The Tamed and the Untamed
Lo domesticado y lo indomado
A student describes experiences of intense fear and boredom in practice, leading to a wide-ranging exploration of familiar emotional patterns versus the unknown depths beneath them, the nature of compassion, and how spiritual seeking can itself become avoidance.
The Tamed and the Untamed
A student describes experiences of intense fear and boredom in practice, leading to a wide-ranging exploration of familiar emotional patterns versus the unknown depths beneath them, the nature of compassion, and how spiritual seeking can itself become avoidance.
Last week I had an experience where a lot of anxiety and fear was coming up. I sat with it and went into it, and I was able to really hold my attention in my presence. I felt like I shifted into a new seeing of myself. When that happened, this extreme fear arose. I didn't know where it was coming from, but I was able to sit through it, observe it, feel it, let it come up, and explore it as neutrally as possible. I don't really know what happened, but I felt the shift in the meditation. Since then I've been feeling more presence this past week. But my thing is that I have this rebel inside me that doesn't always want to go through the boredom of, say, just going for a walk without stimulation.
Rebel is a great quality. Everything has two sides. But it's never about going through boredom. What is boredom? What's actually happening? I would never recommend doing something that brings you boredom. But when boredom is experienced, look closely. Notice what's happening more deeply.
That said, I wouldn't direct you toward a practice that habitually puts you into a state of boredom. Boredom is an interesting experience, and it has to be seen, understood, and seen through. There are aspects of boredom that are really illusions. For example: "I'm bored," but actually, "I'm afraid." That's just one example. It's tricky because we can get stuck in states of boredom, and repeating what puts us in that state is not useful. It's really about piercing through, about aliveness.
The tamed and the untamed
This connects to the topic of vipassana and moving through. There is what I would call the "tamed" experience: that which is very known and familiar, the emotional and mental states we get attached to. At first, the work is to disattach, to move through, to be able to flow. But then we start meeting a deeper level, which is the unknown. I'm using this distinction of "tamed" and "untamed" from one of my teachers. When we meet the untamed, it's that "holy shit, this is here, and I cannot be with it" experience. It's sudden. It tends to carry the quality of a deeper, uncertain fear or pain in some form. It's untamed because I can't be with it in my normal way of relating.
The tamed, by contrast, is all those emotional states we don't necessarily like but that are comfortable in their familiarity. They form a cocoon of emotional dullness. The untamed is what makes us say, "I'm going back into boredom as long as I can get away from this," or "I'm going back into all kinds of shitty emotional states that I prefer, as long as I can get away from this." And the "this" I'm pointing to is what's at the core: "No. Not this. There's no way I'm touching this."
Maybe I haven't faced the untamed yet. I feel like I do better when extreme energy comes up, because then I can be really focused and bring out my warrior spirit and face it and feel it. But when it's just the mundane, that's when I struggle more. Maybe the untamed is something I haven't actually come across. I feel a lot of extreme emotions. I'm very emotional, with a big emotional spectrum. I feel the whole thing super deeply.
I think you have encountered it, and I think everybody does. The way to distinguish (and it's more of a spectrum) is to ask: is this something familiar? Have I been here before? Is it chronic, known? Maybe I don't like it or I really don't like it, but it's, "Here I am again." That's the tamed.
The untamed is usually a crossing into another level. It's like a leap, and there's typically a kind of barrier, some big fear or pain. What you described about last week, maybe that was it. That's what psychedelics produce: they break you out of the tamed.
There are many meditation practices that do this as well. Doing vipassana for a week is going to break you, because you're going to be sitting with the pain, moving through, moving through, not getting stuck. That's going to start putting you into a relationship with the untamed.
Yeah, the psychedelic work definitely can. I handle it pretty well. But there have been instances, like when I did an ayahuasca ceremony and I was on my twenty-fifth hour or something. That's when it started getting really dark, and that's when I hit the wall and needed to ask the facilitator for help.
