The Avoidance That Wasn't That Bad
La evasión que no fue tan terrible
A student asks what delays or blocks the process of self-realization, and the teacher reflects on how the thing we spend decades avoiding turns out to be far less terrible than we imagined.
The Avoidance That Wasn't That Bad
A student asks what delays or blocks the process of self-realization, and the teacher reflects on how the thing we spend decades avoiding turns out to be far less terrible than we imagined.
Last week, you mentioned your own journey and how you realized why it took so long to self-realize, but you also realized that it didn't need to take so long. There was compassion there, but also an understanding that there was no need for it to take that long. I wanted to take that reflection into my own journey and try to understand the ways we can block ourselves or have it take longer than it needs to. What are the things to look out for? For instance, if I go for a walk, is putting a podcast on, as opposed to just walking in silence and being in my own awareness, the kind of activity that can take us away from going deeper?
Let's suppose you face the apparent choice: do I walk listening to a podcast, or do I walk without one? The question there is, what do you really want to do? It's not an easy question to answer, but what you could feel into is this: is putting the podcast on a way to avoid something, a way to feel like it's helping me avoid something? Or is the idea of not putting a podcast on a way to force myself to do something I think is more appropriate or spiritual?
You can feel into it and try to look more deeply at what's going on. And as you see, the decision will happen. The more you see what's happening, the decision will happen. That's the deepest level of it. If you start to see clearly, "Oh, the podcast is a total avoidance, it's so obvious," then you will now more likely open to the freedom of not putting it on. You'll think, "It's just an avoidance. I'm curious to see what it is to not avoid." Or you could realize that it's an avoidance and still avoid, but then most likely that's a little mind trip where you haven't really seen through the avoidance. But this is getting into the weeds of a hypothetical decision.
What delays us
The bigger question, which I think is what you're really asking about, is: what are we doing to delay? One thing I'd say is that it will take the time it takes, and it will be perfect, because it's also what's wanted. We are ultimately free, and the sense of lack of freedom is what we're choosing. And it's not a choice from masochism; it's a choice from love and freedom.
Now, what are we doing, if anything, to delay at the level that we can? I would say there is too much of a sense of challenge. When I said what you're describing (which I can totally imagine saying), that it didn't have to take that long, I would have said that because when I went through everything that needed to happen, it wasn't as bad as it seemed from the other side.
A lot of life is realizing that what we're afraid of and what we're avoiding is mostly a ghost. Very famously, people of older age, when asked what they regret, name the things they have not done, rather than the things they did do. Generally speaking, you start to realize all of the pains and struggles and things you were avoiding weren't that bad. You could have lived more, done more, explored more, experimented more.
The ghost of what we fear
This has to do with the spiritual path as well. What we are avoiding because it seems scary, difficult, or painful: ultimately, it's not that bad. And it actually is the liberation itself, to see that the most difficult thing I could imagine going through, I've gone through, and it wasn't that bad. Which is death.
Not obviously death of the body, because I don't know that, but it was everything I could have imagined death would be. It was the ending of myself, and then going through that. Yes, it was brutal in ways, but then afterward it was like, "Wow, I didn't need to avoid that so much." It was like ripping off a Band-Aid, a really big one.
One night
It's been a few years now, and the painful aspect of it is more and more forgotten. I remember closer to the time telling my wife, "If I had to go through that again, I don't know." I remember saying, "That was really brutal." She was there. It was brutal.
But ultimately, the core of what I was avoiding was just one night. It wasn't even a whole night. It was just a few hours. Everything that I thought I was, ending, with all the feelings implied. The whole universe exploding. On the floor crying, weeping, begging to my wife, to God.
My wife can speak to this. She was tending to me, staying with me because I was scared. After several hours she thought I was okay and went to the bathroom. When she came back, I was lying on the floor with a picture of my teacher held in the air. She could tell something had shifted, that I was somehow self-containing at that point. When she walked toward me, at a certain distance, something hit her. She described it as walking under a waterfall, something extremely palpable and substantial that went completely through her. She was given a very intense and powerful, life-changing taste of what actually happened. Something was shared, which was good, because it's really hard to know from somebody just telling you, "This thing happened to me." It's the difference between hearing about it and going, "Oh, that. My God."
And then we went on as if nothing had happened, for a while.
Coming to the edge
I'm not speaking only to the marvel of that, to the bliss in what happened. Leading up to it was death. It was total, absolute: not just imagining, but going through everything that could have been known to my body and mind as dying. Shame was one of the things I went through. It was a deep part of it.
My point is that I had come up to that edge for decades. Multiple times, it was this sense of, "I can't. No way. I don't want this. There's no way." I had come to the edge, and I always jumped back. I know that it couldn't have happened any sooner. But at the same time, all of my energy focused on avoiding that and running from it was unnecessary.
The addiction to avoidance
In a sense, we're addicted to that avoidance. It's like saying, "You can get off this addiction, and it's really good on the other side. You'll go through withdrawal and it's going to suck." It's just harder to detect the addiction because it's not a substance. It's thought. It's the addiction to the false sense of self, to the contraction of separation, of imagined separation.