The Imagination of a Problem
La imaginación de un problema
A student shares an experience of creative inspiration intertwined with old ego patterns, leading to a wide-ranging exploration of triggers, conditioning, the nature of flow, and whether the one who wants to be free is itself just imagination.
The Imagination of a Problem
A student shares an experience of creative inspiration intertwined with old ego patterns, leading to a wide-ranging exploration of triggers, conditioning, the nature of flow, and whether the one who wants to be free is itself just imagination.
Today has been really interesting. Starting from the meditation, it aligned perfectly with what was coming up for me: this transition of winter to spring, this dying into life. I've been feeling a lot of exciting inspiration coming through toward projects that have been brewing for many years. Usually the inspiration would come and then burn out, but this feels different. It feels grounded. And as you were saying earlier, even if it doesn't happen, I don't care. There's so much fun just having the inspiration move through and feeling the aliveness of it.
What's coming up for me is that it's so much fun, and then the mind gets really engaged, as it should, because it's helping flesh out details of what things are going to look like. That's enjoyable. But then old ego patterns get enmeshed with it, because the mind starts running away with me: what am I going to get? I can see it. I can't say it's a problem, exactly. It's more like I'm noticing both are happening: this raw creation coming through, the useful mind doing great work, and then slipping into the exhausting mind. I notice it, and maybe what feels right is just to stop when I notice that. I don't really know what the question is. I'm just bringing the experience to see if you have anything to say about this coexistence, and whether there's a good way to navigate it.
I have a few things. One, it sounds great overall. The other is that you're talking about these two things: the mind when it's useful, productive, and in service to your projects, versus when it shifts into something more like older conditioning. My sense would be: what's the problem with that? Can you say a little more?
It's funny, because when I first shared it, I thought, "I don't even know that there is a problem." It's really self-correcting. I just see it, and then I stop.
But there's a sense that it could be, or should be, different.
Right. There's an imagination that it could just be pure flow, without the interruption.
The mind may add less than we think
Two things. First, you said the mind in its positive mode is appearing and doing what's needed. Often we think we need to think more than we actually do. We assume the mind is adding more value than it is at the level of foreground cognitive process. I would suggest you explore the possibility that you don't even need to give much attention to the thought process you call the positive one. Just play with that.
Second, you talked about the sense that it could be different, that it could always be in flow. I think that's the heart of the whole thing. If you were to ask me where the real question is in what you're sharing, it would be: can it be a state of flow constantly, even when the mind is conditioned?
My answer would be yes, it can, because the experience of a lack of flow is an illusion. There is such a thing as higher performance. When there is more wisdom, more harmony, more alignment, you could call that "more flow." But I wouldn't call it more flow. That's what is conventionally called flow. I would just call it mastery and wisdom. When there's absolute mastery and wisdom, there will be more permanent states of high performance. But the sense of not flowing is itself an illusion.
When conditioned mind comes up, that can be experienced from a place of flow, from a state of flow. And it's not a change where you have to go into flow. It's seeing that there already is flow.
That really resonates. I felt the whole thing. We've talked about this before, the stop-and-go thing. There's still a belief that I have to stop to get to the flow. But really it's just noticing that it's always here, even if conditioning is here.
One way to address that is to completely obliterate the belief that there is such a thing as no conditioning. The state of absolute flow where there is no conditioning is the state when we die.
I think for me the word "conditioning" is clear. Everyone has that until they die. What feels like the catch is the attachment to thought. I feel pulled into the thought, and then it's like, "Oops, I did that again."
Where does behavior come from?
You said a moment ago that you get it, that everybody has conditioning until they die. What do you define as that conditioning?
I think I define it as the content of thought, or behavior. Egoic behavior, egoic patterns.
Where does the behavior come from?
From identification with the thought.
From thoughts that are conditioned, that are repetitive, interfering in movement, action, and decisions. So it's the same thing.
That's a big insight for me. I don't know why I had this idea that there's some separation. I think it's because I once asked one of my teachers about this. I said, "I watch you get triggered. It happens throughout the satsang. So what's the difference when you get triggered and when I get triggered?" And he said, "Well, for me it arises from emptiness and it falls back to emptiness."
Reactivity and spiritual bypass
I'm glad you don't tell me who it is, so I can say something critical without it being personal. A teacher who's getting triggered regularly during a satsang, I don't think, is very good. I do get triggered. I have conditioning. I will have it till I die. And I wish my partner were here to be my witness. She saw that drop almost instantaneously, from one day to another. She tells me this herself, reflecting that it stopped practically overnight.
