Waiting for the Wrong Thing
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A question about recognizing the habit of waiting for something in the future, and how that waiting is itself made of thought.
Waiting for the Wrong Thing
A question about recognizing the habit of waiting for something in the future, and how that waiting is itself made of thought.
I had this thought today, something about waiting. A habitual thought about waiting for something in the future. Then I recognized it as a habitual thought, and then came another recognition: there can't be any such thing as waiting, because it's just a thought. That felt connected with what you were saying in the meditation.
Yes, a sense of expectation. That something different will happen, will come from time, will arrive here and appear from time.
Waiting is one of the strategies. Another strategy is the sense of doing in order to create a change, to arrive at a different state, the state we want, and then to preserve it as much as we can. So there is this searching for something, and waiting is just one style: hoping, waiting.
The belief beneath the strategy
The root of that is the belief. There is a thought, and there is the belief in the reality of that thought. And when I say "thought" or "thinking," it can be very complex. It is not just the image of a circle, which is a concept, an image. Our mind has the capacity to create a very complex thought, a thought structure: a certain future with a certain feeling tone, a certain mental state. We can imagine that in a split second, and then we jump on that train.
There is this way of speaking about observing the mind, letting the train of thought just pass. But there is a seduction, because it seems so enticing. We imagine this future (which is an imagination; it could just as well have been the imagination of a past, and then it is nostalgia). Pick your style and pick your strategy. You can wait for it or work for it.
It is always the belief that there is something other than this that is not only better than this, but is what will finally satisfy something, because this is not satisfying. There is something about now that I am not okay with.
The constant dream
What I am talking about is something so fundamental. It is not something that happens once in a while. It might be once in a while that we touch something deep enough to notice this, and that is a huge realization. Even more so when we see it is actually constant.
Being in the dream world, being asleep, is not being aware of this. Our reality is the full, complete, total belief in the mind world, to a point where the reality of presence becomes secondary, a kind of background. There is an actual reality that we are experiencing, but it becomes the background, while the foreground is the imaginary, constructed, internal, subjective world. That foreground gets projected onto reality, and then we operate within that virtual reality.
There is time, there are places, there is me, there are people, there is where I need to get to, where I am going, where I am coming from. That is constant. And that aspect of the mind is useful for living. But the problem, though very subtle, is profound: we do not know that it is imagination, that it is mind. I call it a mind map, for example, the mapping of reality. When we do not see that it is one hundred percent fully made of thought, it becomes reality.
What you are waiting for
In your case, that which you are waiting for could be explicit, a very specific thing you are imagining, or it could be vague, or it could be constantly changing. The imagination helps you into waiting for this, then it shifts into waiting for that. Or it could be always the same thing. That is just a character thing: how your personality is, how your mind works, what your preferences are. It is not that relevant.
The important thing is to notice and really look very directly and closely at that which you are waiting for. Look at how it happens, what it is made of. It is like a mirage: we see a reflection, it looks like water, we imagine water, we believe it is water, and then we are in pursuit.
In the same fashion, the closer we get to that which we are imagining, the thirst grows. The more we approach the experience we were hoping would satisfy us, the thirst grows, because it is not actually what we are looking for. We think we are looking for water, we see it there, and it is not actually even water. There are layers of illusion and projection.
The pull away from now
To see it as what it is: the sensations you are hoping to experience, that which you are waiting for, elicit a kind of feeling tone, energetic, emotional, a mental state. And that feeling tone is directly in service of not experiencing something that is here now. It serves as a bit of a numbing, a kind of antidote to what we are actually experiencing.
Yeah, it feels like it is trying to pull you out.
Exactly. It is this push and pull with the current experience. That is what we use the mind for. We are trying to manipulate current reality with thought in order to shift it, change it, get it to finally be the way we want it.
It is a really constant, obsessive loop. The actual antidote is to see it fully, to really see it. A lot of my words are giving you a mental framework, and you might even resonate with it, see little glimpses of it. But they are mostly pointing at something so that you see it for yourself. It is not so much the intellectual understanding of it, but for you to profoundly see it, so that it is obvious. So clear that when you look at a glass of wine, you are seeing a glass of wine, there is a glass of wine, and nobody can convince you it is a vase of flowers.
That is the kind of obviousness we want to arrive at, because then it will not have the power to keep enticing you and seducing you into attributing more reality to it than it has.
Disillusion and grief
This is going to be disappointing. A perfect word is "disillusion," the ending of an illusion. But we associate the word with a negative experience. It is something that we lose, in a sense.
Hmm.
You will lose that world of that which you are waiting for, that which could have been. There might be grief, sadness, anger, frustration. But what I say is: trust. Explore this, because you will come closer to what you are really looking for. As you cross a threshold, you will taste it, and it will be satisfying.
There is always this talk about needing to take a leap. I say "trust." Originally in religion the word "faith" was used, but then it got turned into faith in dogmas, and that became very toxic. I prefer the word "trust" because "faith" has been filled with toxic ideology.
Trust. I even say: just trust a bit. Trust enough to explore and experiment for yourself. Even if you are thinking, "I am not so sure there is anything of value here," I am saying: just trust enough, find out for yourself, but give it some time to really fully explore it.
What I am saying simply is this: the strategy you are using will not work. And I am proposing, as skillfully as I can, a direction that is different, one that is more likely to work. Because what you are looking for is not in the mind, and what you are waiting for only exists in the mind.
Yeah, that was the thing that popped up: the waiting is only in the mind. If that idea of what you are waiting for is not there, then there is nothing to wait for. There is no waiting.
Exactly. And there is something you are wanting. There is something you want, and that should not be tampered with. That is precious, because otherwise it would point to a kind of nihilistic nothingness.
The longing that should not be abandoned
What I am saying, which I was also saying in meditation, is that the heart knows. There is a longing. Let that grow. Do not abandon the search. Just look in a different place, because what you are looking for is not in the mind, not in thought. It is always present, here and now.
The path to it is always: look at what is now, look at what is veiling it. And the veiling is going to be thinking, thinking, thinking, in all kinds of forms. Turning thought into something other than thought. We have been doing this from very young, so we forgot we are doing it. We forgot that it was imagination. It became so habitual that it became reality.
In a sense, this is the conscious arriving at something we knew, something we were directly in touch with before we had a mind, before we had the capacity to imagine, conceptualize, and remember. All of that came after the first year of life. It is a gradual development. We did not have the capacity to form concepts, to remember, to imagine. We were directly in touch with this, but it was an unconscious knowing. Now what we need and want is to consciously regain the direct knowing of it.
There is a process of undoing: seeing imagination as imagination, knowing what seems real as thought.
Wait without hope
There is a poem by T.S. Eliot that speaks to exactly this. Let me read it:
"I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing. Wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing. There is yet faith, but the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought. So the darkness shall be the light and the stillness the dancing. Whisper of running streams and winter lightning. The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry, the laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy, not lost but requiring, pointing to the agony of death and birth."
There is a form of waiting that is just sinking into the present moment. And it has to do with the not-knowing I was pointing to in the meditation. The problem is waiting with the knowing of what you want to get to in time, versus waiting in mystery and trust, in the faith of not-knowing, in the present. Waiting as opening to the now, more and more deeply: more into sensation, more into sounds, more into the mystery of this. You will start to touch something that you will know, not with your mind.
Yeah, amazing.
Thank you. That is very much it.