The Longing That Never Leaves
El anhelo que nunca se va
A student notices the mind rushing in to claim understanding, and the teacher explores how the deep human longing can only be addressed by turning toward presence rather than grasping at objects or achievements.
The Longing That Never Leaves
A student notices the mind rushing in to claim understanding, and the teacher explores how the deep human longing can only be addressed by turning toward presence rather than grasping at objects or achievements.
It's like there's a thought of somebody who's getting it, who's getting this. It's the story jumping in.
There is a level where intellectual understanding is valid and useful, but you're seeing it as a thought, so there's not much more to do. What can be done with whatever you're experiencing that creates any sense of noise, noise in the sense of an anxious restlessness?
The resolution is in not knowing
In that wanting to know or understand, the mind pops up to validate itself: "I got it, I'm there." There's a restlessness in that, because ultimately the resolution is in not knowing. When we really get it, it's just this mystery, and that's where the restlessness ends. The mystery is always present. Right now is completely mysterious. And then the mind can go, "Yes, I know that, I get it."
Yes, that's exactly what it's like. I suddenly see that thought going, "Oh yes, it's this," and it's a thought.
But it matters that you're seeing it and noticing it as a thought.
And sometimes it's restless. Today it didn't feel so much like that anxiousness, but sometimes it feels like a frustration.
You could look at it as a way to see more deeply. You're noticing there's a thought and an anxious grasping at knowing or understanding. You could also look at the sense of a subjectivity: who got it, who understands it. And where is that knowing going to get you? There's going to be a sense of "I'm here, and I'm going to get there once I understand this. Once I get it."
Nowhere to get to
If you see that more and more clearly, you will recognize there's nowhere you can get to. There is only this. And that "nowhere you can get to" can seem, to the part of us in that identification, like terrible news, because all of what we've worked for all our lives is seen through as chasing a mirage.
If we are able, in a sense, to stay with that, to not jump back into the strategy and the beliefs, if we're able to integrate that deeper understanding, it's liberating. Everything we've been looking for is revealed, but it's revealed to be this, to be always this, and to have always been this.
The "this" can only be pointed to with words like presence, consciousness, beingness, awareness. But those words are also, in a sense, confusing or deviating, because they become another thought about what is being pointed to. It matters to notice that, because I could say "this present moment" and you could correctly look at some aspect of your life and think, "This isn't right, this isn't okay." That's appropriate. I'm not saying everything is right and okay. I'm saying something deeper, something prior to what's happening in life, because a lot of what's happening in life needs to be addressed. There are problems and things to do and things to resolve and things to learn. But there's something that is prior to all of that, which is never missing. It is just either overlooked or not recognized for what it is. And it's really what we're looking for.
The moving horizon
The part of us that's in that anxious trying to get there and find it is actually always escaping that and projecting it into a thing we can achieve or get to in time. But it's very sneaky, because it's always "I'll get there tomorrow" or "later today" or whatever window of time you're contemplating. It's the moving horizon. You're trying to get to the horizon, and that's how we spend our lives. But it's because we've assumed it's missing, that it's not here.
And also a lifelong habit of having to do things right or get things right.
Yes. Those habits take different forms for each of us, but they're all just the strategies we use in order to overlook what is here and put it over there in imagination.
We are choosing it
What is important to see is that we're choosing to overlook something and put it over there in imagination. There's a gain in this. We're not a victim of this mechanism. We are completely, emphatically choosing it and fueling it.
As we do this work, we can first notice the mechanism and talk about it as "my mind kicks in." We do experience it as something that has a power and energy of its own, that takes over, that we cannot stop. We can talk about it as a habit, and it feels like a kind of addiction. That's a first seeing of the mechanism. But we can see it more deeply and notice how we're actually choosing it, energizing it. It's become subconscious, but there's something in us that is completely invested in it.
So there's a responsibility there, and there's a freedom in there, in the choice. There's a reason why we choose that, and it's a free choice. There's a challenge to the transformation, to the transition, and we're naturally quite afraid of it. It deserves our respect. And from that, we can have some patience and compassion with ourselves.
The deep longing
There was something when you spoke about the deep longing. That felt like it hit something very vulnerable.
That longing is the human condition. What can happen is that we learn strategies for satiating it. Often, because the people we learned from didn't really know how to satiate it, they were using coping strategies, and so we learned coping strategies. It's like needing to hydrate and drinking beer instead, which feels great, but we actually need water.
