The Map and the Mystery
El Mapa y el Misterio
A student studying Buddhist body meditation asks about the relationship between the physical self and the teacher's pointer toward identity as illusion, leading to a wide-ranging exploration of dukkha, direct experience, and the courage to take risks in life.
The Map and the Mystery
A student studying Buddhist body meditation asks about the relationship between the physical self and the teacher's pointer toward identity as illusion, leading to a wide-ranging exploration of dukkha, direct experience, and the courage to take risks in life.
I'm really interested in this idea of "my hand, not my hand's business." I've been taking a meditation course that ended a couple of days ago called Thirty-Two Parts of the Body. It's a classic Buddhist meditation that isn't tremendously well known. Basically, the way people knew about the body back then was through examining cadavers, so the meditation divides the body into parts: head hair, body hair, nails, teeth, skin, then internal organs and fluids. There are different ways of practicing with it, and one of them involves meditating on other people's bodies, recognizing that they also have all of these same parts. It's a way to tap into the similarity between us. I'm interested in talking about the relationship between this sort of physical "I" and what I've perceived you to be pointing to today and in previous meditations: the "I" being an illusion, or an identification, or a story.
The "I" being an illusion has to do with when we know what "I" is.
Take the hand, for example. Obviously, we know a lot about the hand from anatomy, biology, the physics of it. But experientially, when we relate to our hand, we carry a lot more knowing of it than is real. We know all of this from biology, anatomy, physics, all of the reality of the hand, but we forget that that is a map. Those are ways to explain scientifically and functionally, and we live our day relating to the map of the hand, relating to the conceptual, mental experience of the hand. This can be useful and practical, but there are, in a sense, two worlds of the hand: one is the direct experience of the hand, and the other is the experience of the hand through knowledge, through memory, through thought.
The experience of the hand through thought is useful and practical at times, but when we assume that it is the reality of the hand, we forget the experience of the hand.
The hand as a gateway to the sense of "I"
This is only a metaphor, in a sense, because it's a way to explore something, an easy experiment: just observing the sensation of the hand. But it's a practice, because it transfers to relationship with a person, relationship to the rest of the body, relationship to life, and even the sense of "I."
That last one is the more challenging one to observe. There is an experience of being, and then there is the belief of what I is, what I am. When I say that is illusory, I mean those beliefs. When you refer to "I" in your experience and you know what you are, you're addressing and referring to beliefs. The true, direct experience of "I" is mysterious. And this is not a difficult thing to notice.
Dukkha: the fundamental sense that something is wrong
That's the distinction I was making earlier: when we relate to our current experience and we have a problem with it, it's because we chose to know what "I am." And by "problem," I have to be specific. If there are issues in life, things that are actual right now that I need to address, I'm not talking about that kind of problem. I'm talking about a very deep sense that something is wrong, something is missing. For people who have done enough insight work, they will realize this is almost permanently there: the underlying sense that something's wrong.
In Buddhism, since you're doing some Buddhist practices, it's called dukkha. That's how they refer to this. It's a fundamental sense of dissatisfaction. It's translated as "suffering," but it's not quite the same. You can describe it as this sense that something's just not right, something's not okay, and it's in me, it's in life. There's always something that's fundamentally not okay.
The reason why we meditate is this something that's just not okay. And that something works exactly as it does with the hand. When I know what my hand is and I relate to the mental knowing of the hand, I forget the hand. When I know what I am, I lose touch with being.
This creates a situation that is difficult both ways. There's a satisfaction in knowing what I am. But the cost of that knowing is dukkha, a dissatisfaction, because I am losing touch with something that is more essentially what I am. And because of that dissatisfaction, we try to get close to what I am. But in getting close, I have to let go of what I think and believe I am, and we don't want to do that either. We want both. This is the back and forth that we experience in this work. So it will be experienced as loss, and even death.
It's easier to explore this in relating to a hand, because you graduate from that exploration to something more challenging. The ultimate challenge, the real game, is the knowing of what I am. When you say "I," what is it referring to? And the answer to that question is a mystery.
You could also answer that because you learned that's the "right answer," and then it's still knowing that you are mystery.
In that case, it's still a map. It's tricky. You will know that you are there when there is no more dukkha. But you can also suppress and repress that experience. You can pretend that everything's okay, and it's not.
Broken fingers and broken maps
I had a thought about what we were discussing. We have our hand, the physical matter. There's the experience of our hand, which has to do with the rest of our body and cognition. And there's the idea of our hand. Let's say I fall and break a finger. On some level, it's common or easy to say there's something wrong. But on some level, that's also a map, a perception. Just because you hurt your finger doesn't mean there's something wrong per se.
