The Bomb Has Fallen, but Is It Good or Bad?
La bomba ha caído, pero ¿es bueno o malo?
A student, shaken by a political event, describes how the practice of letting go of resistance allowed an unexpected shift. The teacher explores how thoughts become mistaken for reality, the difference between preference and absolute knowing, and the process of disidentification as a kind of withdrawal.
The Bomb Has Fallen, but Is It Good or Bad?
A student, shaken by a political event, describes how the practice of letting go of resistance allowed an unexpected shift. The teacher explores how thoughts become mistaken for reality, the difference between preference and absolute knowing, and the process of disidentification as a kind of withdrawal.
What a great guided meditation to start off. Playfulness, no serious stuff, mystery, memory. It was such a gift, especially today, a devastating moment for quite a few folks after the election yesterday in the U.S. I don't want to dwell on politics, but I need to refer to it, and if I offend or upset anyone, just tell me and I'll stop.
I'm in Europe, so I woke up to what we'd been bracing ourselves for having indeed happened. My whole body went into mourning. The body, the mind, the sense of paralysis, the projection, the horror. And yet, 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: my legacy is a legacy of humor, 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 stay either. I'm not looking for an outcome. Part of me sure is, but that's not my guiding light the way it used to be.
What I keep coming up with from your teaching 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 met you in 2022, I was in such an excruciating state, 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 myself less and less interested in conceptual explanations, although they are helpful to hear. It's the presence, it's where the message is coming from. That is what's 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 politics side, the key is something captured in an old Zen story. I don't have the whole thing memorized, so I'll just give the punchline: whether this is good or bad, I do not know.
The key is always this question of absolute knowing. Whenever there is an absolute knowing, there is a problem.
You touched on that a lot today. I could feel it resonating. I thirst to hear it in all the different ways you say it. Because I don't ultimately know, and as I say, 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, which I think you describe very well about your own path: they go together.
The knowing that always hides
Just keep an eye out for the knowing that always hides. I use the word "knowing" loosely and in different ways, with very different meanings. There is the knowing which is direct knowing of experience. But right now I'm referring to the knowing of mind.
When thoughts become truth, and they are truth persisting over time, that's one kind of knowing. For example, the understanding of whether the earth revolves around the sun or vice versa: that's an intellectual knowing, but it's close to a factual understanding of reality. It's still a map, but a very accurate one, very close to reality, and useful. However, when we talk about matters of society, of relationship, then that knowing, when it becomes absolute knowing, 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 just being in touch, being connected. That helps guide me in detecting it.
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 result is a bad thing. One thing is to have a preference, a strong opinion, a strong leaning in one direction over another. But to have a really deep certainty that one side is absolutely right and the other is wrong or bad: that's not clear right now.
There are situations in the world that are more clear when something is right or wrong, where one must act and make a decision. But always the decision has to come with a kind of rootedness in the risk that we don't really know.
Toxic not-knowing vs. genuine openness
In one sense, there is a toxic not-knowing, which is paralyzing. It means not deciding, not taking a risk: "I don't know, left or right, left or right," and so I don't move. That's based on fear, and it's toxic. But there is a different kind of not-knowing. It's a matter of balance. The opposite extreme is "I know it's always left," and then sometimes it turns out to be right.
I'm speaking generally about any decision, any path where there is a fork, though obviously it applies to politics as well.
It's preconceived. It's a projection: "This is my concept of how it should be," and then I project it out there.
That's why this has been pointed to in different ways. There's a Zen Buddhist story about a man whose son falls off a horse and breaks his leg. The townspeople say, "Oh, your poor son, he broke his leg." And the father says, "Well, he did, and it's sad. But whether this is good or bad, I don't know." Then a war comes and all the young men are drafted, but his son cannot go because of his broken leg. They come and say, "How lucky you are!" And the father says, "I'm happy for that, but whether this is good or bad, I don't know." And then something bad happens again, and it repeats over and over. It points to this root understanding: yes, I prefer my son not to break his leg. I prefer him not to go to war. This makes me happy and glad. But whether it is good or bad at the root, I can't know.
Holding those two together, the deep unknowing, the deep openness, and simultaneously a connection to a preference, an assessment, and a choice: that is where wisdom starts to emerge. And it's always dynamic. If it's always "left," it's not wisdom.
It's ideology.
Whatever is true as something that can be put into language, or an action 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. And this becomes more and more obvious as we wake up.
It's been pointed out before. Jesus pointed it out in the saying about relating to an enemy: first take the log out of your own eye so that you can more clearly see the speck in your enemy's eye. And another way it's been pointed out is that the world is a distraction.
Seeing thoughts as thoughts
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 that nothing is happening out there, but I see that it's a relationship. I can see the dynamic happening.
The more you see thoughts as thoughts, the more you start to see the relativity of them, and they stop being truth or reality.
Because we don't allow them to take root.
By seeing it as a thought, you naturally are no longer identified. In the process of identification, what happens is something that is mind-made, emerging from thought, is assumed to be reality. Then we forget that we made that assumption, and we are relating to what we think is reality when it is actually thought. This is the root of suffering and all conflict.
What has to happen before we can see a thought as a thought
Once we see something as a thought, a lot has already happened. Something needs to occur in order for that to be possible: whatever reason we needed for that to be real has been let go of. Identification is an attachment. There's a need, a kind of addiction. By the time I can see something as a thought, there has been a process of withdrawal from that addiction, because the addiction is: "I need this to be reality. I want this, I need 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 what was reality is no longer reality; now it's a thought.
This is a progression. It can come in and out; we go back in, we go 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 thoughts that we recognize as thoughts, the deeper the beliefs that we see to be thoughts and not 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's a thought, a complex mental construct, then you see what was supporting every other false identification. You could go at the root of it, which is the identification with the self-construct, or you could work on it more progressively, peeling back layers like 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 from something that appears to be reality to seeing that it's actually a thought. Once we see something as a thought, a lot has already happened. And then we can keep seeing it as a thought, and that's when it naturally becomes something we understand to be relative.
The body's role in unraveling
I find that my whole nervous system is involved in this attachment to thought. I feel the reactiveness of the nervous system, and I can see that for what it is as well. It happens on many levels, this unraveling. So much of my life I focused on coming from the head. The conceptual is very useful, extremely useful. But the deep belly, the heart: that depth of experience is where I think the resistance comes from, ultimately. That's what my path has really opened for me more and more these last few years. I just say, "Bring it on, whatever it is." Whatever reaction, whatever thought. Sometimes I have to move and act it out because there's so much stored in the body. I notice more and more that there's activity up here in the mind, but it's down in the belly where the real action is. It's new to me. I never felt this aliveness there before, maybe as a kid but not as an adult.
That's why I refer to it as an addiction and use the term "withdrawal," because the withdrawal from substance addiction is a very biological process, and I think this is very, very similar.
I so resonate with that. I was in a twelve-step program, and I really resonate with it. The experience is the same. Thank you so much.