyond experience, but then there's an avoidance of an experience.
Only by completely relating to experience can you, in a sense, know what is beyond it.
That really blows my mind, and maybe that's the whole purpose of it. But what is beyond experience?
I can only use words like "your true nature" or "reality." But what matters is not how to describe it or become metaphysical or philosophical. The point is to encourage the exploration and the inquiry of that. It is the source of experience.
The source of experience
That makes more sense.
Everything you think, everything you perceive, hear, feel, touch; all your knowing of history, of the universe, of the past; all imagination about the future; all dreams, fantasies: all of that is known by something which is not any of that.
Would you say that all of experience stands on being?
No, because that implies they are two separate things. It is better, as an image, to conceive of being as something that, when in motion, gives rise to experience. When not in motion, there is no experience, yet there is still being.
So experience is like the ripples in the water, and being is the water itself?
Yes, though it is still only an image, because water itself is also only known as an experience. It is a metaphor. Think of being as something that is transparent: no shape, no color, no form, no taste. And then, when in motion, it creates patterns of reflection, which are then known as form, as experience, as sensation, sound, sight, thought.
The limits of metaphor
That reminds me of a passage in the Tao Te Ching that says the five colors blind the eye, the five tastes dull the palate.
I don't remember that particular line. But also, the trick in what I'm saying is that being can then be conceived of as a thing, as something that exists. And it is not a thing. That is why water as a metaphor for being, with the ripples as experience, is a bit misleading.
In Buddhism, they use the expression sunyata, which is translated as "emptiness." The emptiness where everything appears, or the emptiness that is within everything. And they work with koans. You are, in a sense, trying to arrive at the solution to the koan of what emptiness is. And they say, "No, not that. Not that. Not that." Until something happens that is a shift.
Beyond thought
It is not a shift in thought. It is not an understanding in thought. It is not a knowing in thought.