The Emptying Before the New
El Vaciamiento Antes de lo Nuevo
A student describes a falling away of deeper desires and a sense of directionlessness, and the teacher explores the difference between desire born of lack and the love of life's creative process.
The Emptying Before the New
A student describes a falling away of deeper desires and a sense of directionlessness, and the teacher explores the difference between desire born of lack and the love of life's creative process.
I wanted to ask you about something that's been happening recently. I've noticed a falling away of deeper desires. It seems like I've always known what I really wanted in my life, but recently it feels like: yes, it would be nice to have this, it would be great to have that, but nothing is going to be the thing. Nothing is going to be the thing that makes everything okay. That's not going to happen. So it feels a bit rudderless right now. There's a lot less resistance; resistance has fallen away. Yet the direction is still very fuzzy to me. There isn't a sense of "my heart really wants this right now" or "I really want to go toward that." There are goals I have, but it feels more like I'm here right now, and that's really about it in terms of what I know. It's just strange to me. Everything feels like: yes, I could see that that would be nice, I'd like that, but it would have its problems. And this has its problems, but this is also okay. And that would likely be the same thing. So I wonder if you could comment on that. Am I just in denial of some deeper thing that I want? Or is this just part of the process?
To me, it sounds a lot like what the introduction to the meditation was about. I don't know if that resonated with you.
Yeah.
The transition period
There is a period of transition. Imagine living a certain number of decades with a particular worldview, a sense of what the point of life is and how things are going to work out. What's the strategy for the best way of living? All of that develops from a very young age, and we pretty much maintain that paradigm for several decades. Most people maintain it forever.
But when that starts to drop, when the effort or the doing that creates the sense of "something's missing here and this other thing is better" begins to fall away, which is exactly what you're talking about, we start to have the disillusion. I think that's the word in English. In Spanish it means the ending of an illusion. It sounds bad, right? You're disappointed, you're disillusioned. But it's actually the ending of an illusion. It's seeing clearly.
The seeing clearly can happen instantaneously, but still, a lot has to happen for the new to come through. And it's not up to you to make that happen, because part of what is seen, and the more it's seen, is that the heart of it is the illusion of what I thought I was. That's what really starts to fall away.
What you're describing is that the person you thought you were, the one who had these ideas and these desires, is starting to fall apart, starting to be seen as not that real. It's not pulling its weight. It's not having its intensity. All of that is going to be confusing. It's like suddenly being put on a different planet. But it's even more confusing, because at least in that situation you would know, "I'm on a different planet. This is different. Now I have to deal with this new thing."
What's happening to you, and what happens to most people in this process, is a slow, gradual thing. Even for people who have a very sudden awakening, there is still a process. The old paradigms are still activated. The old mechanisms are still happening in the body and the mind. But it starts to be seen as not that real. You might interpret it differently, as you were saying: it's no longer that interesting, no longer having its pull, the desire isn't there anymore. But what's happening is you're seeing through the hologram of you, the one that seemed so real, that was such a big deal, that everything revolved around. You start to see it's a kind of hologram of "me" and desires and what life is, where it should go, what's going to work and what's not.
If you adopt the strategy of "well, this is changing, I need to figure this one out now, I need to find what I really want," you're back into the same thing. So what's important to notice is: yes, I can confirm that most likely you're in this transition period. Everything seems to point to that being a straightforward explanation. But then look at why what's happening now is a problem. You weren't saying it was, but there's something there bringing up this wonder: is there something I'm not doing or should do? Is the desire there or not? Do I need to find what my heart longs for? That's just more of the same activity.
When you talk about this merging of the process with the heart's longing, the heart's desire, doing what you really want, how does that fit in with this particular stage? Because that's made a lot more sense before. Right now, maybe I'm just making a problem out of it.
Emptying the cup
You know the idea of having to empty the cup? You have to empty it before it can fill again. You're in the process of emptying. The deeper desire, let's call that the new, comes after the emptying. It's always important to look at what we really want, but there are periods and transitions where you just need to be patient. For example, what you could want right now is to not want anything and wait. So when I say, "What is it that you really want?" it's whatever you want now, and that could be not much, with the discernment of asking: am I dropping responsibilities? Am I self-sabotaging my life? Am I dysfunctional? Which doesn't look like it. You're not getting in the way. Things are just dropping.
Yeah, it's like emptiness. It's just really empty right now. There's just being where I am. There are little desires, but there's nothing frantic. There's "I want a cup of coffee" or "I want to go do this," but there's not this frantic "I need to get there."