We used to fight pretty much every other day, if not every day, because my being triggered would trigger her, and vice versa. In the last three years, we've probably had three fights. We've had conversations that got frictional, difficult, but actual fights where I would get triggered would only really happen after a week of traveling when I'm burning out. Then we'd have a two-hour fight, it would be over, and a few hours later we're both fine. That's three or four times in three years.
I don't know what you mean specifically by this person getting triggered in satsang. But there has to be a change that is evident at that level. Otherwise, I would be very cautious. I would question how much that awakening has matured, or whether it's not embodied.
That's been clear for me. That's why I stopped studying with that teacher. But I will say there are famous teachers, regarded as the main go-to non-dual teachers the whole world knows, and I've seen them get triggered in satsang as well. The closer you get to them, the more you see there's still quite a bit of identification.
I'll pause you there. Dis-identification is not the ending or disappearance of ego. Without ego, a person cannot speak.
That makes sense. So better not to use the word "ego."
No, it's better to use the word that's most appropriate. If you want to call it identification, use "identification."
People have different definitions of ego. In society it often just means personality, while spiritually it's more identification-based. So yes, "identification" is a better way to say it. I guess what I learned from getting close to all these teachers was a lot of disillusionment around what the goal even was. But I've also seen teachers since, and talking to you, I don't know you personally, but I believe you that you don't have a lot going on with triggers. I can sense a more peaceful, even keel. I could be wrong because I don't know.
Intensity is not the same as being triggered
I'm actually very intense. I have a very intense personality. For example, when we were traveling over the holidays, we had eighteen family members from both our families visiting, and I was basically responsible for everyone, especially my partner's family, who aren't used to traveling. It was very intense. I was leading with a lot of intensity much of the time. My family said, "Wow, you're getting intense." But I would say I wasn't triggered. There were times I did get triggered, a handful of times, two or three. But in general, there was a lot of intensity, and I was quite strict or stern because there were health risks I needed to prevent people from taking. When you're with someone doing something dangerous and they're not listening, you have to be firm.
I have a personality that is not always in a state of calm and peace externally. When I'm telling my eighty-year-old father not to go swim in waves that might drown him, and he's not listening, I got very intense about it. And then he almost drowned. There was a lot of that happening. I was in a position of responsibility, caring for people from age five to eighty. We were going through areas far from the tourist zone, dealing with serious food allergies, language barriers, and a lot of things to manage to keep everyone safe.
So when we speak about triggers, I would say a trigger is when one unintentionally, mechanically, and habitually reacts to something out of pain or out of fear. That is very different from responding to a situation because someone is taking a foolish risk and not listening, and I respond with some form of aggression.
I might be triggered. You can never know for certain that you're not triggered. But when you are triggered, you know. You can tell yourself you weren't, but the minute you say, "I was not triggered and I know for a fact," it's most likely you were. So I can't say I wasn't triggered. But knowing the taste of what it is when I am triggered, I was barely triggered for two weeks with eighteen family members.
There's also something here about dispelling the sense that we need to be in specific states, for example, that aggression is never appropriate.
That definitely makes sense. What feels right to me is something more like how an animal operates: there's aggression, and then it's back to peace. When it's needed, it's expressed, and then it's back to stillness.
That is not a right comparison. An animal is in a state of dis-identification because it's prior to sufficient mind development, which is different from transcending identification. Some aspects are comparable, like what you described, but we don't want to be like animals.
Well, I don't know about that statement. But the way I imagine it, and this is what that teacher said in his words, is that it rises from emptiness and falls back to emptiness, even though my experience of him is: "Okay, you've got work to do."
What he says applies to Hitler. What Hitler did came out of emptiness and went back into emptiness.
But the difference is that Hitler had a prolonged story. He attached to the story.
Then it's just a matter of degree. My point is that if you brush off a reactivity and justify it as "it came out of emptiness and went back into emptiness," then I would say: sure, that's the same thing Hitler did. He just did it more often.
That is a good point. I guess really it comes down to how it feels for me. I can only know what's going on in myself.
The teacher admitted he was reacting, right?
He admits he's triggered, but...
