Tasting the Pain That Feels Eternal
Saborear el dolor que se siente eterno
A student explores a persistent background pain mixed with fear, and the teacher encourages a direct, timeless intimacy with suffering rather than placing hope in its eventual resolution.
Tasting the Pain That Feels Eternal
A student explores a persistent background pain mixed with fear, and the teacher encourages a direct, timeless intimacy with suffering rather than placing hope in its eventual resolution.
Just now in the meditation, I was looking at a background pain closely. It wasn't that intense today; there are days when it's more intense. It felt cold. When it's more intense, it's often mixed with fear, and sometimes I escape it. I was doing what you suggested: asking what needs to drop for there to be a kindness with this. What came was "knowing," like knowing how things should be. Basically, all expectation of anything being a particular way would have to drop. I would have to drop even the expectation of there not being eternal pain, because I don't know how long it can last.
Right.
Well, "eternal" is how it feels. For me to be okay with this, I have to be okay with it lasting for years, and that's eternal in my mind. It's hard for me to feel the okayness. But the exploration was interesting, at least. It showed me something.
I think you got it right. That's the kind of thing to see. You described it very much how I would expect it to be described. For any particular person, the description won't always match, but that is one very valid version.
The condition of forever
Coming to that sense of, "If this doesn't change in a reasonable amount of time, I'm not going to be okay." That's the feeling. Not literally eternal, but the sense that it's way longer than what you will be okay with.
One way to work with that as an antidote is to keep asking yourself the question: Can you be okay with this if it never changes? What would you need in order to be okay with that? Not "in case" it never changes, but in a life, in a universe, where it never changes. That's the only way to fully relate to it.
I can't imagine being fully okay with it.
The question is: What would I need in order to accept this, to be okay with this, if it never changes? In that direction, there is an active engagement. "What would be needed?" Not a decision about whether I can or I can't. You can recognize the experience of "I cannot be okay with this." And then: what would be needed for me to be okay with this, under the condition that it never changes, in the universe where it never goes away?
I can't think of an answer to that.
Not a thinking question
I don't think it comes from thinking about it. What I think you touched on, and I'll ask you directly: is that sensation, that feeling, something you're familiar with?
It's a bit familiar since I'm in grief, but it looks very mysterious and deeper than other pains I've known.
The only way out of this is through it, and the only way to go through it is into it. Any sense of hope or energy placed in time, in "when this will be gone," is a pushing away. It is the opposite of going into it and going through it. To meet that feeling in the timeless, where it could be there forever, with no expectation or energy in its resolving, leaving, or changing.
Fear as rationalization
Even contemplating that brings up fear. I feel like it makes me dysfunctional. The fear comes in: are you going to be dysfunctional for your whole life, if you contemplate this being here and never going away?
I understand. Those are thoughts, and the fears are the same. The fear is trying to create rationalizations for you to pull away. That's all it is. It's trying to give you a rational reason to keep doing what you've been doing.
In fact, there is a hypothesis that you would be more functional, and that the dysfunction is the avoiding of this.
But also, the idea of "going through it" implies going somewhere. It brings in the future: go through it in order to emerge from it.
Intimacy, not strategy
When I mentioned going through it, there is the carrot that it can end. But what I'm really pointing to is intimacy: the savoring of it, the tasting of it directly. When there's an expectation that it's going to change and go away, and what you're doing is for that reason, it's a pushing. It's an absence of a direct relationship and intimacy.
It's like trying to taste a lemon, and while you're tasting it, all of your energy is in the intention: "This is going to stop, I'm going to take this out of my mouth, and then it's all going to be okay." All the energy is in that, and not in the actual tasting. So you can't really fully taste it.
And when it appears, it just appears.
Yes. Not like creating a strategy, not starting to do it as a routine. Just, as I said in the meditation, whenever there's a sense of something missing, there it is for it to be tasted. If it gets very intense or takes on a specific quality, like the one you're describing now, then that's where you taste.
At any moment when a deep satisfaction unrelated to circumstances is absent, what's actually there is the presence of a sense of something missing, a sense of something not being okay. I think that's very related to this feeling.
That pain is created by an illusion. You have to taste it fully to uncover that. The secret is inside the thing itself, like a secret message inside a bittersweet chocolate. Though I suppose it looks more like a pool of lava. Very hot chocolate.