Thoughts as Opportunities
Los pensamientos como oportunidades
A question about whether thoughts that trigger resistance can be seen as useful, and how the belief in a separate self can be deconstructed.
Thoughts as Opportunities
A question about whether thoughts that trigger resistance can be seen as useful, and how the belief in a separate self can be deconstructed.
The idea came up when we were discussing that there's resistance to thoughts. The thought triggers resistance.
That's what you're experiencing: the resistance to thought.
So the resistance links to what we believe as true. In a sense, thoughts are positive, not negative. They bring up stuff.
Positive in what sense? Do you mean that they're useful?
Yes, because a thought triggers the resistance, and that allows us to see through the resistance.
You could always think of every obstacle as an opportunity. If you are struggling with thought, it is a point of opportunity.
Yes, that's what I mean.
Resistance as a signal
If you get taken by thought and you struggle with it, there's a resistance. It's uncomfortable. It's unpleasant. Yes, there is something to uncover, because when we are free, even free at a certain level, whatever we are free from can no longer affect us.
There could come a point where all of the negative thinking is completely insignificant, to the point where whether it's there or not, it means nothing. It affects you in no way. It's like clouds on a sunny day. You don't even notice them. Whereas in the past, it was a stormy day, scary and depressive. But at some point, the same intensity of negative thinking can be like clouds on a sunny day. They're there, but you're not believing them.
The loop of belief and feeling
And the emotional aspect, what appears as a feeling that seems real, is actually more of the effect of believing thoughts, an effect in our biology, in our body-mind. That is often tricky because it makes things appear more real. There's a kind of confirmation: "Because I feel this way, something must be wrong." But the feeling is created by the belief that something is wrong. Then the feeling confirms the belief, the belief creates more feeling, and so on.
There needs to be a period where you're detoxing, in a sense. You don't believe it anymore, but you're still going to have the thoughts and still going to have the emotions. It's going to take a while until the clouds clear. And when they come back, because you're no longer believing and creating the negativity in the body-mind, they pass.
I totally get it. There was a point where I felt free from thoughts. I could clearly see that it was just interpretation in the mind, and I felt that the interpretation was not going to be lived out anymore. But after that point of clear seeing, there was still falling back into the pattern. So at this point I'm just having more certainty in the seeing of it, through all the interpretation and mind chatter. I'm feeling more confident now.
The only certainty
There's only one certainty possible, and it can be known more and more certainly. It is that there is something prior to all of it. You could say that's consciousness, beingness, what you are. There's various language around it, but it's the only certainty.
Yes. The certainty of seeing is there. It's just there. And I don't even try to describe what it is.
It's indescribable.
How does disidentification with the mind relate to unity and non-separation?
Separation and non-unity exist only in the mind. By not believing in them, you can know this directly. It's a hard belief to debunk. I totally give you that. But it is that simple. It's hard, but it's simple. How do you get up to the peak of Everest? You just walk all the way up.
The belief in separation
You could say the belief is complex in the sense that "separation" is one word, but the reality of it is a whole collection, a worldview, a long narrative about what's at the core, who's at the center, where I came from, where I'm going. You could chip away at that. One path is to very slowly and gradually chip away. Others are more direct. It's a bit of an art, because it really depends on the person: not only where they're at, but also what they want. Some people are on this edge of "I'm either going to jump off a cliff or I'm going to wake up," and the sensation is just unbearable. For others it's a gentler journey. But ultimately it is just a belief. And then you might experience it as: "That's a belief. I've got rid of that one. There's another one. There's another one."
Is self-inquiry the best way to take that belief apart?
Self-inquiry and the legs of the table
Because it ultimately is the belief in self. And by "self," I have to be a little technical. I mean that which is separate: something that originates on its own, has its own origin, and has its own separate will and agency. There's quite a bit packed into that.
I used to describe it as a table with a bunch of legs. You go at one of the legs with self-inquiry, then another, then another. Maybe you go at all of them slowly, a little bit here and there. But at some point you don't need all the legs to come down. At some point it's enough that the whole thing collapses.
Some teachers, for example, all they talk about is the sense of agency. So they're going at one leg: eighty percent of the teaching is "you're not the doer, you have no control, absolutely no control, there is no doer." That's going at one of the legs, one of the things that keeps this belief in self alive. Because the only thing that can be separate is the idea of something that I am that is not something else. What is separation? Is there something that is not something else? It's that simple.
Emptiness all the way down
To see this, you need to break things apart. We know that there is absolutely no separation between this phone, this case, and myself. Every serious scientist will say there is no separation. And I'm talking about what we consider as objects. This is only a hundred years of understanding. Our body-mind, our genes, have millions of years of conditioning that this is a separate thing. Yet we know there is absolutely no separation. In fact, we know that everything is empty.
The word "atom" comes from Greek. It was a genius breakthrough: the world is composed of tiny things. But atoms were conceived as the irreducible source. You couldn't go deeper. It was the smallest building block, and you couldn't go further. Then they realized there are subatomic particles. Then they realized those particles aren't really particles. They appear to be, but they're empty. They're energy, empty energy that probabilistically has a certain effect on its surroundings. It's all empty. And that's just what we experience as the manifestation of reality and matter.
The constructed self
Now look at the sense of self, the sense of what you are. In a sense, it's the same thing. From very early on, there is a creation of a thought that is an image of what I am. Then we build a big narrative around it, and it appears to be very real. Then it can be deconstructed, which is self-inquiry, to a point where you can see there is nothing there that you can call "I." There is beingness, there is awareness, but there is nothing there that is what I am, that I can know as a thing.
It's only the belief, and it has certain qualities. There's a quality of agency, but in the way I've experienced it, it's the belief that my will originates in myself. I am the origin of that will. I am the source of that, separate from the rest, separate from the world, separate from God (that's just to name something), from the universe. And that's just the agency aspect.
Thank you.