Right. That frantic "I need to get there" is not what this is about. Sometimes when I talk about what the universe as you wants right now, I give the example of sipping that cup of coffee. It's not necessarily "I want to build this huge business" or whatever. It could be literally that my deepest longing is to savor the moment of whatever I'm doing. If I'm playing the piano, the sensations in the fingers. If I'm creating a business, it's the dance and the play of that push, the actual experience in the moment of that. Even if there's a vision and a project and something being created, the best thing about it is the taste of the experience of that movement. It's not about "when will it happen so that I can get there so that I have the thing."
Desire as love of the process
Oh, that's a really helpful clarification for me personally, because when I hear you say "what your heart really wants," for some reason I'd always thought of that as a big thing: my heart wants to get married and have two children, my heart wants to build a business. But that's really helpful to know it also means my heart wants to be in this moment, totally present with everything.
Yes. Because it could be to get married and have kids, but it's not about getting to the point where you're married and you have kids. It's the wanting of that and the journeying with that love for that. You could call it desire, but it's the love of the journey. Getting married and having kids, for example: where is that love? When can it be tasted and savored? When you get married and have kids? No. Right now.
Even with the most mundane example, like creating a business: if you think there's only value in having the business succeed, and only when you reach that success stage will you really have what you want, no. Because the love of creating is where the richness is. It's me in a process, in a movement, in a journey that I can savor. Whether the business works or not becomes less important.
With everything, if you want a cup of coffee, the whole process of the anticipation, opening the bag of coffee beans, the smell, grinding the beans, that whole process can be as delicious as the cup of coffee. Or if you go to a café instead, the process of walking there, talking to the barista, anticipating it, comparing it to the one from yesterday, the savoring of the coffee. It's not about the moment of getting the coffee.
Yeah, that makes so much sense when you say it that way. I don't know why, but I guess the focus on the end goal has always been so dominant. When somebody says, "What do you really want?" you think about a goal. But it's the process you're describing.
Having and savoring at once
The thing is that it's both, because when we use language and we talk about time, the mind can turn it into a duality. There's the appearance that it's one or the other. Either you're here with whatever this is and you can't want anything that's not here, or if you want what's not here, then this has to not be okay. And that's not true. This is the case where you can have your cake and eat it too.
You can follow the love, instead of calling it desire, because desire, the way I'd define it, is coming from the sense of something's missing. If I define desire as the wanting of something that's not here, something missing, then that's very different from the love of the creativity of life. When I say "what does the universe want," it has more to do with the creativity, with the love, than with the sense of something missing.
So it includes both the goal and the process in one vision.
Yes. The goal is like the vision. When I imagine getting married and having kids, I have this really lovely, tingly, expansive sense of what a beautiful thing that would be. If it's not coming from "I need that to be okay, this life is not okay as it is right now, but when I have that I will be okay," then it's not problematic. But if it's coming from "life is beautiful, this is beautiful, it's okay, and there is this tingly, beautiful, loving sense when I envision a future with kids," that's the kind of thing I'm talking about: the love of what could be as a creative process.
So when I ask, "What do you want? What do you as universe want?" it's like asking, what does the artist want to paint? What does the creator want to create? It's not "oh, there's an empty canvas, this is terrible, I need to fill it so that it's okay."
Yeah, that's very helpful. Thank you. That makes a lot of sense.
You're welcome. It actually helped me clarify something for myself, how to talk about it more clearly. I resonate so much with just being in the present, but I can see the love of something else and how it relates. It's not that it's missing. It's just that it would be wonderful to have that, and there's love here for this and that.
You can assume that if the desire for something has to do with something missing, and we're not talking about food but rather a psychological need, and the problem is soothing the sense of something missing with that other thing, then that's what I would call a kind of negative desiring, which is what Buddhism, for example, talks about.
But if you're not there, and there is now this openness and this love and beauty for what is right now, then you can include the imagination and the vision of what could be created. You could consider that as part of divinity. That's why when I say "what does the universe as you want," or "you as the universe," or "the universe through you," these are all metaphors for the vision. The love, the desire, is of a very big scale. It's divinity, it's universal. But it's being experienced, felt, and created through you, through the part of you that is a perspective, that's unique, that's you.
The previous conversation resonated with me because I've been thinking about how to support my child long term. I was a programmer and was laid off a couple of years ago. I had fallen out of love with it, and I thought, "Oh, this is my chance to really do what I want." I never quite managed to figure out what that was, and I realized I was part of a huge wave of programmers in the same boat.