Psychedelics and the untamed
With psychedelics, a lot of it is like a simulation of experience. Because it's created through a substance, it's really just training for going there. But in a way, you're making tamed what is actually untamed. What you need is to be in the untamed more permanently, to learn to be in the unknown, in the new, in what is always being born fresh.
That's what happens in a breakthrough. In this disidentification (which could be temporary, partial, or total), you are no longer holding and attaching to what is tamed.
Fear as the face of bliss
I want to add a question that came in that is quite relevant. The question is: "Do you think sometimes it's bliss we can't bear, so it presents as fear and pain?"
That's very appropriate, and very true. Very often the untamed, at its core, is love. When it moves fully, it's extremely blissful. But it's unbearable.
I'll describe this from my own experience. The first times I touched what was just described, I was a teenager, and it was just absolute pain, so intense that I passed out. I would go unconscious and enter dream-vision states. I'd be sitting, and then I'd wake up, but the pain was intense. As I discovered spiritual practice and years went by, I would keep coming up to that same thing again and again.
One of the breakthroughs was when I stood with it long enough that it turned into bliss. I noticed the moment it shifted from the most intense, horrible pain I was running away from into bliss. It was the moment the sensation started to wane. It was coming up really intense, and in the moment it began to fade (so it wasn't going to completely kill me, which was the experience the fear was producing: "I'm going to die"), the moment it started to fade and I realized, "Okay, I'm not going to die today," the fear completely dissipated. And that energetic sensation, which I had been perceiving as pain, didn't change. The second the fear was taken out, the same sensation, the same energetic, was known as love.
It was bliss. The same sensation that had been pain was now seen as bliss. That's really hard to convey. And then I would come up to it a million more times, and I would still know it as pain. That is really strange. But ultimately, when the resisting (which was the belief in separation, the belief that what I am is this limited person) completely dissolved, the bliss was free to move through as bliss and no longer as pain.
A lot of what we avoid, a lot of that untamed territory, is vast, expansive, freedom, bliss. But we can't be there as a separate self. If you come to that as a separate self, you will know fear and pain. As you disidentify as a separate self, you will know it as yourself, and it will be freedom and love. But we always want it both ways: to be there as a separate self and to know it as love.
Yeah, we want our cake and eat it too. I want to know the bliss.
And what you truly are, which is that bliss, that freedom, is ananda, often translated as "bliss." It's from the Sanskrit sat-chit-ananda.
When I'm facing difficult emotional experiences, if I go in and feel it and give myself the space to process it, I haven't really had any moments where it made me stop. It's felt scary, but it hasn't been a wall. However, the challenging experiences in daily life that create worry and fear, there's definitely resistance to that. New experience, moments of risk and uncertainty: that feels like the untamed to me. But if I can go back into my space, collect myself, and remind myself that it's just a sensation, I've been able to hold space for that energy so far. I really like this idea of the tamed and the untamed. That's a helpful way to look at it. Thank you.
The last thing I want to ask about is this: I love to learn. I do recognize there are times when I need to not be stimulating my mind, and I can handle that. I can go for long walks without a podcast and just take in the scenery. But I notice that when I'm learning something new, it takes me out of my presence, my awareness. It feels like when I choose to put on a YouTube video or a podcast, I'm choosing the world, choosing the separate self. As much as I try to stay present while my mind is being stimulated, it does pull me in. So how do I manage that?
Presence is not elsewhere
Be very careful with your judgment of presence: your ideas about when you are more or less present, what presence is, and what it looks like. Being in the world, learning about stuff that's not spiritual, look at the judgment there. I don't mean just a negative thought or belief about it. Look at the judgment as in the interpretation, the assumption. For example, interpreting a state of intellectual learning as non-present, or interpreting engagement with something worldly as problematic.
That belief, that interpretation, is what will make you not present. The interpretation that you're now into something more of the world of thought, listening to a YouTube video, learning something, the interpretation that this is less spiritual or not present, that is what makes it not present. The same applies to going into the world: the interpretation that the world is not spiritual is what makes it not spiritual. It's actually the interpretation that creates the thing.
