The Freedom That Doesn't Depend on Circumstance
La libertad que no depende de las circunstancias
A student describes experiences with telepathy and energy practices that seem to ease contraction, and the teacher redirects attention from techniques that improve experience toward the deeper willingness to be with difficult sensations.
The Freedom That Doesn't Depend on Circumstance
A student describes experiences with telepathy and energy practices that seem to ease contraction, and the teacher redirects attention from techniques that improve experience toward the deeper willingness to be with difficult sensations.
I've been listening to a podcast about parents of children with nonverbal autism who report that their kids have telepathic and other psychic abilities. I've had moments where I've felt I experienced telepathy and confirmed it with the other person. In one episode, a child who had been taught to touch-type to communicate later reported that it was during that process he discovered he had a body; he didn't know that before. All of this has had me thinking a lot about the nature of consciousness.
I've also been noticing that when my brain feels scrunched, that sense of contraction you named during the meditation, I can sometimes lie down, visualize light, or send energy to that area and almost flesh it out. When I do that successfully, it also works when I'm sick or feel a cold coming on. I'll lie down, do this, and often nip it in the bud.
It feels to me that there's a connection between doing that and cultivating inner integrity. I feel much more connected to my body and much less interested in my usual excuses or habits. The world around me responds really well to that. But the next day I tend to revert back to old habits. This often happens on a day when I feel luxurious in terms of time, and then the following day I have to make up for it, so I get busy, frustrated, and re-scrunched. I don't know exactly what my question is, but I find myself playing with this more deliberately and feeling good about it, while also not knowing how to work with it more consistently.
Having a technique or ability to shift contractions is good and valuable. But ultimately what matters here is something different.
Let me say it this way: everything that has to do with what I call growing up, learning, expanding, getting better at things, all of that is very welcome. Sometimes we dive into that, and I often end up focusing on it for people who really need it. But ultimately, that's not what I'm going after. It's not about finding ways to shift things so that our experience is better. That is valuable, but what I point to has nothing to do with that.
What is the nature of contraction?
It has more to do with this: when you are in that contracted state, what is really happening? Finding ways and techniques to shift out of it is valuable, and I encourage that. But the main thing is, what's the underlying dynamic?
When you started talking about this podcast and telepathy, I'll use that as an illustration. I think humanity is telepathic. There are just different levels of telepathy and different levels of knowing that one is telepathic. I can have a thought and believe it's mine when it actually came from someone else, which is different from having a thought and knowing that it came from somebody else. It's not a big difference; it actually doesn't matter. But if I happen to be the kind of person who is more likely to know which thoughts came from someone else and be accurate about it, if I have that kind of talent, that has absolutely nothing to do with the consciousness I'm talking about. That's like a good party trick, or it could be useful in some ways. But it's like being good at playing the piano.
I've seen it used as a party trick.
What could be most valuable about it is that it breaks down the idea, the illusion, of absolute separation. But once it does that, there's no more value to it.
I think that's where I am with it. Everything you said resonates.
The trap of specialness
Just watch the sense of that making you special, having a specialness because of a talent or the ability to be telepathic. Then it comes back through the back door: "Yes, there's no separation, but I'm special. I'm different."
Well, I think one of the things that feels attractive to me about this is: if I'm not separate, then maybe I don't have to struggle with all the nonsense that comes from trying to operate as a separate self. We have to tend to the body-mind, but the thing that feels attractive in terms of an implication is, maybe I can just relax into this new paradigm.
You could relax at a deep level and still face all of the challenges. What I'm hearing, and I might be wrong, is: "Maybe because of this I could relax and not bother so much with the pressure of these responsibilities."
Or discern which pressures are dukkha and which are actual responsibilities. Maybe that's part of it.
That can be clarified, because the risk is false surrendering, false acceptance: "Because I've seen through these delusions and there's no separation, I can just let go and things will happen naturally."
Like another form of spiritual bypassing.
Peace that doesn't depend on circumstance
Exactly. You can be completely under the most insane pressures of life, fully committed, fully working hard, responsible, and know absolute peace and relaxation. It's of a different dimension.
Otherwise, you're trying to relax at the level of climbing a mountain while wanting your muscles to be relaxed. That's not going to work. But you could be climbing a mountain, your muscles having a hard time, your body having a hard time, your mind having a hard time, and you're completely loving it. That peace is something else entirely. Or you could be thinking about some difficulty in your life, cursing, having a really hard time, while your body is fine.
Using that metaphor, the kind of relaxation I'm imagining is climbing a mountain with a team. Not only am I fine physically because it's a welcome kind of labor, but I'm also not caught up in interpersonal drama, insecurities, or comparisons. Because I know on some level, the separation between myself and team members is not as real as I might perceive it to be in the way I operate now.
Intellectual understanding is not enough
The kind of separation I hear you speak about is starting with an intellectual process, an intellectual exploration. That helps, but it's not going to go deep unless you explore at a deeper level.
For example, you could have interpersonal conflict but not have drama. It's not about avoiding the conflict, because conflict is sometimes necessary. If you're climbing a mountain and you're in conflict, that's also fine. That's like the muscles working. The muscles of relational conflict are working hard. You're challenged because you have a difficult person on your team. But you could still be without drama. You could be having a beautiful time. Now, "beautiful" has a different quality. I'm speaking to the freedom and the peace that does not depend on circumstance. If you are imagining it depends on there not being interpersonal conflict, that's not what I'm talking about.
