When Fear Leaves Pain
Cuando el miedo abandona el dolor
A student observes that deeper contact with what is seems to produce better choices. The teacher explores how rejection, fear, and identification narrow the field of possibility, and how seeing through fear transforms the experience of pain itself.
When Fear Leaves Pain
A student observes that deeper contact with what is seems to produce better choices. The teacher explores how rejection, fear, and identification narrow the field of possibility, and how seeing through fear transforms the experience of pain itself.
It interests me that there seems to be an alignment of some kind. The deeper you can be in contact with what is, with everything that appears, with every difficult thing, with every difficult pain, the choice that happens mysteriously seems to be better. It's mysterious. It's like a choice that happens, but I don't have much more clarity on that in words.
The thing is, to the degree that you are in rejection of what is, you can be in rejection of the whole thing, or you can be in rejection of something subtle. There is a gradient of how deeply you are rejecting what is, and in a sense that reflects a level of integrated wakefulness. The more deeply you are rejecting everything, the more illusion there is.
Another way to look at it: the more you are rejecting, the more you are identified with beliefs, with thoughts. Only through thoughts, and by believing them, can you reject what is. You need to have a concept about something and then a belief that it should not be how it is.
Identification narrows the field of choice
The more you are caught in those beliefs, which is identification, the more the choosing is conditioned. The movement and the choosing that the universe can do through you will be conditioned. The options will be narrow, because you will be more or less trapped in a system of avoiding and manipulating what is.
Now, the more you are able to be with whatever is, and the more you are able to be open to any kind of discomfort or pain that might arise from whatever choice moves, the potential of movement and possibility is vaster. The universe can act more freely and from a deeper place.
But isn't it also that if you're rejecting something of what is, you're seeing a narrow part of reality? And if you can really see all of reality, you take a decision from a more complete place?
That's right. But what I'm saying is that when you're believing the thoughts, that's a perspective. It's not even a narrow part of reality. Most likely it's not reality at all. It's illusion. And then the options you have are narrow. If you can only go left or right, what if what the universe wants is forward? You don't have that capacity because you are restricted by the belief system: only left or right. And so you will resist anything that is a movement forward.
I find it very interesting because I think I'm starting to see it in my life.
Nice.
A description of the felt sense of this is: the more I'm identified, the more the sense is that I am choosing, it's all up to me, I'm getting it right or wrong, it's stressful, tense, challenging, frictional. On the other side, when choosing just happens, it's mysterious where it's coming from. There's flow, a sense of ease and well-being, even when there are challenges, even when there is pain.
Trust and faith
It's as if trust is starting to grow. Everything can be capitalized. Even the worst pains can be a force of good, or they already are, if you look at it in a certain way. So I guess that also makes your level of trust start increasing.
Completely. And you could take that to a point where you start speaking of faith instead of trust. That brings in a bit of a religious tone, but it is that, in a sense. True faith is not in a belief system. It's in a deep trust of what is, a deep trust of this mystery.
And at that point, even pain can become so deconstructed, because the experience of pain as a bad thing is also a belief system. To the point where there could be pain and there could just be an intense, sweet sensation.
I remember when you talked about how when the component of fear comes out of the pain, the quality changes completely.
When fear left the pain
I realized that many years ago, but it took me many more years for it to become part of my daily reality. I saw pain increasing, and the more it increased the more painful it was, but I realized what was increasing with it was the fear. Then there was a moment where the fear disappeared, and the sensation I had been calling pain didn't change. But because the fear wasn't there, the taste was different. It was as if fear had been a filter, and that filter was what made me call it pain. The instant the fear left, that sensation was tasted as love. The change was so radical that it completely changed my perspective on pain.
For many years I would still experience pain with the fear, but I knew there was something more. I knew a big part of it was the fear. And when fear, at that deep level, was seen as an illusion, I never experienced pain in that old way again.
Was fear seen as an illusion gradually?
No, it happened suddenly. It was a realization. But it took time for it to affect my whole system. The way my thoughts activated, the emotional activation, the body, the mind, all of that slowed down gradually. But the realization itself was a glimpse.
The root of fear
The source of the fear was the end of me. When pain increased, the fear was essentially what I was describing earlier: "I can't handle this. If this doesn't stop, or it goes too long, or it gets too intense, it will be the end of me." The fear ended when I saw that I'm not what I thought I was. What I thought I was could end. But what I actually am has no beginning and no end. And so that kind of fear didn't activate after that, pretty much ever.
