The Agent Is the Whirlpool
El Agente Es el Remolino
A student describes noticing, during meditation, a sense of a controlling agent behind experience, and asks whether that agent can be seen as mind and dissolved.
The Agent Is the Whirlpool
A student describes noticing, during meditation, a sense of a controlling agent behind experience, and asks whether that agent can be seen as mind and dissolved.
The way you guided the meditation, this sense of everything, watching it as the universe, everything that goes inside the body-mind appearing in the same space as the birds: I found that very powerful. It did something. I started to notice this other appearance that I wasn't so conscious of before. It's like the entity that thinks it's in control, or that it owns 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 dissolve, maybe?
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 here: to stop believing in something, and then it dissolves as "the real." Mind becomes what it is, which is thought.
The thought of an agent
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 it 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 over time.
That resonates. More than an agent, it's a belief in control, actually.
But who has that control? Is it that the "I" is the agent? I'm asking you: is that how it appears for you?
Yes.
But everything that has an agent-like nature, you can see as having no such origin, no such center or entity-like nature.
The whirlpool image
There's an image I like. Think of a river where there are some rocks and certain conditions, and then a whirlpool forms. You look at the whirlpool and you think, "Oh, there's a thing there, that's the whirlpool." It appears as though it has this force and independent nature. But it's just the 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, in the sense of the creation of the universe. But it is not separate from the whole.