If you relate to the YouTube video as you're listening to it and see it as what it is, this magical mystery of colors, shapes, forms, sensations, thoughts, and aliveness, all one field of beingness now taking the shape of the experience "me listening to a YouTube video," then you'll be watching a YouTube video in presence, because it will be sacred. Because you are there, and all of that is sacred. If you go into something of the world and you see clearly, you're not going anywhere. You're not going "into the world." There is no world. There's only this experience of mysterious, magical creation that is this moment, and even the world is just as sacred as anything.
Well said. Thank you.
Foundations and seeing through
It does happen that we lose ourselves in thought. There are different levels. When we begin this process, it is important to have foundations of practice: observing the breath, looking at thought, vipassana. All these kinds of practices are very important, because otherwise we wouldn't even have the chance of noticing when we are completely immersed in thought.
But at some point a different approach is needed, where we can go into the experience of being in the world of thought and it no longer being the thing we need to push away from. Everything that is the world or the thinking space can also start to be seen as Buddha nature, Christ nature. But it can't be interpreted that way too soon, because until we know the taste of beingness or Buddha nature, we can't make that leap authentically.
Yet at no point, even when we are lost in identification, is anything not Buddha nature. The only difference is that someone who is a Buddha recognizes that everything is Buddha nature all the time, no matter what. Whereas one who hasn't yet recognized this interprets Buddha nature to be elsewhere: not here, somewhere else, coming and going, in the temple, in the teacher, in the moment of deep spiritual glimpsing. And at every other moment, Buddha nature is supposedly not here.
I've been getting this feeling lately that everything around me is celebrating life, celebrating the fact that it exists. Maybe it doesn't even know how or why, but it's like, "What other thing to do other than just celebrate?"
And not just around you: within you. Everything. Everything that you are knowing. All of this mystery of perception, sensation, the skin, the air, thoughts, imagination, memory, past, future, all of it is this celebration of this mystery.
And then we forget that. But it doesn't go away. We just forget it and misinterpret it. And then we remember again: "Oh no, it is a celebration." At first it seems like that recognition is coming and going, like we lose it and find it. But then we realize we're just misinterpreting and then seeing clearly.
Spiritual seeking as avoidance
But sometimes we come to these groups and think we're evolving, and we're not noticing how we are avoiding all these fears in our lives.
You could use anything to avoid. All spiritual practice, all facing of emotions, all psychological training, therapy, self-inquiry, all of it can be an avoidance. So what matters is the important question: what do you want?
Pursuing the imagination of awakening is also possibly a way to avoid life, to avoid something. I've been noticing fantasies around awakening. Part of me thought things like, "If I awakened, life would be easier. I would attract more of what I want." That kind of thinking.
That's exactly how it presents. That's exactly how it looks whenever a whole spiritual search is an avoidance mechanism, an avoidance strategy.
Yeah, that's what I think I'm seeing, and why I'm kind of pissed. I'm not sure all of it is an avoidance mechanism, but part of it is.
The core of it is: what do you want, and are you willing to go after it? If what you're wanting is a spiritual awakening, which is something you imagine is going to make life easier, then what is the "easier"? What's the "harder"? And what is it that you're avoiding?
Yeah. I'm seeing all that.
This is quite natural. I don't think there's a single person who goes into spiritual work not as a strategy to avoid challenges and pains in life. But at some point, the strategy fails, and that's when the practice becomes more real, more genuine, because it's no longer about avoiding life, avoiding what you really want.
Then, really, there's not two. Life lived in all ways, the abundance of the world, what is "in the world," is the spiritual life, is the self-inquiry. So the direction is: what do I most deeply want? But if what I most deeply want is spiritual awakening so I can avoid life, I'm splitting the universe in two. If what I most deeply want is the pleasures of life and to stay away from anything scary in internal experience, I'm also splitting the world in two. That's where most people are. But then people going into spiritual practice often carry a deep attempt to avoid something in life.
At the same time, it seems like a somewhat inevitable or natural process. First you go into it because you can't stand your suffering, and it's a way of avoidance. But you learn things that help you realize how you're avoiding.