Now, having a child who's nearly four weeks old, I'm thinking the responsible thing to do is go back and just get a job. I'm trying to think about what you just said in terms of my situation. I feel sometimes like I could do anything. I've been getting back into programming, updating my skills, and realizing there's a part of me that enjoys this, finding ways to enjoy the process. And then there are days when I think, "This is such an uphill slog, I'm never going to get to the point where someone wants to hire me." I wonder if the universe is telling me to do something else. Sometimes I imagine going to school for therapy, how interesting and heart-expansive that vocation could be.
There are many possibilities. My current answer is just to stay in the present. For now I'm going to focus on programming for about six months and see if anything takes. If it doesn't, then probably pivot to something else. My current thinking is to find ways to enjoy the process at every stage, no matter what it is, because I could see how I might get irritated with the programming path, find ways to complain about it, switch to becoming a therapist, get all frustrated with that process, and end up dissatisfied with whatever I do. Sometimes I think it's purely a matter of attitude and not much to do with what the actual thing is.
I think that's a very reasonable thing to do. You have skills and background in the world of technology, so not dropping that too soon is a good strategy. And what you said about it being a matter of attitude is very much so, because you can imagine the grass is greener. If you switch careers, it's all going to be beautiful and lovely and rewarding, and then you're going to be struggling with all the problems of that profession. You could have a similar kind of comparison to how it is dealing with code.
Attitude versus natural state
I was wondering if you had thoughts beyond the professional considerations. The idea that how you experience life is about your attitude, how you orient, how you maybe interact with the present moment or project onto it.
The way I experience it is less about having an attitude and projecting something, and more the opposite: dropping an attitude and being with what appears. That can also include a personality in the sense that there are ways I am that are unique to me, that emerge and are not my doing in a sense. A lot of what's problematic comes from the illusion of knowing what I am. But when you drop that, something is still there. There is a personality, a way of being that's unique. It's different from an attitude. An attitude comes from knowing something. So if you "know" that programming is wrong and it's a problem and you don't like it and there's nothing there, that's an attitude based on a conviction about something you don't really know.
Think about when a child grows. When they're very young, they have a distinct personality. Then they develop problematic ways of being. The constant playfulness or joy gives way to a personality that's overlaid. That's what I would call the attitude. But if you strip that off, what's beneath is a very natural curiosity, a natural joy, a natural interest, a very unique way of being, where that child might be super interested in wood carvings for whatever reason. Usually we try to put kids to do the things we think they need to be doing, and maybe wood carving is actually more important than things we consider essential. In that form of educating, we tend to push down on natural tendencies, the natural state, the natural form of being, in favor of one that's overlaid.
When I'm talking about what the universe wants as you, that's the kind of energy I'm addressing. What is it that's already there, that was there? The vitality, curiosity, and interest that was there when you were two or three years old, before many belief systems were overlaid on top of it.
I think of it as the natural emergent energy, life energy, that each being has. And I'm thinking about this in terms of my child, how to support and cradle that without adding too much.
Exactly. And that's what I heard when you said, "I think I can do anything." That's speaking to the more natural you. The one that's the attitude is: "it shouldn't be programming" or "it should be therapy" or "this isn't right." That's overlaid. I spent decades with an attitude of complaining about pretty much everything. When that attitude dropped, everything was just pleasant.
Stress as vitality
You talked about stress. As a businessman, the amount of stress is quite huge at times, and I'm learning to manage it just for health reasons. But there's a lot of fun and tastiness in a kind of process of stress. It's like a roller coaster: stressful, but fun. Stress becomes part of the thing I can savor.
You could look at the experience of being a new father and having to figure out how to support your family as something stressful. But you can take that stress and drop the attitude that it's problematic. I'm not saying you have that attitude, but the tendency would be to take a position where having stress is problematic and it shouldn't be there.
It's definitely there. I think what you're talking about applies to other aspects of fatherhood too, like learning how to put the baby down for a nap, learning how to coordinate all the things so that we can go out for a few hours, just all the fiddly bits. It can be stressful, and there are also moments when I realize that having to contend with all this is actually kind of revitalizing.
Exactly. A word that was coming to me as you were speaking was "vitality," and you said it. You could look at the stress of the situation you're describing and call it problematic and not easy. But you can also call it vitality. It's aliveness. You're alive.
Rebranding stress.
Rebranding stress, yes. But there is a distinction. There's the type of stress that comes from being a responsible father, and there's the stress of neurotic forms of living. The stress that comes from neurotic forms of living is problematic and should be addressed. But the stress of "I've become a father and I want to be a responsible one," call that vitality: loving challenges and being responsible.