The kinds of pain that have come up since, I can talk about them as pain, but they're not felt the way they used to be.
Pain without the drama
I've even had the experience where someone close to me pointed out a change in how I was affected by physical pain. Before, getting cut would activate fear, then a reaction, then self-punishment if it was something I did. There was this whole drama just from cutting myself. Then it shifted so completely that I wasn't even remembering how it had been for me before, but she did.
It was so sudden, almost from one day to the next. I was cooking, trying to cut a big, hard squash. We have a big knife and I was putting all my weight on it. The back of the blade sliced the palm of my hand. Blood was coming out and I just looked at it. She said, "Your hand!" and I just said, "Wow, yeah, I guess I need to wash it." There was absolutely no reaction. Five minutes later she was saying, "What the hell happened there? Normally you would have been freaking out, kicking yourself, upset, having a whole tantrum." But for me it was just this sensation, just curiosity. The direct experience of that cut was, yes, I would call it pain (it's the proper word), but it wasn't like it used to be.
That makes sense. What I intuited is that the suffering part of it is caused by the fear.
It's the fear, exactly. It's the whole rejection of it, the pulling away from it.
I've noticed it with young children. One can fall and hit his head really hard and just go, "Oh," look around with curiosity, and after a minute say, "Oh, that still hurts," but keep going. Another falls, hits his head only a little, and screams for his mother. One activated fear and the other didn't. One activated a sense of "I'm not okay, mommy, can you make me okay, this is scary, something really bad just happened." And the parent can try to help or can make it worse; all sorts of things happen. That's something parents can help us learn, but ultimately it's ours to learn. Initially it's that sense of "you're okay" from the parent. But eventually it becomes something you can shift internally.
You are not the body-mind
No matter what you're feeling or going through, you start to see that that which is "not okay" is not ultimately what you are. What is ultimately not okay is the body-mind. The body is going to go, guaranteed. So there's no other way out than seeing you're not the body-mind.
It's literally like: I believe I am this hand, then I go through amputation, and I'm still here, and I'm okay. That's a true glimpse. That which you thought you were vanishes, and you're still there. It seems so clearly that what you thought you were is not real. But that's not liberation. It's a beginning. It's a liberating glimpse, because it initiates liberation. It's like planting the seed.
Everything that you identify with, all the thoughts you think you are: they can disappear. And then there is another kind of glimpse where, while the body-mind remains, while there is perception, while there is experience, what you thought you were disappears, and yet there is still experiencing.
So we're not in control of that either.
I wouldn't say it that way, because saying that suggests "I'll do nothing," and that's a dogma, a belief system. I would say the illusion that you are can't do anything, but you can.
The same "you" that learns to make better decisions.
Yes. This is where language gets tricky. When there's a teaching tradition (call it Buddhism, Advaita, or whatever), there's a whole framework, a languaging, a set of pointings. But it's all words. And those words, those pointings, can get used in service of belief systems.
Glimpses and liberation
You mentioned glimpses. I've had a few glimpses of no self, and yesterday felt like a deeper one. It was like, "Oh, there's not this 'me' I thought I was." If I understood you correctly, those glimpses are what lead to liberation. And then it sounded like that second type of glimpse you described was the liberating one.
No, that's not quite it. Let me choose my words carefully. What I described as the second type of glimpse can happen at different degrees. The liberation, at least how it was for me (and I say this because it's very mysterious and can be very varied), was like death. Like dying.
I had seen, many times, the glimpsing of what I thought I was disappearing while perception and sensation continued. But it was always accompanied by waves of fear, and there was always some subtle sense of "me" still observing. That's more of a gradient. What happened for me, the one I'm describing as where fear ended, was when it literally felt like the thing I was afraid of the most actually happened, which was death.
There was no longer any sense of me, in some subtle sense, observing. There was experiencing, but what I was, was just everything. Very much all of what was being experienced was vibrating as "I," and there was no location. Hard to put into words.
That reverted very temporarily for a few months and then settled back in a more subtle and more permanent way. But the liberating part was the ending of fear, because what I had been afraid of the most had happened.
The crucifixion as metaphor
I associated it metaphorically with the crucifixion. If I take the life of Christ and the story in the Gospels as a metaphor for a path, I think the liberating glimpse happened in the desert. And then liberation happened on the cross.
