The Bomb Has Fallen, and Still Something Shifts
La bomba ha caído, y aun así algo se mueve
A student describes the shock of waking up to devastating political news, and the conversation turns to the difference between absolute knowing and genuine wisdom, and how seeing thoughts as thoughts begins an irreversible unraveling.
The Bomb Has Fallen, and Still Something Shifts
A student describes the shock of waking up to devastating political news, and the conversation turns to the difference between absolute knowing and genuine wisdom, and how seeing thoughts as thoughts begins an irreversible unraveling.
What a gift that guided meditation was, especially today. This is a devastating moment for many people after the election in the United States. I don't want to dwell on politics, but I need to refer to it.
The day started with waking up to what we had been bracing ourselves for. My whole body went into mourning: the body, the mind, a sense of paralysis, and then the projection, the horror, all of it. What surprises me is that coming to these groups over time, these guideposts, they have a life of their own. I was in such a state this morning. I wrote a friend and said, "Maybe last night was the last time you'll see me smiling." She told me to keep my humor. And I wrote back: humor is my legacy, it's part of my DNA. I don't need to be told about humor. But I wonder how long it took the survivors of Hiroshima to smile after the bomb fell. That's where my mind went: the bomb has fallen.
And I can't believe that there was already a shift today. I wasn't looking for a shift, and I don't need it to stay. I don't need this spaciousness to remain. I'm not looking for an outcome. Part of me is, sure, but that's no longer my guiding light the way it used to be.
What I keep coming to is: there's nothing I need to do or get or be or reach. Just let go of the resistance and it all comes, because it was already there in the first place. When I look back to when I first met you, I was in such a state. That time was excruciating, and so much good came out of it. So that's what we have here. We have it all here. There's a growing trust that I don't have to make it happen. And I find that I'm less and less interested in conceptual explanations, although they are helpful. It's the presence, it's where the message is coming from, that is so powerful. I'm happy to hear anything you'd have to say.
Whether this is good or bad, I do not know
Around the political side, the key is something pointed to in a well-known Zen story. I'll just say the punchline: whether this is good or bad, I do not know.
The key there is that it always comes back to this tendency toward absolute knowing. The moment we have absolute knowing, there's a problem.
You touched on that a lot today. I could feel it landing. And I thirst to hear it in all the different ways you say it. Because I don't ultimately know, and the worst things I've experienced have brought the most evolution, the most expansiveness, the deepest sense of experiencing truth. It's so beautiful and so devastating at the same time.
Just keep an eye out for the knowing that always hides. I use the word "knowing" loosely and in different senses. There's a knowing which is the direct knowing of experience. But right now I'm referring to the knowing of mind, when thoughts become truth and persist over time as truth.
Factual knowing versus assumed truth
One thing is factual knowledge of the world. For example, the understanding of whether the earth revolves around the sun or vice versa. That's a kind of intellectual knowing, but it's close to a factual understanding of nature. It's still a map, but it's very accurate, very close to reality, and it's useful. But when we talk about matters of society, of relationship, that knowing, when it becomes absolute, can be very problematic.
I feel the tightness in that kind of knowing. It's intensely uncomfortable and I feel alienated. It increases the sense of separation. So a lot of it has to do with simply being in touch, being connected. That helps guide me in detecting what's happening.
That's a way to recognize that something has taken root as an assumption of truth when it's just a thought, a belief that has become an assumption of what reality is, and it's not.
For example, the "knowing" that a particular election outcome is a bad thing. One thing is to have a preference, a strong opinion, a strong leaning toward one outcome over another. But to have this deep, absolute knowing that one side is right and the other is wrong or bad: that's not clear right now.
There are situations in the world that are more clear about right and wrong, where one must act and make a decision. But always, the decision has to carry at its root the acknowledgment that we don't really know.
Toxic not-knowing versus open not-knowing
In one sense, there's a toxic not-knowing, which is paralyzing. It amounts to not deciding, not taking a risk: "I don't know, I don't know, left, right, left, right," and so I don't move. That is based on fear, and it's toxic. But there's a different kind of not-knowing. It's a matter of balance. The opposite extreme is, "I know it's always left." But sometimes it's not. Sometimes it's right. I'm speaking generally of any decision, any path where there's a fork, though obviously it applies to politics as well.
It's a projection. It's my concept of how things should be, and then I project it out there.