The warmth is not located
It's been interesting having a child because the generator of that vitality is just so adorable, even when he poops all over us. It's this really broad, beautiful warmth. Beyond just his being, it's like his presence and his effect on our lives feels like a tectonic movement of sorts. The propellant for the vitality and the stress is really hard to deny the goodness of. It's just so apparent.
I would just offer one thing there. I wouldn't say it's only in him, because what that's bringing up is in you. The warmth is invoking that in you. It's not here or there, only in one. The warmth in him is the warmth in your eyes, and the warmth in your eyes is the warmth in him.
I'm having a funny feeling. I don't know if this resonates with anyone, but you go on vacation and your life is all of a sudden really colorful and fun, and you're savoring every moment. Then you come back home and you think, "Why can't I live my life at home as though I were on vacation?" I just had a taste of that with my son. Why can't I treat every human being the way I feel toward him? Is what you just described portable to other relationships and situations?
One hundred percent. Each relationship will be unique, as we were saying about the natural state and personality. But at a deeper level, the resonance of warmth and respect and caring can be the same, and in fact is the same. The more you see the true nature of reality, the more you will see that warmth isn't personal, that caring is not personal, that love is not personal. But it is discovered through relationship, through unique, valuable relationships.
You say "portable." The way I would see it is that you start to recognize it as a possibility and a reality everywhere, as you see through the interpretation that it's located, that it's in you or in another. As you taste it, it is discovered through a glimpse, for example through a relationship with a partner or a son. That's why I was saying you see that warmth in him, and it is there, but it's not exclusively there. As you see it, you know it in yourself, and it is not two warmths. It's not the warmth in him and the warmth in you. It's the same warmth.
The same warmth as in warmth that emerges from our relationship? Or a warmth that's more global, that we both tap into as we relate?
It's neither of those, at least not the way I would put it into words. Now we come into something more poetic. It is the warmth that is of reality, the caring that is of reality. The human part of us, the heart of the human part, can then also recognize it as itself. You can recognize it in another and say, "It's not in me, it's there, and I'm learning it." But where you can actually see is that it is the same love, and it's not located or personal. The paradox is that the more you do that, the more it actually starts to spread and manifest through you. You become more in harmony with that reality, and it starts to be communicated more clearly to others.
I remember at some point noticing that the way people who were parents interacted with me included a lot more forgiveness and generosity and curiosity. Not across the board necessarily, but I noticed it a few times with certain people, and I feel like I'm experiencing that more and more. It reminds me of the job conversation. Allowing reality, the natural expression of the human heart, to be the place from which you operate allows you to see everything through a more ample lens.
Operating from nothing missing
Yes, and through the filter of the perceptual instrument, to be technical, but it is through the experience of being human. If as a human being I have an attitude, a belief system about how things are and how they should be, and it's negative in the sense that something is essentially not right or missing right now, that's what I will perceive, that's what I will relate to, that's what I will communicate, and that's what I will spread. That's how I will educate.
You can reverse that and see it's not about having an opposite attitude. It's about not having that attitude. What is actually here without that filter is presence, is warmth. It's natural. And from this, you can feel, relate, communicate, teach. You will be teaching as a father. That's going to be your job, one of the many. If the essence of where you're coming from is "nothing is missing, nothing is essentially wrong," you will educate with one flavor, very different from the flavor of "something is essentially missing."
I can see how my parents had that to some degree, and I can feel the butterfly effect. I see it in politics as well.
It's the state of the human consensual mind. You could also frame it as: one is operating from fear, and the other is coming from love. The interpretation that something is essentially wrong or missing creates fear, because now you have to anticipate time, and there's a possibility you will never get what is needed. Something is essentially missing, and you might never get it. That's scary.
If nothing is essentially missing, and you can still have a vision for things you love and want to create, and they could happen, while also loving this moment, it's very different. Like not needing a cup of coffee, feeling like it could be nice to get one, and then enjoying every step of the way. If you think you need a cup of coffee, it's a problem. You could say casually, "Oh, I need a cup of coffee." But if the actual experience is "I'm not okay, I won't be able to face my day," and there's this sense of "I need a cup of coffee and I don't have one," that starts to become problematic, especially because it's false. It's not true.
I'm really curious about where that breaks down, because you mentioned earlier that obviously we're not talking about food. I think of Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
It is a spectrum, but the line is always too far. There isn't a hard line, but we think we need more than we do. Very much, always the case. And then it's: need in service of what? It's not just pure need or absolute need. "In order to survive, do I need to survive?" There's a very different attitude between "I need to survive" and "I want to survive."
That's interesting, to bring it down to that level.
You brought it up. "I need to eat in order to get rid of the hunger" is not truly a need.