What's the difference between being triggered and reacting? If he was triggered and you noticed it, it's because he reacted. If you notice somebody getting triggered, it's because they've reacted to the trigger. It manifested. That's a reactivity. You asked him about it, and he said the difference between you and him is that when he reacts, it comes from emptiness and goes into emptiness. My point is: so did Hitler.
Well, that's just his personality type. He's an Eight on the Enneagram. They're reactive and then they forget. And it's like, "Oh, it's very spiritual of me."
That's a bypass and a cop-out, and I'm glad you don't mention who it is so I can just say: to me, the appropriate thing would be, "Yeah, I reacted. Sorry."
Waking up and growing up
That's what feels right to me. My personality, when I'm triggered relationally, I don't have any issue processing it with the person. It's more my personal suffering, like if we didn't resolve it and then I go home and I'm carrying the story, still working out, "Well, this is what I wanted to say," and so on. That's where my liberation lies: not carrying that personal suffering. Whereas this teacher doesn't have that mechanism of reflection. There's no looping or reflecting.
That's because there isn't enough understanding of the potential of the human and the mind, where there's work to do. In that teacher, I would say there's work to do to resolve what's creating the reactivity.
There's an aspect of this work which is the waking up, and there's an aspect I call the growing up. There are levels of growing up you can't reach until you wake up. And once you do, there's work to be done. I think this teacher just stopped at some point because it's not felt as needed.
He is very masterful at guiding people in the waking up. It's clear that's his role. He's really good at it, and he is awake on a very deep level. You can feel it. But the growing up hasn't happened. Especially if you live as many spiritual teachers do, a very solo, removed life where it's just satsang and then home, without much pushback. I don't really want to spend much more time on this teacher, but it's just one example of a pattern I see.
I'm not really talking about the teacher. It's about the ideas you might have around what's possible: what awakeness feels like subjectively, what the experience of flow is, what the mind does, what identification and conditioning feel like and should look like. If you have a sense that there will always be reactivity, or that the question is how to be with what you can't get rid of, then I would say: a lot of that can actually be gone. But you can also still be in complete flow with what happens.
Instead of resting on the wakefulness and being in flow while still having problematic conditioning and reactivity appearing, one could be in a state of flow while working through that and removing it at the root, from wakefulness.
A quiet mind is no sign of awakening
That makes sense. I do know that eventually the goal, if you can call it that, is something like: I hear accounts from people who say, "I just have a quiet mind now." It's very rare that the mind is even doing anything they have to meet. But in the process, until that's the case, it is what you said: when conditioning does arise, how do I meet it at the root?
The root is not in active thought. There could be very little thought and conditioning could be ruling your life because it's subconscious. In states of repression, the conditioning isn't present, isn't seen, isn't experienced as thoughts. When you say conditioning thoughts aren't showing up, it's because you're looking at them; you're more open to them. But there are aspects that will be subconscious, and the way you know has to do with your openness to being aware of your fears and your pains.
That's a really good point. Because when people say they have a quiet mind, I don't necessarily feel like I'd want to hang out with them. They feel like there's still a lot repressed.
A quiet mind is no sign of awakening.
It's not? So what would you say it is?
It depends on whether you want to look at it from a third-person perspective or a first-person perspective. How I would recognize awakening in another is one thing; how I experienced the shift in myself is another.
In myself, I realized very soon, with quite a bit of surprise, that it had nothing to do with a quiet mind. That was one of the things that surprised me the most. I can have a very quiet mind and live with a very quiet mind. But I can also live with a busy mind, and it has no effect on my functioning, on the level of suffering or lack thereof. The mind had nothing to do with it.
I feel like there aren't a lot of teachers who would agree with me, but I've heard teachers say it's very much correlated with the quiet mind, and whenever I hear that, I think it's completely wrong.
I've heard both: quiet mind, and what you said, that it should be regardless of what the mind is doing.
It is completely regardless of what the mind is doing. And because of that, the mind does tend to settle. But when it's not settled, it's completely irrelevant. It is literally irrelevant whether my mind is busy or not at the level of how I feel, the well-being, the lack of suffering. Whether the mind is reactive or peaceful has nothing to do with it. It has to do with: do I believe what the mind is presenting? If I don't believe it, I'm watching a movie.
Layers of thought
I want to say something about that. My experience is that whenever I'm aware of the thoughts, they stop. I don't ever have this experience of just watching the movie of thoughts while eating popcorn over here. It feels like the thoughts require my engagement to continue.
