The Mystery of This
El Misterio de Esto
A meditation inviting you to move gently toward your experience rather than away from it, discovering that even pain and fear can be met directly.
The Mystery of This
You're here to essentially enter
the mystery of this.
There's a suggestion, a recommendation,
that there's a way to alleviate the suffering,
and in a sense it's through the suffering,
it's not away from it.
So you could consider it a conscious suffering.
Become more aware, more close to it, to look at it more deeply and directly.
The suggestion and recommendation is that this is a way through it,
but it's also an invitation with a disclaimer that it is also towards
learning the ability of feeling pain,
feeling fear,
to be intimate with it so that they are no longer monsters,
scary beasts.
And that this is possible.
It's very, very possible.
This is essential to our nature.
One field of experience
At first all experience seems like things happening,
real things,
thoughts about real things,
real past,
real memory,
real possible futures,
real problems.
There's a time and a place for that, and we could put it aside for now as the relative.
And what is real now,
what is real in direct experience,
is ultimately indescribable, but we can say
it is one field of experience.
There is no such thing as sound as opposed to sight.
They're not two separate things.
They're just different qualities of what is appearing.
There's no dividing line between sound and sight and any experience.
There's no dividing line between sensation and thoughts.
And if that seems very strange, you can
go ahead and explore where that line is.
Where is the separation?
It will ultimately clarify and find that it is just one field,
one complex vibration.
Nothing is static
And nothing that appears is actually static,
stable, or unchanging.
All of the appearances come from something,
go to something,
a movement.
The image of the stream is very widely used.
It's a stream of sensation,
a stream of thoughts,
a stream of sounds, sight, sensation.
It's a moving and tingling and glittering, shape-shifting experience.
Attention focusing something somewhere,
shifting,
moving back and forth.
So what I'm pointing to is just this noticing of the whole field of experience.
Where am I in all this?
The more you notice this, you might start to wonder:
what of all this is I?
Where am I in all this?
It might appear that the landscape is the body, or the location of the body, or a sensation,
or a place in the head or in the chest.
In the narrative,
the stories, the thoughts appear in your past and memories,
relationships, struggles,
desires.
All of that is this same field.
Identification
Notice how some aspect of what appears seems to have a kind of magnetic attraction,
a bold temptation,
desire.
It's a sense of contracting into it, focusing into it.
There could be some aspect of thought or sensations,
a combination of both,
kind of focusing and tightening and contracting.
This is what we call identification.
There is this kind of pulling into a subset of experience,
forming a sense of I separate from the rest,
dividing experience into me, my inside, and not me, other, outside.
If you look at it closely, it's very dynamic.
Attitude and intention
Looking, exploring, and being: attitude or intention matters.
You don't need to understand something or get somewhere,
just to notice what's happening.
Taste the heart of it,
as if sinking deeper into the experience.
All of it.
Nothing is pushed away.
Noticing the pushing away of thoughts,
then you can go,
ah, what is this?
What am I pushing away from?
What if I go into these thoughts and absorb the experience?
Same with emotions,
sense of contraction.
Don't try to change it or undo it, just taste it,
as if you were trying to discover all of the details of the flavors,
like savoring a fine wine and having to describe it.
A complex dessert with many flavors; you want to know what's in it.
Learning to move towards
In this process we learn, and we also train our body and mind functioning
how to move towards and not away.
We learn that we can trust experience and taste it
very deeply.
The fear and pain and discomfort itself can be tasted,
and we will be fine.
Follow the breath and sensation,
a sense of sinking into,
sinking downwards,
towards the heart.