The Fear of Infinite Expansion
El miedo a la expansión infinita
A student describes a persistent sense of being contained within an internal boundary, and the fear that releasing it would mean dissolving forever. The teacher reframes this as a sophisticated expression of the fear of death and explores what "ending forever" could actually mean.
The Fear of Infinite Expansion
A student describes a persistent sense of being contained within an internal boundary, and the fear that releasing it would mean dissolving forever. The teacher reframes this as a sophisticated expression of the fear of death and explores what "ending forever" could actually mean.
I was noticing something when I'm meditating. It's a thought that seems really silly when I examine it. There is some sort of containment to "I," with a slight visual image of it being in space, but not external space. It's some sort of internal space. The evidence that there's some sort of containment is that I'm privy to my own thoughts and my own sensations and feelings, and not other people's. I know that doesn't stand up to rational inquiry, but it still persists. And there's fear: if I don't keep that, then what is there? It's not very rational, so I think I need to hack away at the logic behind it. But there's this sense that if I don't keep it, I'll just extend infinitely in space and time, in some sort of internal space, whatever that is.
If you were to infinitely expand, what would happen?
It's just scary. You don't exist at all then.
Yes. Death.
Yeah, forever. That's the fear: a feeling of forever, fear of death forever.
Or disappearing forever.
I think it's the same thing. The way it's coming up right now is this sense of infinite expansion, which doesn't sound like death, but it is.
It is, because if you infinitely expand, that which you are can no longer be defined.
I'm just trying to tell you the flavor of it. I used to have this thing when I was a kid where I would imagine dying, and then I would think: it's non-existence forever. That's what it is. But that's sort of nihilistic.
It's death. That's the definition of death. It's ending forever.
The impossibility of knowing your own absence
Because if we knew we would come back, then the period of ending couldn't truly be known. If it was known, there's no end; it's not an end. So if you disappear and you come back, that period where you were gone, hypothetically, you don't know it. Why? Because if you knew it, you wouldn't have been gone. The period where you're gone, you can't know, because if you know it, you're there; it's not gone. So when you come back, you didn't die. And you didn't even know that any gap occurred. You had no experience of it. So that's not something you can fear. What you're fearing is the ending that is forever. And that's exactly the definition of death.
A way to look at it: how is this ending forever going to look to you?
So you're recommending I think about that?
Really contemplate: how does this ending forever look, if you're not there to know it?
It's just so not comforting.
It's not possible.
Okay, thank you. Because it's so silly that this thought is supposedly protecting me from that.
A sophisticated expression of the fear of death
It's not silly. You have a sophisticated mind, and so you're expressing the fear of death in a sophisticated way, in a sense complex and maybe complicated. But that's how you're experiencing it because you have a sophisticated mind.
What do you mean, "how I'm experiencing it"?
The whole thing around the expansion and a separate mind.
Right. It feels like I die right now, and how do I know I'll be able to come back, in the sense of being able to be conscious?
You don't know, and that's the only way you can experience the true transition.
Okay, but this is the thing. I have this thought that supposedly protects me from this happening. That's so ridiculous, just a thought. But at the same time, there does seem to be something physical or substantial that happens when I go near that, and it makes it feel like no, that actually is real, there is something.
When the body confirms the fear
The body and the mind, in a sense, are one. That's what we call the body-mind. When at the level of mind there's a coming close to the fear of death, it activates all the biological responses, which confirm: "I am dying." So you have to run away, and then the mind activates to protect.
It's so funny though. It's so silly, like an imagination in my mind that there's some kind of glass-like limit, and it's not doing anything.
It contains the idea that you are something.
Yes. But that thought is that I'm separate because I have my own thoughts and sensations.
And that you are those thoughts and sensations, or the space where they appear.
So really, yes, I have that somewhat element of privacy. But at the level of what is aware of those, there is no line.
Is the space appearing within awareness, or awareness within the space?
Is the awareness appearing within that space, or is that space appearing within the awareness? Because you're talking about a sense of something expanding.
Right, it can only expand if there's this line.
Yes, the idea of it.
I'm agreeing with you. There's an idea that there's a line, and so the line could expand.
That line is what I meant when I said earlier that we identify with a part of our experience. You're describing that part as this more conceptual space of thoughts and sensations. But that's how it works. We experience sounds, and they are "not me, out there." We experience sight, and it's "not me, out there," except if I'm looking at my hand, that's me, but it's still out there, just a part of the "out there" that is me. The sensations of the body: that's me. If I'm sitting on a couch, there's a sensation that is the contact of the couch and the legs, and there's a concept: part of the sensation is couch (not me), part of the sensation is me. All of that is this line, these boundaries of "me, not me, me, not me." That's how identification works.
But if we start to look at those boundaries and see there isn't such a line, we see that it's conceptual. It's happening constantly with the map-making of "me, not me."
You're describing it from the perspective of meditation, where there are the thoughts, which are private, and that's the sense of me. But in the sense of expansion, there's an ending to that. And that's the edge.
The requirement of transition
At some point, it seems like a requirement that in this process we transition to something that feels like the end of "I," in whatever way that transition is experienced. It's this ending of the identification, the belief that I am a thing. And the body is very likely going to activate as if it's dying. You've had that. It's probably less intense now, getting a little more toned down.
Yeah, definitely. But sometimes still pretty intense. It just seems so funny: so difficult to surrender that thought, and at the same time so easy to see that it's obviously just a thought and can't do anything.
At some point, you see through it enough that it falls away on its own, and you can't hold on to it.
That's what I'm trying to get to. I need to hack at it so I see through it more radically, but I'm not seeing how.
I think you are. It's just on the way out.
Privacy after the transition
I find it so mysterious. There is this sense that something is private, because I see my thoughts and emotions and not the person's next to me. And yet what I am doesn't have that exclusiveness. I imagine that even once you've been through the transition, you still also have that sense of privacy, where you see your thoughts and emotions and others don't. There's something there that's so weird and mysterious. It sounds contradictory.
The problem is that you can't really talk about it, because the way you know it after the transition, all language belongs to the before. It's the nature of language. It requires an "I" and an "other" and all the dual aspects of language. So you can't really describe it. You could say, for example, that thoughts appear but they don't belong to me. So there isn't, in a sense, a sense of privacy the way there was.
I don't mean privacy as in "these thoughts and emotions are me," but in the sense that they're accessible by me and not by the person next to me.
I would say that only applies in communication. I don't experience it like that. In relationship and communication, I would say "this is my thought" or "I had this thought," but it's not experienced the way it used to be, where it was me and mine.