There are different kinds of thought. If you pay attention to the mind, there are all these layers of what I call thought. Even just to speak, there is thought happening; there are concepts. If you look around, the mind is going to be mapping the names of objects in the space. If you don't pay attention to that aspect of the mind, it goes really quiet; you don't need to be mapping. But the mind is naturally going to be doing that. You can't get out of your house, drive or walk to a café, order coffee, come back, and not have the mind doing a lot in that process.
Now, it's a kind of mind that doesn't need to involve inner dialogue. It doesn't have to have imagination of past and future. But to even walk to a café to order a coffee, you need to imagine the future. You need to know what a coffee is. You need to conceive the possibility that you could buy one and drink it. All of that is work.
Right. It's just so background.
And that's all fine. Now, the inner dialogue, the verbal chatter, images of situations, of people, of futures and pasts, a lot of dialogue: that's when it starts to get unnecessarily busy. But even that, if it's happening, could just be a movie. All of it, where it's like: wow, there's the movie.
But my experience is that once I see it's a movie, it stops, because there's no one to dialogue with. It required me to participate.
That's great. But then, if in that moment you're walking, there's still mind. Different layers.
Right. Really, when I'm talking about the problem, it's the gross mind of the inner dialogue.
The dialoguing is pretty much all unnecessary.
And it feels exhausting. That's the part where, once I see it, it stops and it can be quiet.
What's exhausting is what you're avoiding
What's exhausting there isn't the activity of the mind. It's what you're trying to avoid with it. When you're engaging with that dialogue, you are using it to avoid something. That's what's exhausting.
And it's always clear that what I'm avoiding is in the body. Once I see it, I come back to the body, allow the sensation to be felt, and then there's a clear, open mind. It's great. Sometimes it's a little more sticky, so I have to spend more time feeling, maybe do some inquiry, and then it becomes really blissful. That's been my ongoing process. And in my fantasy world, all of that is too much work.
If you hold that thought and really look at it, it's a belief system coming from an assumption that there's somewhere you can arrive at. If you assume there's a better state, a better level of awakening, a more refined and harmonious way of functioning to get to, then you're going to be trying, efforting, and exhausted. But it's coming from that belief, that assumption, that there's somewhere to get to.
I still have an imagination that you, and other people whose accounts I've heard, are living in a way where you don't have to do what I just described. And if you do, it's rare.
That's correct. It's not an imagination; it's a fact.
Well, then that's what I'm talking about.
The paradox of having nowhere to get to
Oh, but here's the thing: it's possible to drop the belief that there's somewhere to get to.
Even though that fact you've given me is something I want.
If I were to deny that fact, I would deny you something I think would be a crime to withhold. There is a possibility of a freedom you don't know. I know it. Now, let's assume for a moment that I'm to be trusted. What that could do for you is this: instead of trying to get to the thing I have, which you're imagining through more effort or striving, see that the trying itself is the issue. The way to meet me where I am is by dropping the belief that there's somewhere you can get to.
And that makes sense for now. We can be in the present together, and there's no concept that you're somewhere else. It's pure freedom and presence. And then my identification comes up, and then it's like, "Well, now we've got to get back to that." That's where it happens.
That's where you just see that there's nowhere to get back to. You're mapping things out in time. You're in this place when you're here now, in this session, or this afternoon on your own, in presence. And then there's this other place where identification comes in and you're trying to get somewhere. This is the back and forth.
But when the identification comes in, instead of seeing it as, "Oh, I have to get back to that other place," see that what you're looking for is here, in that moment. It will be here when you are identified. Look at the sense that something needs to be different, that you need to get to this other place. You have to realize that what you're looking for is always here. Don't project another place.
It feels like there were two opposing messages, if that makes sense. Before, it felt like you were saying, "Why are you imagining that awakened people live differently from what you're experiencing?" And now you're confirming that they do.
The devil's in the details. There is a difference. The difference is in whether you are believing something that isn't true, or not. But other than that, it's all the same.
But what we were discussing is that in the moment of identification, that is what you're doing: believing something untrue, which is the old conditioning. And then you were saying everyone does that.
That's where it's a matter of degree. There's no way a human being who is alive and awake can function one hundred percent of the time without ever having any kind of trigger or identification. But I emphasize the difference, using myself as an example, of to what degree it changed. The person who most likely could trigger me, my partner, now after three years, it's almost impossible to be triggered by her. My mother, who is the second person who could most powerfully trigger me, told me herself a few months ago that it's been years since we've had a big fight. We had one actually on that trip, and I'm still not sure whether I was triggered or not. But from every visit involving fighting, it went to three years of barely any.