Hopefully you learn, and hopefully you want to. Because you could avoid life all your life doing spiritual practice and just create a world of the known within spiritual practice, avoiding what you really want, what is really calling you.
If you listen at that really deep level, then the spiritual life and the worldly life will collide and be the same thing.
I guess there have been cases of people who never went into spiritual practice and woke up.
Yes. And in the cases where it goes the other way around, you also have to consider the mysteries of past lives, of what was lived. There are situations where so much has already been lived that there isn't room for anything else but waking up.
What really matters is for you to look in yourself and be very transparent and honest, to have the inner integrity to see: what do I really want? If nothing in life calls you, if you have no fear of it (because that's the key, the integrity and clarity), if there's nothing there, no fear, no activation, no interest in worldly things, but there is interest in just sitting and self-inquiry, then you're probably of the kind that just needs to do that, and you're going to wake up soon.
That is also very much the case with people who are so fully in life, so fully in all of it, that they wake up without a spiritual practice.
Thanks.
You're welcome. You're in a big crisis, and it's a good one. It's a big waking up from the dreams and visions.
Compassion as consequence, not practice
What are your thoughts on practices of compassion, like general loving-kindness for people, either as mental projections or verbally? It feels like the more that falls off here, the more compassion there is anyway. But sometimes I've done metta practices and they feel helpful, like they open the heart. At the same time, they feel like they support a sense of self and other. Are there any nondual practices for this?
I don't have a lot of thoughts about practices of compassion because I don't think of them, nor do I have a particular relationship with them. To me, compassion is a natural consequence of understanding. It's not something you can practice. You can only imagine and fabricate false notions of what compassion is.
It's the same with "unconditional love." "Practice unconditional love." I think that's insane. You could look at your conditioning and your conditions. As you see that and see through it, something can happen. But you don't practice it. Practicing being good will only make you emulate ideas of what it is to be good. Instead, look at how you're not being good. Look at how behaviors are coming from reactivity, fear, and pain, which move you into behaviors that are mean and hurtful. The consequence, if you move through that and clear it, will be loving.
So sure, if a practice of compassion actually means "look at all of your illusions" and that's all you're doing, then as you see through them, you won't have to "do" compassion. It will truly emerge. It will naturally be what happens. Because as you understand your own madness, you will understand madness appearing in others. And that understanding is compassion. But you don't start by understanding the madness in others. You don't focus on the madness in others. All you do is focus on the illusion and the madness in yourself. As that is seen through, everything else will be obvious.
Yeah, that's the growing sense here. There's more undone than done, and there's just a sense of compassion anyway, a natural emergence. So there's maybe an old attachment to the practice of trying to speed things up.
Seeing through the illusion of time
Any sense of speeding up is buying into the illusion of time. So the fastest way is to look at the illusion of time. As you see through it, you go into the root. By "illusion of time," I mean: you understand its essence. The essence of time is an interpretation of experience, which can be useful but is not fundamentally real at the level of experience. There have been studies where you shut down a part of the brain and the person stops experiencing time, but they are still experiencing reality. They're conscious. Then that part activates again and time begins again. So is time fundamental in reality, or is it a mental overlay? I would say it's a mental overlay.
So the more you see that, the better. Because if you're trying to accelerate, trying to rush, you're operating at the level where time is real. And the whole point of what this is moving toward is deeper than that. The most direct way (and if you want, the fastest) is to see through illusion, to see through the constant buying into the mind's maps. When it's fully seen as mind, mind, mind, nothing but more mind, you fall through. You can no longer identify with something that is just seen as forms moving, appearances of thought.
You just pop out, and there's sensation, perception, thoughts, and the vastness of not being identified, not buying in. That's something that is just a very gentle, constant looking. "Oh, there I go. Oh, that's more thought that I was buying into. It seemed to be more than a thought." It starts to seem important, not just as a thought but as an actual fundamental aspect of reality. And it assumes an "I" as something limited and knowable. That's always at the root of buying into thought.