What We Avoid Is Mostly a Ghost
Lo que evitamos es mayormente un fantasma
A student asks what tends to delay or block the process of self-realization, prompted by the teacher's earlier remark that his own journey didn't need to take as long as it did.
What We Avoid Is Mostly a Ghost
A student asks what tends to delay or block the process of self-realization, prompted by the teacher's earlier remark that his own journey didn't need to take as long as it did.
Last week, you mentioned your own journey and how you realized why it took so long to self-realize. 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 make 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 on a podcast as opposed to just walking in silence and being in my own awareness the kind of activity that takes us away from going deeper?
Let's suppose you face the apparent choice: do I walk and listen 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? Does it feel like it's helping me avoid something? Or is the idea of not putting it on a way to force myself to do something I think is more appropriate, more spiritual?
Feeling into the decision
You can't decide this abstractly. You simply feel into it and try to look more deeply at what's going on. As you see what's happening, the decision will happen by itself, and that is the deepest way. If you start to see clearly that the podcast is a total avoidance, then a new freedom opens up: you're more likely not to put it on, because you'll think, "It's just avoidance. I'm curious to see what happens when I don't avoid." Or you could realize it's avoidance and still avoid, but then most likely a little mind trip has happened where you haven't really seen through the avoidance. This is getting into the weeds of a hypothetical decision, though.
The bigger question of delay
I think the bigger question you're asking is: what are we doing to delay? One thing to 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. 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 where 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.
Most of what we fear is a ghost
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, tend to name the things they did not do rather than what they did do. You start to realize that all of the pains, all of the struggles, all the things you were avoiding, they weren't that bad. You could have lived more, done more, explored more, experimented more.
This applies here as well. What we are avoiding because it seems scary, difficult, painful: ultimately, it's not that bad. The liberation is to see that the most difficult thing I could imagine going through, I have gone through, and it wasn't that bad. That thing was death. Not obviously the death of the body, because I don't know that, but everything I could have imagined death would be, because it was the ending of myself, and then going through that.
Ripping off the Band-Aid
Yes, it was brutal in ways. But afterward the feeling is: I didn't need to avoid that so much. It was like ripping off a Band-Aid, a really big one. And it's been a few years now, so the painful aspect of it is more and more forgotten. I remember closer to the time, I was saying, "If I had to go through that again, I don't know." It was really brutal. But ultimately, the core of what I was avoiding was just one night. Not even a whole night. 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 God. That's what it was.