That's the distinction I'm trying to make. Clearly there is something wrong if you break your finger. You do what you need to do. It's a functional thing. It has to do with proper use of thinking, proper use of maps. But it doesn't mean that something is fundamentally wrong in life, with reality. There will be physical pain. The distinction is that there will be physical pain and possibly some emotionality, but not suffering. Emotional pain as well; it's fine, it's natural. But there is something that gets added, and you don't need to break a finger in order to add it. You could be sitting with everything okay in life and still be in the experience of dukkha.
When you say "the proper use of maps," you basically mean acknowledging the pain that is inherent in life. You might break a finger, you might experience the death of a loved one, but the proper use of maps is to understand how to orient your mind so that you're not adding dukkha.
That's one aspect, because if you are adding that narrative that something is deeply, fundamentally not okay, then the way you think, the way you use the map, is going to be dysfunctional. One way of defining dysfunctional is neuroticism, and a definition of neuroticism is not seeing reality.
Back to Buddhism: what did the Buddha say about how to know if something is the right thing? Only if it works, if it's functional, if it's practical. If it's adding unnecessary suffering, it's impractical. If it's being unkind to somebody else, it's impractical.
The projection of future okayness
Another way in which we experience dukkha is the sense that "I will be okay." There's something now that's not okay, but it will be okay when something happens or I get somewhere. There's this projection that the solution is somewhere else.
But in some cases, like a broken finger, the healing really is in the future.
That's the distinction again. The healing of the hand and the healing of the pain is in the future, so that's not dukkha. But if I'm not okay until my hand heals, that's dukkha. If something is not okay in life right now until my hand heals, that is dukkha. It's your relationship to it. It's hard to describe and pinpoint, but it's a sense that something is fundamentally wrong or not okay. It could be with me, it could be with life, but it's now. In the experience of now, something is missing. And what's missing, if I put it in words (you cannot truly put it in words), is mystery. What's in the way is knowing, beliefs.
This is becoming a very general conversation, which makes it hard to clarify because it's abstract. You used the example of an injury to your hand, but if you spoke about what actually is your experience now, then we could clarify. Or what's normally your experience, maybe not now, but in two hours or yesterday. What's the recurring thing? You don't have to. Just an invitation.
I really like the distinction between dukkha and pain, because they're very different. I think sometimes spiritual narratives suggest, or it can be easy to interpret them as saying, you can rise above anything and it's all in your head. But the reality is, breaking your finger hurts. The reality is we're all going to die, and there's going to be a lot of pain along the way. I guess that is the first noble truth. I think that's a pretty accurate map.
It's still a map. Who knows, maybe one of us doesn't die.
Where desire comes from
Another way to work with this is to look at what you want: what your desires are, your drives, your passions, and where your intentions are coming from. If what you want is coming from an open vitality, or if it's motivated by something missing, something that's not okay. Is it coming from the love for something? Because the love for something is going to originate from a place where nothing is missing.
Even as we mature and grow in life, we deepen in this sense. For example, we can start playing music early in life and it's coming from this sense of something missing: "I will complete myself by becoming a musician." But even that can be motivated from a deeper love of life and love of music that then becomes, in a sense, robbed by the sense of something missing. As we mature, the same passion of music-making can come from a place of just the love of music. Nowhere to get to, nothing to achieve. Just the enjoyment of the process of music, and even the process of learning and getting better.
Identity and trauma
What you're talking about is true even with really intense suffering, like trauma and terrible things happening to you. It's really the same process of how you create an identity. If something really undesirable happened to me when I was a child, children can't really handle those feelings. So what we do over time is construct a story: "It happened to me, it was terrible, this person is responsible for it." But what we really need to do is feel what we actually felt. For instance, I wanted my father to care for me more and protect me more. Because that would mean I'd have to feel all my feelings about the fact that he didn't, what I've done instead is make it about how his actions threatened my identity, how I want to see myself as somebody who matters and somebody who's valuable. So it still comes back to the "I," whether it's about being a musician or something that was really, really painful.
You might see, in working with people with trauma, that there's a really strong identity in being the victim. A big part of the process is getting into that but also getting past it.
Yes, because the identity is created in proportion to how much you can't handle feeling what you felt. So if you hurt your finger and there's just a small identity issue around it, like "I don't like having to feel bad feelings," then it won't be as hard as if you have some secret "I am Superman, I never get hurt, I am invulnerable" kind of identity. That will create more suffering.
I actually remember hurting my finger when I was younger. I broke a finger and it was very painful, and then I went to put it under ice and I felt terror. It was no longer just pain; it was terror. It was the noticing that the body will end. I was putting ice on a sprained or broken finger, in terror.
