Contraction Is an Interpretation
La contracción es una interpretación
A student asks how the direct experience of open being can coexist with a sense of limitation and identification, and why contraction seems to arise automatically.
Contraction Is an Interpretation
A student asks how the direct experience of open being can coexist with a sense of limitation and identification, and why contraction seems to arise automatically.
Something stops, and it's strange, because I can also describe it the opposite way: that something does stop. Sometimes I feel this contradiction. I feel the direct experience of beingness, the obviousness of it, and at the same time, this limitation is there. How can both be there?
What limitation? There is only limitation if you imagine it and believe it.
I'm referring to identification. I'm viewing it as something that has a gravitational pull.
The image is just an image
You're not the victim of the identification mechanism. You could notice an image of your face, and then interpret: "I'm identified, I'm limited, I'm stuck. I can't stop this. How do I stop it? Let me figure out the mechanism." But the image of a face is just the image of a face. It's mysterious. It's beautiful.
Yeah, but it usually brings contraction with it, or pain.
That's the interpretation. There is a judgment, a decision about what it is, and that creates an illusion of contraction, which then creates a sensation of pain or an emotion.
I'm not sure I understand what you're saying. In my mind, the image itself is harmless, but if I believe I am that for a while, that generates contraction.
Believing is not something that happens to you
Stop believing it. The point is that you are interpreting the believing as something that happens to you, and I'm saying that where you're at, where you're going through, that's a choice. You interpret this believing as something that happens to you, and as a consequence, you're thrown into a contraction that also happens to you.
The contraction, which I understand is real at a certain level of discussion, is, where you're at, an interpretation. By that I mean there is no such contraction. It's the same as seeing an image of your face or somebody else's face: it's just an image. It's not identification. The sensations of contraction are not contraction. They are just sensation. And by seeing what the whole complex of contraction is made of, you can, in a sense, see through it. It's transparent.
By seeing what it's made of?
Intimacy, not resistance
Yes. The curiosity you have is to know it more intimately. The deepest part of that curiosity requires this: if you are wanting it to stop and go away, there is no way you can be intimate with it.
It's like wanting your friend to come home so you can be close to him, but wanting him to leave the minute he arrives. You're never going to know him well that way.
What I'm describing is that this work is not about making what we don't like leave. It's about having such intimacy with it that it could be here forever and you'd be totally fine. Because then you start to realize it's not an enemy, it's not a threat. Fear, pain, contraction: it all becomes just part of that same aliveness.
Yeah, that really resonates.
Nothing there to wrestle with
The contraction is an interpretation. If you go into full, direct intimacy with that experience, you'll notice: there's sensation, there's emotion, there's thought, and all of it is, in a sense, transparent. It's not an object. We make it into an object. We call it contraction, we call it identification, we call it "I," and it becomes a thing we wrestle with. But if you see it's all transparent appearance, you can't wrestle with it, because there's nothing there to wrestle with. There is no thing.
It's like being underwater, fighting with water. There's nothing you can pull or push against. You're trying to fight with a part of the ocean, and you're just going to tire yourself out. It appears as though there are things. That's why the metaphor of waves on the surface works: it appears that the wave is a thing, but it's just more ocean. We try to manipulate those waves, try to get them to go where we want or to be the shape we want. When you realize it's all just ocean, that there's no thing there you can push or pull, then you can start surfing.
Thank you. I don't want to take more space.
You're welcome.