That longing is actually a really beautiful thing, a really deep, valuable thing. It's what's calling us back to ourselves. So I say quite emphatically: do not suppress it, and do not see it as a problem. The problem is what we interpret and understand to be the solution. What the longing is about is an interpretation. We project it into a longing for love in a relationship, or longing for children, or longing for money, and all kinds of things. Those could be things we very truly love and want to have, but the deep longing I'm addressing will never be satiated by them. We all know the experience of getting what we really hoped was going to satiate that, and then the longing is back, stronger than ever.
The dark night of the senses
Is that related to the dark night of the senses?
It's actually quite exactly that. The dark night of the senses is when we start to see that what we hoped to find through the senses, through experience, situations, relationships, substances, is just not going to work. We go through a kind of withdrawal. Usually what that does is bring the spiritual work, the spiritual path (just to label it as different from other things we can do), into a kind of priority in our life. Which doesn't mean we become nuns and monks or go to a cave, but it means that while we can still pursue life and things we desire and want, that deep longing we address in a spiritual practice.
Because anything that is truly a spiritual practice is going to be about now, about presence. That's what I would call spiritual practice. If it's about rituals and dogmas and going to a certain kind of structure like a church or a temple, I'm not excluding that, but only if it's in service to seeing reality more deeply: what is now and what we are.
Some people call that the inward path, toward the subject or toward presence, as opposed to toward objects, toward time. This doesn't exclude objects and time. In a sense, it's about prioritizing something that is prior to that: presence, what you could call the eternal subject. That's why the inner work involves looking at the mind, looking at sensations, looking at emotions. That's the way to address the longing. And it's about the heart as well. It's coming from thoughts and mind into the heart.
The dark night of the soul
Then there's the dark night of the soul. It's about the collapsing of duality. The experience itself, fundamentally, of "I and the world," "human and God," "me and others," which is a very fundamental part of our experience and has become the reality we know. We don't have a memory of something prior to that. We have the experience of duality but not a memory of anything before it. When we were born, there wasn't duality.
The dark night of the soul is the collapsing of that. You could say it's when the mechanism of the belief in "I and universe," "I and other," is itself seen as unsatisfying. It's actually the root of all dissatisfaction. We get to the core of it, the core of what in Buddhism they call dukkha: dissatisfaction, suffering. In Christianity it's addressed very well too, though with much more symbology, poetry, and mysticism (Christ and the cross), but it's all about the ending of that duality. The son and the father are one.
The loss of God
The mystic who wrote about the dark night of the soul describes it as the loss of God. It's not the elevation of the "I" to divinity. It's the ending of the existence of both "I" and "the father." So there's a loss of God, but not in the sense of atheism, because atheism is a reaction (and I think quite a healthy one) to dogma. But then something else takes the place of religion: it's going to be science or whatever else replaces that dogma, which becomes the intelligence "out there," the universe as a thing that is other.
And there's still longing and searching.
Exactly. There's still going to be a longing, and there's going to be an attempt at satiating it through a relationship with that which is "other."
And it's a dark night of the soul because it's a loss of what is most important and dear to us.
The most intimately meaningful and valuable. What has given us a reason to live suddenly starts to disappear. The meaning starts to dissipate, and it's terrifying. It's cyclical; that's why they call it the dark night of the soul. There are layers, and the ultimate layer is: what do we know ourselves to be? It's a transition, and when that transition happens, something is revealed which, I think, pretty much always is recognized as much more valuable.
Glimpses along the way
And there are glimpses during that transition.
Exactly. There are glimpses before and during. It's what keeps us motivated to keep going. Those glimpses are tastes of what is right now, which always is, always was, and always will be. We know it. We knew it when we were born, before we were born.
One way to conceive it is that we remember it, but it's not something we remember, because it's not in the past. It's now. We simply recognize it as reality, as what this always is. Everything can change, but something always is. It can be called so many things: presence, emptiness (though it's an empty fullness), beingness. I used to use the word "beingness" a lot, but then I had to change, because it starts to become a thing. Some call it consciousness, but consciousness is that which has no color, no smell, no taste, no shape, no size, no place, yet always is. I was using that word today in the meditation to point to that aliveness. But then I can see the mind going in, because as I use that word, I can also imagine interpreting it as biology, as life in the world. That's not what I'm pointing to.