I remember when I was a kid, I was trying to cut through a wax candle. It was pretty thick, and the knife slipped and I cut through a significant chunk of my finger. It was gushing out, and I remember staring at it. I had enough sense to go to the bathroom and run it under water, but I remember being shocked at the fact that that could happen. It's funny, because I didn't really feel upset or alarmed. I remember feeling shock, surprise, almost curiosity: "Wow, I didn't know this could happen." At some point a few moments later, I felt an ache, the pain of it, maybe when the shock subsided a little. But I don't think I constructed a story around it. I just remember feeling mostly curious and surprised.
I can't say I've had that level of equanimity with, for example, personal relationships. But I get the sense that that's what you're pointing to in terms of the deeper traumas and ultimately this work.
What is actually present now
Not necessarily traumas. What I'm pointing to is: what, in your experience today, yesterday, the day before, if anything, is there a sense of something missing? And what is it about? Because we've talked about your situation with work, and you just mentioned relationships. I'm wondering where there is something more personal, more intimate that you could maybe share or ask about. It might feel more vulnerable. It might feel more risky.
I think one of my, it's funny, because I don't particularly feel like something's really missing or really wrong. There have been moments in my life where I have. But in this moment, I wouldn't characterize it that way. What I do feel is a fear around whether the relationship I'm in is the right one, and whether the career path I'm slowly putting together is the right one. When I really am with that from a place of okayness and acceptance, I'm like: it's here now, it's working, and this is it. It's right now. And if that changes, it'll become apparent, and that's okay.
I also noticed something recently. My partner and I had planned to do some relationship processing yesterday that was sort of past due from a week or two ago, but then neither of us really felt those issues present. We were wondering whether we should talk about stuff or not, and I became aware that unless something really feels present and needs to be addressed in the moment, it can turn into what you're describing, where you're indulging a sense that there's something wrong. In choosing to discuss it, you might reify it. What we ended up doing was just having a good night: dancing, having fun. When you just decide that things are actually good and you're having fun, that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. It was interesting to get together expecting to do heavy emotional work and realize, actually, there's nothing wrong. We don't need to do that in this moment.
So I've been playing with that, playing with my perception of whether there's something wrong in this relationship or whether I'm just bracing myself because of stories I have.
And again, part of the art of being in relationship is discerning what is dukkha and what is just the normal difficulty and pain of relating.
To me, I'm hearing that there isn't much. Everything's good.
It's good. And it's funny, because part of my ambivalence comes from it not being a total Disney fairytale, not having that high dopamine, new-relationship-energy kind of feeling.
Are you fully satisfied?
This is the thing: I'm sinking into this realization that, yes, mostly. Furthermore, our capacity to build on what is here feels very strong, in contrast with some other relationships I've had. The example last night showed that. Realizing we had a choice, discussing it, and then choosing the thing that felt good. There's a lot of creative potential in that. If our partnership were an architecture firm, we'd have a lot of tools at our disposal. We can create and plan and imagine beautiful things.
It's interesting, because there's also something scary about that. When something feels functional and you have access to that choice, I think I have a fear around things actually working out, because then it means commitment to that decision. And sometimes, like now, I think: why is that scary? That seems actually kind of great. I guess the fear is that in making this choice, I'm passing up something more perfect that doesn't actually exist, that isn't actually available to me. That's the option I'm weighing against.
Taking risks and trusting the heart
So that's anxiety. Last time we spoke a lot about risk-taking. I would suggest that's the way for you. Take more risks, take bigger risks, and you will go deeper into your experience and discover more. There will be deeper movement, deeper fear, deeper love, deeper challenges. It doesn't mean you will lose the experience you are describing, of realizing things are okay. When we develop, we often go through challenges and then come to a stability. But then something is going to break this stability, and it's a good thing. We get in touch with deeper energies, deeper desire, and then move our life into a vaster space, a vaster unknown. That's going to bring up something far more palpable, like fear or challenges. Right now, it seems like you've gone through some challenges and you're stabilizing, and now you're moving into and planning a bigger movement with your work.
I just say: follow your deepest desires. Take big risks. We trust your heart.
What I hear you saying is essentially: if you trust your heart, take risks, and open to the mystery as a kind of policy throughout your life, that will give way to a deepening and expansion of experience, which will surface a new set of challenges, fears, anxieties, and growth. At each stage, you work with those, you practice with them, and then the cycle repeats. You might have periods of stabilization, you might have periods of intense challenge, but over the course of life, you keep growing.
And you might touch something deep. You might not, but you might. You could have a sense of, "Oh, this is what I've been having a hard time getting in touch with." Whatever it is, I don't think I can describe it to you. I'm just saying you might, in that process, come in touch with something when you relax a little bit.
Interesting. Thank you for the dialogue.
You're very welcome. I hope it helps.