The Agent Is a Whirlpool
El agente es un remolino
A student describes noticing a sense of a controlling agent within experience during meditation, and the teacher explores whether such an agent actually exists or is simply thought.
The Agent Is a Whirlpool
A student describes noticing a sense of a controlling agent within experience during meditation, and the teacher explores whether such an agent actually exists or is simply thought.
The way you guided the meditation, this quality of watching everything as the universe, where everything that goes on inside the body and mind appears in the same space as the birds. I found that very powerful. It did something. I started to notice another appearance I wasn't so conscious of before: the entity that thinks it's in control, or the owner of all these body-mind movements, especially the pain or the hard ones. I'm not sure what the question is exactly, but can that controller be seen in its entirety as mind? And does it then dissolve?
It depends on what we mean by dissolving, because every appearance dissolves in a sense. It changes; it comes and it goes. Everything dissolves already, without anything being done.
What can dissolve is the illusion. "Dissolve" is just a word for ceasing to believe in something. Then it dissolves as "the real," and mind becomes what it is, which is thought.
The agent is made of thought
You said something like "the agent that believes it can control." But that's assuming there is such an agent. There's the thought of an agent. There's a thought that the agent has a belief, that the agent can control. All of that is thought. If you look for such an agent, you won't find it. But you should look. And this is something that can become more and more subtle. I know you already do look, but it becomes more subtle.
It resonates. More than an agent, it's a belief in control, or actually...
But who has that control? Is the "I" the agent? Is that how it appears for you?
Seeing it as a separate entity
The trick is to see this clearly. You start talking about it as a separate entity, which in a sense is closer to what it actually is: just a thought. But then there's the belief that "I" is that agent.
Yes.
Everything that has an agent-like nature, you can see as having no such origin, no such center, no entity-like nature.
The whirlpool
There's an image I like. Think of a river where some rocks and certain conditions create a whirlpool. You look at the whirlpool and think, "There's a thing there, the whirlpool." It appears to have force and independent nature. But it's just water moving in a certain pattern. What you're talking about as the agent is the whirlpool. It doesn't have an origin of its own that is separate from what surrounds it. In a sense it is mechanical, in the most beautiful sense of the creation of the universe. But it is not separate from everything else.
I don't have much more to add. I'm a bit confused. I understand what you're saying, but...
Keep looking
Just keep looking at what appears to be some kind of center, agent, controller, decider, and notice that what it is made of is thoughts. And then there is something noticing the thoughts, recognizing them as thoughts. That something, just to use a word, is closer to the sense of "I." So it is more accurate to say: I see the thoughts that appear to be an agent.