The Direction Out of Resistance
La dirección para salir de la resistencia
A student asks about moving from intellectual understanding to direct experience, and the teacher explores the relationship between sensation, knowing, and the habit of going into thought.
The Direction Out of Resistance
A student asks about moving from intellectual understanding to direct experience, and the teacher explores the relationship between sensation, knowing, and the habit of going into thought.
Going into the body instead of going into the mind is one way I can do that, right? I think I have been going into the body much more, but at the same time there is also this idea that I am what knows the experience, that I'm not the emotions. It's an idea I try to convince myself of, but I also know I'm not going to know that I'm knowing just by thinking about the idea and then trying to go for it.
One thing is seeing it as an idea, and another is looking for that in your experience. Does it feel more to you that you are your hand, or that which is aware of your hand? In your experience, forget about what anybody has said.
I feel I'm aware of my hand.
So you're not your hand. You're what is aware of your hand. Sure, you could say that your hand is part of you. But are you more the knowing and the awareness of the hand, or are you more the hand?
I'm more the awareness of the hand.
Right. That which "I" points to is that which is aware of the hand.
That's confusing. Not as a criticism, but it ungrounds me.
Thought versus sensation
Your hand has less information about you than you have of your hand. Let's go back to what you said: that going into the body is a way you can do this. That's correct, because resistance is always about going into thoughts and beliefs. That is the direction of resistance. The direction out of resistance is first moving out of thought, out of the focus on thought, into the focus on sensation and feeling.
What that brings me right now is that I don't really have much to say, except that I hear my heart beating in my ears and I can feel a heat in my body, around me.
Yes, and then there's the knowing of that. The knowing of the heartbeat in your ears, the knowing of the heat, the knowing of your thoughts, the knowing of sensations, sight, sound.
When knowing and sensation seem to be one
My experience is that the sensations and the knowing of the sensations are the same thing. I just have the sensations.
That's true. But what I'm saying becomes helpful when that's not always true for you. When that clarity breaks down and there arises an illusion of separation, then it's useful to notice the knowing as distinct from what is known. Because if what you say is your experience all the time, then there would be nothing to work with. It's when that stops being the case that this pointer matters.