The Literal and the Poetic
Lo Literal y lo Poético
A student reflects on the deepening of presence and the merging of waking up and growing up, leading into a discussion about how a teacher's words, once heard as abstract poetry, reveal themselves to be startlingly literal and direct.
The Literal and the Poetic
A student reflects on the deepening of presence and the merging of waking up and growing up, leading into a discussion about how a teacher's words, once heard as abstract poetry, reveal themselves to be startlingly literal and direct.
It reminded me of something I heard a teacher say. You listen to someone who's had that shift, you hear the words, you feel presence, and it's like an iron near a magnet. After a certain point, there's a force that's just there, beyond the hand that placed it. That's the feeling I get when I listen to you. It's very powerful. You mentioned in the beginning that your teacher was very particular about some things. Is there anything else you'd care to share about that?
There's so much, but nothing specific comes up right now beyond what I already mentioned: he was very emphatic about meditation, effort, and willpower. Is there anything that comes up for you?
Maybe I'll ask more about meditation and will. Intuitively it makes sense: you put all of yourself into this. What could be more focused than meditation? Maybe the real question is, what the hell is meditation? But yes, I'd love to hear more about that.
How the relationship with meditation changes
Speaking to that wouldn't be anything specifically from my teacher, but I experience, and I think it's common, that the whole relationship with meditation changes. It starts as a practice: a thing you do, with somebody doing it and the thing being done. At that level, the practice and the willpower are very important, because there is also the experience of resistance. There's the experience of an independent will that is my own. And then there's the experience of a whole outer world and inner world that I'm resisting.
At that level, the practice is really important because it's the way we face what is happening and break through the barriers of identification, which is when we become truly contracted.
You could also say it raises the energy and opens up to something deeper, what you experience as presence.
Feeling the teacher, finding yourself
When you say that my words move you, that you feel something, that used to happen to me as well. I would feel my teacher, and then it happened with other teachers too, and then I realized: I'm actually feeling myself.
He's in me, of course. That's the magnet and the iron. At some point, they're really one and the same. I understand.
Yes, and you start to refine it. But it's important to begin looking at that which you feel, which seems to depend on the words or the presence of this other person. You can start to ask: where is that which I feel, which I love, which is beautiful, which we could call presence? Where is it really? You could associate it as a consequence of these words or this proximity, but it's actually you.
Right. And I feel like this connects to what you were saying about growing up and waking up. That's what came up for me: how these two are merging in my life. The more I grow up, the more I find I'm expanding. I can look inside and find the inspiration, the excitement, and vice versa. It's magical because it has this natural balance. It's amazing, actually. How did I know how to do that? Where did that come from? That's the merging of the two, from presence. I don't consider myself awake, but I feel the awakening mode. And there's less of the conditioning, or if it's there, there's a distance from it. Less identification, I guess that's the word.
You're describing it beautifully. That's really good to hear.
Nowhere to go
The more I hear you, the more I feel like there really is nowhere to go. I'd love to wake up, but I'm here. This is it. Now let's see what happens. Will I fall on my face? Will something clever come out? Who knows what magic. And it keeps happening more and more. There's this basic trust in whatever the hell it is.
At a retreat this year, someone asked a very simple question: "Is it important to wake up in this life?" And the teacher said, "No." Just: no. And then she said, "Nothing's important." And it was like, that's it. That's what I came for. All the rest was gravy.
Nice. I find myself saying: take all the lives you need or want. No rush.
Enjoy all the climbing and struggling, the screaming and kicking. Go for it. I'm a human. What do you expect?
The literal thing
My teacher's style was all over the place. He could go into quantum physics, and then a whole teaching would become a quantum physics thing. It could be super poetic or super non-dual. It could be politics, or fantasy, archetypes, beings. Through all of that, and probably because of that style, a lot of things were said that you didn't know where to place. Much of it was always very confusing, and he always emphasized that it was intentionally confusing. If you think you understood, you're probably confused. That was the point.
But then, after this shift in me, I went back to listen to him and it was like night and day. It was like: he's been literally pointing to this nonstop, and I didn't see it. It's so literal. I could see now where he had been going around, creating a context so that he could then do the literal thing. And whenever he said that literal thing, I realized I used to interpret it as poetic and abstract. Then it all got reversed. The stuff that had seemed more real was the poetics, and what I had taken as poetics was actually the literal.
Maybe "literal" means there are fewer interpretations going on. Would you say that?
I was just talking in the video about direct experience.
Right. And I find it drives the mind crazy. When it's like, "this is not an object," the mind doesn't know where to go from there. You just hit a wall. The mind doesn't know what to do with that.
Not knowing what you are
It's another example of that literalness. My teacher would say things like that, and I would think, "Well, it's probably some level of poetry pointing to something abstract over there that I'm not getting." No. It's actually very direct and very literal.
Like not knowing, or not knowing what you are? That kind of thing, when you're in meditation?
Yes, not knowing what you are. That's what it addresses. But the thing is, when you don't know what you are, you don't know what that really is either.