The farmer and his son
That's why there are different ways this has been pointed to. There's a well-known Zen Buddhist story about a man who has a son. The son falls off a horse and breaks his leg. The townspeople say, "Oh, your poor son, he broke his leg." And the man says, "Well, he did, and it's sad. But whether this is good or bad, I don't know." Then a war breaks out and all the young men are drafted, but his son cannot go because of his broken leg. The townspeople say, "How lucky you are!" And the man says, "I'm happy for that, but whether this is good or bad, I don't know." Then something bad happens again, and the pattern repeats.
The story points to this: yes, I prefer my son not to break his leg. I prefer him not to go to war. This outcome makes me happy. But whether it's good or bad at the root, I can't know. Holding those two together, the deep unknowing and simultaneously the connection to a preference, an assessment, a choice, that is where wisdom starts to emerge. And it's always dynamic. If the answer is always the same, it's not wisdom.
It's ideology.
Whatever is true as something that can be put into language, or an action taken in a direction, is only ever true in a particular moment. It could be untrue or wrong in a different moment: the same thing, the same action, the same words. This becomes more and more obvious as we wake up.
It's been pointed to before. Jesus pointed it out in a teaching about relating to an enemy: first take the log out of your own eye so that you can more clearly see the speck of dust in your enemy's eye. Another way it's been expressed is that the world is a distraction.
I find that more and more. What I'm seeing is really here, not completely, but increasingly. And it makes me more skillful in the world, because I can see where things are coming from. It doesn't mean nothing is happening out there, but I can see that it's a relationship. I can see the dynamic happening.
Seeing thoughts as thoughts
The more you see thoughts as thoughts, the more you start to see their relativity, and they stop being truth or reality.
Because we don't allow them to take root.
By seeing something as a thought, you are naturally no longer identified with it. In the process of identification, what happens is that something mind-made, emerging from thought, is assumed to be reality. Then we forget that we assumed the thought to be reality, and we start relating to what we think is reality when it's actually thought. This is the root of suffering and all conflict.
The unraveling
In order to see something as a thought, something needs to happen first: whatever reason we needed for that thought to be real must be let go of. Identification is an attachment. There is a need, a kind of addiction. By the time I can see something as a thought, there has already been a process of withdrawal from that addiction, because the addiction is, "I need this to be reality. I want this to be reality."
That reality, in a sense, has to die. What we thought was real needs to die, needs to be let go of, needs to be grieved. That's why I talk about fear and pain, because what we live through in that process is some form of fear, some form of pain. And then that reality is no longer reality; now it is a thought.
This is a progression. We can move in and out of it, going back in and then back out. But once we see something to be a thought, there is, in a sense, a point of no return.
The unraveling begins.
It starts to unravel. And the deeper the beliefs that we recognize as thoughts rather than reality, the more everything starts to support this unraveling. That's why the core of it is self-inquiry, because the deepest attachment is to the self, to the self as the image "I." Once you see that what you knew to be yourself is not yourself, that it is a thought, a complex mental construct, then you've found what supports every other false identification. You could go directly at the root, which is identification with the self-construct, or you could work on it more progressively, layer by layer, like peeling an onion. But ultimately you're going to come to this point: Who am I? The image of what we are is the thing we're most addicted to.
So it's this movement where something that appears to be reality is actually a thought, and then we see it as a thought. What I was pointing out is that once we see something as a thought, a lot has already happened. And then we can keep seeing it as a thought. But that's when it naturally becomes something we understand to be relative.
I find that my whole nervous system is involved in this attachment to thought. I feel the reactivity of the nervous system, and I can see that for what it is as well. It feels like this unraveling happens on many levels.
The body's involvement
So much of my life, I focused on understanding things from here (pointing to the head). The conceptual level is very useful, extremely useful. But what has opened for me more and more in the last few years is the deep belly, the depth of bodily experience. That's where I find the resistance ultimately lives. I just say, "Bring it on," whatever it is: whatever reaction, whatever thought. Sometimes I have to move and act it out because there is so much stored in the body. I notice more and more that something is happening down here. It's where the action is. It's new to me. I never felt this aliveness in the body, at least not as an adult.
That's why I refer to it as an addiction and use the term "withdrawal," because withdrawal from substance addiction is a very biological process. I think this is very, very similar.
I deeply resonate with that. I was in a twelve-step program, and I really resonate with that comparison. Thank you so much.