The Threshold That Seemed Unbearable
El umbral que parecía insoportable
A student asks about the experience of loss in awakening, and the teacher reflects on resistance, the impossibility of imagining what lies beyond, and the unnecessary nature of fear.
The Threshold That Seemed Unbearable
A student asks about the experience of loss in awakening, and the teacher reflects on resistance, the impossibility of imagining what lies beyond, and the unnecessary nature of fear.
Did you feel prepared for the loss? Or did you feel any sense of regret when you went there?
No regret. Freedom, bliss. It was more like: why did I take so long to let this go?
Really? That resonates. I feel like I'm dragging my feet. I get to these groups, or I listen to a talk, and I think, "She's talking about the pain again," and I don't feel like I want that right now. But then there are other moments where I feel like my life is going to fall apart if I don't realign, because I'm so wrapped up in unimportant things.
It's 99.9 percent "why did I resist this so much?" And at the same time, a complete understanding of why I did. But the understanding is of why I resisted unnecessarily.
I often think of what a certain teacher used to say: that it's an unimaginable reality, and that it's worth it. That rings in my head. But I also hear him saying the sacrifice was great. So it's a mix of faith, based on what's on the other side, and at the same time a terror, because I really have no idea what he was talking about. I used to feel a sense of hope when he'd describe an unimaginable reality, but I don't feel much hope anymore. I really don't feel any hope about it.
Hope is poison
Hope in this is poison. You're only hoping for what you can imagine, which is illusion. But it is worth it. It's not what you imagine. You cannot imagine it. You cannot. And it's this. It's here now. It's this. That's the joke. It's nothing other than exactly this, all of this right now.
That is funny. Did Jesus talk about the loss?
I don't remember. He talked about being troubled. Very troubled.
And poor, too, right?
The problem of original language
He used that metaphor a lot, but I think it has many other connotations. Being disturbed, troubled. The thing is, the words we have aren't from his language. The first texts we have from Jesus are in Greek, and he spoke Aramaic, so we don't actually know the original words. It was passed down verbally and written by people who are actually anonymous. We don't know who they were. They were later named Matthew and so on, but the first writings came several decades after he had passed. And they were in Greek. So we don't really know the exact words, and the context of the language matters. We have to take it with a grain of salt. But he did speak of the disturbing nature of awakening.
Was the Gospel of Thomas also in Greek? I thought that one was Aramaic.
I think it's Coptic. I'm not sure. The ones in the Bible are originally Greek, but the Gospel of Thomas, I believe, was Coptic, which again wasn't Aramaic. I might be wrong there.
Take all the time you want
Can I share a short dream from last night?
Yes, but let me say one more thing to your question first. I have said many times to this group: take all the time you want, there's no rush. At the same time, it's worth it, and I resisted it, and there's no regret. There's a complete understanding of why I resisted, but there's also the knowing of how unnecessary it was. It was necessary in the sense that it was the journey, the experience, what I chose. But it was unnecessary in that what I imagined was too difficult was not. It was just the crossing of a threshold that seemed unbearable, and I ran away from it. But then it was like pulling off a band-aid. Decades of running away from that, or approaching it very slowly. Please, let's keep the dream brief.
The dream of the apocalypse
I was in a forest, a natural environment with cabins. I knew the end of the world was coming, a zombie apocalypse about to be triggered, and everybody knew it was going to happen. So we started to stockpile water and survival supplies. We had a group of people and planned to run to another cabin out in nature, waiting for it to pass so we wouldn't be infected. We knew everyone was going to go crazy, just panic out of nowhere. We had a warning, and we gathered our supplies, trying not to be noticed, but then people started catching on. Then we were in our bunk beds, and I was thinking to myself, "Why don't we just leave?" But we just kept lying there, almost resting but not resting. It could happen in a couple of hours, and I was thinking, "We need to run into the mountains now." I woke up in terror.
What comes briefly is this: the ending of illusion, the preparing for it and the running away from it. You are in both. You're preparing and you're running. But the apocalypse is the ending of the illusion, the ending of this world, which is the known.