That's the degree of change I'm talking about. The things that triggered me the most are no longer triggering me. Things that were less triggering aren't even in the picture. I used to be frustrated with practically anything, to a significant degree. My partner saw that change overnight. She told me I wouldn't even remember how it was before, because the memory of it also went.
Well, it changed overnight for me too, and then it changed right back.
That is a stage. I know that too. If I go back ten years, there were periods of beautiful openness. All of the pain was gone. Well-being I had never tasted before. Yes, that's from awakening. But that and what I know now are almost incomparable. The change that happened in the last few years, which was overnight, is very different from all of the openings and awakenings and shifts I had before.
Right. It is a common thing people talk about: you have your awakening, then a honeymoon phase, and then all your major traumas come up for shadow work. That's what's happened for me over the past ten years. It fluctuates. There's a month of, "Wow, I don't think anything's triggering me anymore," and then another wave comes back where everything seems to be triggering me. But it does seem like a slow process of cleanup and integration. Overall, of course, it's so much less, and it's really mostly internal. There are still relational things, but as long as a person's willing to work through it, it's not a problem for me. It's actually fun.
Beliefs become more subtle
The key there is that the beliefs become more subtle, and so they're more incisive and harder to see. For example, when you described the conditioning and identification coming back, and there seemed to be a paradox in what I was saying, I had to clarify that it's a matter of degree. We're getting into subtle things now.
I want to emphasize: there is a change that is really big. The shift is very subtle, but the effect is very big. If I were to deny that and not emphasize it, I would deprive you of the possibility. But it's not something that can happen by you trying to get there. At this level, it's about seeing that when that well-being, that peace, which you say comes and goes, seems to be gone, it's not something you can get back to. It's about seeing what's obstructing it right now. And it's going to be a subtle belief, one that's helping you manage something.
It's always fear for me. Always trying to get safety. I try not to get mental with the belief. I try to keep it really somatic.
Both approaches carry risks. Sticking to the somatic is a risk, and sticking to the philosophical understanding is also a risk.
Or doing inquiry, like, "Is this really true? Who feels unsafe?"
Neither of those approaches is foolproof. You could stay stuck trying to process fear on a somatic level. The other one, seeing through it, can also lead to constantly creating a subtle observer, something that's stepping back to look, and that something isn't really there.
And yet I still want to get to the root of what is creating that separation.
The root is only there when it's happening
The root is only there when it's happening. Don't think of it as though there's a root you can get to tomorrow, and once you pull it, it's done. You're creating it in the moment it's happening. The root is believing that something's missing and that you can get it.
Is it just sufficient to see that, to recognize it? It's so subtle, because there's the observer noticing the dynamic, and then...
That observer is partly creating it. It's part of the dynamic: the idea of you having a dynamic, doing something about it, not doing something about it. What is essentially wrong or missing?
I just go to total emptiness. There's nothing to say about it.
But when the conditioning and identification come back, when they do, what's the problem? You said you need safety. Is it the attachment to safety?
The problem is the looping, and then noticing I was looping, and noticing all the tension in my body. And then of course there's probably a subtle added thought of, "Oops, I did it again."
It's all imagination
All of that is imagination.
Well, that's the problem.
No, because it's not a problem. Just have fun imagining that. It's only a problem if you say, "I'm imagining this and I shouldn't be."
It's really a problem for the one that wants to be free of that.
There is no one that wants. That is imagination. You're basically putting a flag and saying, "No, but there's a problem for this one," and that one is imaginary. The problem for that one is the imagination I'm talking about. That one is not in the imagination you're having about "I." That one is made of thought.
And sensation too, like tension in the body. But that's also fine.
Not really. The sensation is where it's anchored and located. It's what's used for an anchoring and a location to validate the belief in some kind of entity.
Sometimes it's actually the sensation, like in the back of my head or neck, where I can feel the stress of the looping. I'll feel that first and then go, "Oh, right, I was looping." Sometimes it starts with the body alerting me to what seems like the problem, and then it's like, "I want to be in peace, I want to relax." And I know how to get there: stop feeding the looping.
Notice that all of that which is having the problem, the imagination of "you," is all made of thought. It doesn't need to stop. Just see it for what it is.