That makes sense. I think that's a common experience, this final meeting with death. The sense I've been having is that I'm slowly dying. There are these waves of fear that feel like the death of me, but I don't think I'm getting it complete. I'm getting pieces of it. It's like a gradual dying.
I've heard it is like that for some people, gradual, where the last bit is very subtle. For me the last bit was very extreme. In a sense, something remained, and then there was one final piece that was very subtle.
The last shift
It was only months after that final shift. I just remember waking up one morning and something was completely gone. But I didn't notice something was gone until months later. It was so bizarre, so different, that it took me months of contemplation. I spent hours sitting, just contemplating my experience, trying to understand what had changed. Someone close to me noticed it instantly. She wanted to record me and I kept saying, "Stop recording," and she said, "No, you have to record this. What you're saying is so beautiful." We had this battle for a few days and then she was recording me every day. But for me, I didn't understand what had happened. She noticed something immediately.
That last bit was like from one day to the next. Very subtle. I just woke up one morning and everything was different.
And that last bit you're describing: was it that the observer was gone?
The way I would describe it is that there used to be something that resisted, and that disappeared. Whether the observer went before that, I'm not sure. I had had so many shifts before that I can't tell what happened when. But there was a very deep, very palpable sense of it. I could feel it, I could taste it. That which resisted was simply not there anymore.
I could say it's the sense of an agent, a location, an observer; it's all the same thing. But for me, the way I recognized it was specifically: something was resisting, and it was gone.
Mistaking an absence for a presence
It took me months to realize this. I thought something new had appeared, so I kept trying to find that new thing. Actually, what was new was that something had gone. It took me literally months to understand that the change was a disappearance, not an arrival. I spent hours every morning, from about five until eight, sitting on the couch with a cat on my lap, just looking, curious. Not asking a question, just "what is this?"
That sounds exactly like what I experienced yesterday. And then, of course, I would want that back as a permanent state.
The difference is that what you're describing from yesterday had happened to me many times. There was a knowing of an experience of something coming and going. When the later shift happened (I call it the last shift, though who knows if there's anything else coming), it was completely different. What became very obvious is that this was always like this. Nothing came and went. It can't come and go, no matter what's happening. Whereas before, I would taste it, know it, and it would come and go.
I do love your pointer to check what's still here, because it is still here. It's just that there's another layer on top of it.
Keep looking. Follow your curiosity and your intuition. Who knows, that might shift any moment. But don't wait for it. Just look at what is now.
Fear dissolving into love
When you were describing fear and meeting the fear and seeing through it, I've had so many of those moments, and I continue to have them. Fear arises and it just dissolves when I look at it, because it's seen to be nothing. It can even explode into love. Sometimes it starts as fear and then becomes this burst of pleasure. So it makes me wonder: if I've seen that so many times, why does it keep arising?
That's normal. It just needs to bubble up to the surface and affect your whole body-mind, your neurons. Changes need to happen even at the neurological level. The body activates fear through literal mechanisms: hormones are released, they're felt in the body, there's a whole biological process. These mechanisms are repetitive and habituated, and they need time to shift.
So the more you just look at what is now, and see what is real and what is not real (just what you've been doing), the body-mind will shift on its own. It's like jumping off a mountain on skis: you fall and get up and fall, and at some point the body is learning how to balance on its own. At first you're doing a lot, but then the balancing becomes a flow, becomes natural. The body learns. With this, it's the same. I can recognize, especially in hindsight, how things that used to activate don't activate anymore, or not as easily.
The neurological system needs to change. Neurons need to reconnect in different ways so that fear doesn't activate habitually and unnecessarily, and the system realigns with: "Well, there's nothing to be afraid of right now. You're not dying. So no need to dump all those hormones into your body."
It does feel like a gradual relearning and rewiring. But it can feel like every single fear that arises is the fear of death. It always feels like "this is going to kill me." So it boggles my mind that there's another fear of death waiting.
Layers of identification
That's because the identification is deep and progressively more subtle. The first glimpses of no self, where we see that what we thought we were is not real, can show us a big chunk of it. But then there are more subtle ways in which we identify. At that level, it's a deeper, gradual seeing until we hit the root. It's been described as the "I thought," the root of "I."