Lack of anything is a rejection of what is. It's trying to manipulate relationships so there's no conflict so that I could be at peace. Or: "If I develop deeply enough, I will have no conflict, and then I will be at peace." That peace is the peace of imagining you've developed enough that there's no more conflict. But it's the other way around. You work through conflict. You become at peace in conflict. And then when there's conflict (and by conflict I mean any kind of life challenge), you're no longer avoiding it. When you're in it, you're surfing. When you're out of it, you're surfing.
The taste of strawberries
I didn't find an amazing partner with whom I had no conflict. We've gone through conflict. But we haven't had any significant conflict in about three years, maybe a small one once a year. And it wasn't because we became good at not having conflict.
That wasn't the goal.
No. What happened, at least for me, is that what was difficult about the conflict was a very deep underlying sensation that I couldn't be with. It was just a big "no." Anything but this. I call it a sensation; you could call it a feeling. It's an aspect of experience at the deepest level, the sense of the heart level. I just couldn't be with it.
A "no" to the experience of that sensation?
It's like the taste of it was strawberries, and I just couldn't tolerate strawberries. Anything but strawberries in our relationship. And it happened that whenever we entered conflict, the flavor was strawberries. It wasn't because there was anything particular to the relationship. It's just that that was what I was unable to be with. And the nature of the relationship, because we're committed to intimacy and love and truth and our passion was just that, meant it would go straight to strawberries.
Then there was a complete night-and-day shift where suddenly I was like, "Strawberries." And all the noise I had been creating whenever there were strawberries just stopped.
Someone once told me, "Those are just sensations." It wasn't just words; it was more experiential.
My point is that what I'm calling "strawberries" is what I was saying in the metaphor of climbing a mountain, where your body is hurting. If you're climbing a hard mountain, you're fit, and you're hurting no matter how good you are at it. Your body-mind is going to say, "What are you doing?" That's a metaphor for the experiences and sensations we have a big "no" to.
The triggers for that are going to be relationships, anything that threatens the sense of self-identity, fears of endings: fear of ending of life, fear of ending of relationship, ending of survival capacities. So work situations, close relationships, parents. Anything that forces you to see the illusion that you don't want to let go of.
Responsibility as a pointer to freedom
If you think, "I heard this telepathy thing and the implication is that the self doesn't exist and consciousness is some kind of global energy field, therefore I can slip into that and not have conflict," you're avoiding the real conflict you have to work with in your life. It's there, in learning how to handle that conflict, that you actually learn to peel back the layers of the illusion of identity.
The telepathy thing can at best just let you know, "I thought things were more separate than they are." It's not enough evidence to completely dispel the illusion of separation. But if you face and work with whatever your responsibility requires you to face, that is something else. A person who is free is very responsible. If you see somebody claiming freedom and you see their lack of responsibility, they are not free.
Responsibility is a direction, a north, a pointer. And the inner integrity is: am I willing to see how I am irresponsible and face that? What am I afraid of? What challenges am I not facing? How am I avoiding?
It's going to bring you to difficult sensations, difficult feelings, difficult emotions. Only when you are completely okay with the taste of those sensations, feelings, and emotions are you free. And you're free to also be responsible, because you have no need to avoid.
That's helpful. Regarding telepathy as evidence of non-separation, I'd say it's supporting evidence.
It's supporting evidence. It pierces through when there is a belief in absolute separation. But it's not enough evidence to completely dispel that belief. We could still have an identity, an illusion of a level of separation that allows for telepathy. So it still isn't enough.
But it's outside of what's conventionally accepted or scientifically understood.
Yes.
Being with what arises
My experience was actually very similar to yours: being able to be with sensations. One thing I'd add is that I was quite attached to ideas like "you should have to validate my feelings" and "you should have to empathize with my feelings," along with other things I thought I needed. To be able to let that go completely, to realize I don't actually need you to validate my experience. I just need to say, "That's my current understanding, it's true for me now, I can change it later if I encounter new evidence, and you can be non-validating." Those were some of the more difficult things for me to let go of.
Is it possible, or true to your experience, that not being validated would trigger sensations?
Being invalidated would amplify things. I would have an experience, and then the other person was either not validating or actively invalidating, and it would amplify. I'd become more upset, and more upset. Then I started to see that as a pattern and thought, "I'm not going to amplify anymore. I'm just upset." And then it was, "I actually, completely, don't need you to validate that my experience is true for me in order for me to be okay." And if the other person was invalidating, it was just, "Okay, whatever. Fine. Talk later."
And my experience was different, and that came across as invalidation of yours.
There was another thing I wanted to share. I spent many nights alone, not because I was pushed away, but because I needed to be on my own. I was in agony for hours, sometimes the entire night, processing what was coming up for me. There was a really intense commitment: if it's happening in this body and mind, then it's mine. It's not my partner's job to process it with me, help me with it, or engage with it.
A teacher I worked with helped a lot with that. He was quite extreme about it. He'd say, "So what if you're up all night? Go to work in the morning. You can do it." And I'd think, "I'll be in torture, crying my eyes out for six hours with no sleep, and you're okay with that?" "Perfectly okay." It was incredibly strengthening to know I could handle it. So far, in the last several years, I've been able to be with, to a much larger degree, anything that was coming up. And that gave me the confidence to relate to life differently.
He would also say something like, "I've been there. What are you so special? Your pain is so bad? Mine was pretty bad too." Not that he would talk quite like that, but that's how I took it.
Thank you for sharing.