For me, how that happened was very shocking. It was like, "Oh, the whole thing, the whole thing I thought I was, all of it, is not real." I'm talking about twenty years of seeing what I thought I was is not real, very deeply. The first time was, "Wow, I was gone, and I was seeing, and everything was beautiful." But there was still fear, still a subtler subject observing, something very subtle still there. The more obvious layers, the thoughts of "me and my life" and all that, had vanished. But there was still a subtle observer. And then even that was seen as neither real nor what I am.
For me, there was a process of a lot of shame for having been so thoroughly deceived in believing that's what I was.
That's what I felt yesterday. Shame and embarrassment. And then a sadness at having to go back and pick it all up again.
Well, you don't have to. You could say you're doing that over again, but just stay open to the possibility that it's not necessary. You can look at it: "Why is there still a going back to the sense that this is needed?" You can own it, rather than saying "this is just happening and nobody's doing it." If you own it, that you're going back to that, then you can look at it more directly. What's the catch here? What am I biting on? What is so sticky? And just keep looking.
Yeah, it's a lot of subtle beliefs. The selfing of who I think I need to be, to manage and control and be in charge.
"I need it because of this and that." All of those beliefs come from that more subtle sense of self.
Exploring the subject-object dynamic
Did you ever explore the subject-object dynamic? For example, in the sensory field, in the visual field, seeing who's looking at the object?
I started exploring that quite early on, intuitively, without really knowing it was a thing. Then I started hearing these teachings and learning these techniques and thought, "Oh, that's what I've been doing." Quite a lot, actually.
There's much we can explore there. I don't have time today, but here's what I'd say: you seem aware of many practices. Look at the sense of a subject and assume there is one, and that it's very subtle. It's easy to say, "Well, no, I've seen there's no one here." But right now, do you have a sense that you are located? That you are observing something that's observed?
If that seems real in this moment, look for the location. Look for what is being referenced as the subject. And don't quickly say, "I've seen there's no subject, so there's nothing here." There is something you're referring to. Keep looking, more subtly.
If there is a sense of a subject and an object, it's because you're referring to something as a subject.
Yeah, there's definitely a felt sense of a subject behind my eyes, looking out.
So just pay really subtle, soft attention to it. Not a strained focus, just a really gentle attention. What is that which is being referenced? Is it a sensation? Is it a thought? Is it both? Does it move? Does it change?
Then go back to that which seems to be the object. Where is that? How is it referenced as a thing "over there"? And back to the sense of the subject: what is it? Is it a sensation? Is it a thought? What is it? Just sit with that and explore.
I've been doing that, and there's always this wave of panic, and then also the expansion into everything.
Hunt for the panic, not the expansion
Hunt for the waves of panic instead of the expansion. When you hit the waves of panic, that's when you're actually seeing something. So hunt for that. What is it that brings the wave of panic? You're seeing something real in that moment.
So just focus on where it's coming from, the sensation of panic?
What I mean is: hunt for the places that trigger the waves of panic, instead of getting attached to the expansion and wanting to reach the expansion. That's where the seeing is happening. The expansion is just a side effect, an after-effect. The actual seeing is what creates the wave of panic.
It just feels like a thought that's wanting to hold on.
That's what it is, cognitively speaking. But the exploration is about your direct experience, not in the sense of finding something you could then come back and describe or write down ("Oh, it's a thought of this and that").
Think of it like cleaning a window. There are parts where it's clear, and that's the expansion. Then there are waves of panic, and that's where it's dirty. I'm saying: look for the parts where there's panic. That's where it's dirty. You clear that. But what I'm asking is not for you to catalog the content. It's not important to identify the particular narrative or mechanism. It's all going to be a bunch of thoughts, a bunch of beliefs about this and that. It's all repetitive. It's what all humans go through: attachment, fears, identification. The actual storyline doesn't matter as much as seeing through it, seeing through it, seeing through it.
My point about the panic is that it signals where the beliefs are, where the attachments are. As opposed to looking for the expansion: if you look for the expansion, you'll be moving away from the parts that have not been seen.
That makes a lot of sense. I just don't know where to go. I know where the sensation is, and I sort of know where the thought is, but I don't know how to do what you're describing. I don't know what I'm finding.
You said there are waves of panic. So when that happens, notice what you're seeing. And you asked about the subject-object dynamic. I'm saying: look at the sense of the subject. Where is the location? What is it that you're referring to in the sense of subjectivity? Is it a thought? Is it a sensation? That's all. Just keep exploring.
Yeah, I'll keep exploring. Thank you so much.
Thank you. Have a lovely day.