The Crack in the Belief
La grieta en la creencia
A student describes how the word "trust" from the meditation evoked a feeling of being born again, and another student explores how questioning the sense of "wrongness" in difficult experience can open a doorway to something new.
The Crack in the Belief
A student describes how the word "trust" from the meditation evoked a feeling of being born again, and another student explores how questioning the sense of "wrongness" in difficult experience can open a doorway to something new.
The word "trusting" that came up in the meditation really resonated with me. I was thinking about how this phrase keeps coming up: "born again." Trusting in that way is like an opening. It feels so childlike, open, vulnerable, and innocent. It's interesting to contrast that with the moments when we choose to be "the adult" again, when we choose to know: "This is the future, this was my past." I feel like I understand why I've done that, why I've chosen that, because it felt safer, because it gave me something. But more and more, there is a growing trust. I can relate to what others have shared, because it can bring up a lot and it's scary. And yet, shining through those veils as they dissolve, there is this sense of being born again. It's beautiful.
Yes, it's beautiful.
When you were speaking earlier, it was funny because it matched what I was feeling throughout the whole meditation. At one point you said, "There's something wrong," and I recognized that: the sense that there's something wrong. I was doing what you suggested, trying to focus on the core sensation, and you said, "Trust that it's a doorway." But somehow that pointer wasn't quite enough for me. Because you were also talking about beauty, and I thought, well, maybe this is trust. I asked myself: what if it's possible that I see no beauty here, but what if there is beauty? What if I haven't seen it clearly? And that started to open something. At least I began seeing it differently, tasting it in a different way.
The "what if" as a crack in belief
That's exactly what I'm talking about. I often say, "What if?" The benefit of the doubt matters, because that sense of it being not okay, really deeply wrong, is a belief. But it's not recognized as a belief when it's happening. It feels like an experience. The belief projects an interpretation of wrongness onto the experience. That projection is the veil: the veil that says "what is happening is wrong." And so everything I see is tainted with that sense of wrongness.
When I say "trust that it's a doorway," I often put it as: "What if it's not wrong? What if it's okay? What if it's a doorway?" Because when you hold deep beliefs, you can't just fully drop them all at once. You need a very small crack. It's easier to consider a "what if" than to leap all the way to "this is actually a beautiful thing." When for you it's the most horrible thing, that leap is too far, too much. But a crack in the belief, a crack in the experience that stems from that belief, that's what the "what if" opens. What if you're not seeing something?
Trusting your own experience
The trust is always in your experience. You have to trust your experience. For example, when you meet a teacher and the teacher says something that moves you in a certain way, something resonates. Then there could be a possibility of trust in the teacher. But actually, what you're trusting is that something happened in you. You tasted something new or different that felt right or good. That can then become "I trust this teacher, this relationship," but ultimately, you have to trust your own experience.
So I can say to you, "What if that is a doorway?" or "Trust that there's something there you're not seeing." And if you immediately say no, the door is closed. But if you do the experiment, if you do the exploration when it's really intense, if you really focus and sit with it and become still and intimate with that which is absolutely horrible to you, with that big sense of "not okayness," and you ask, "What if I'm not seeing something? What if I touch this more directly, more deeply, and discover there's something of value here?" Some sense of more freedom or love that you had not yet known. Then you could have a tiny glimpse, which is what I think you're describing. Something becomes a little different.
It's a little chip, a little crack. And it's the crack in how you're relating to something. There is actually a separation from that experience, and the crack is where that separation begins to break. The veil, the sense of "not okayness," is actually a separation. It is a pulling away from reality into imagined reality, because you are too terrified. It's too much.
Total intimacy with experience
That's what this whole thing ultimately is. The whole dropping of identification is absolute, total, complete intimacy with experience, which includes all of the difficult experiences: intense, painful, scary.
Yes. What changed is that the experience stopped being so, I don't know, horrible in a sense. The quality changed. But it started with noticing that wrongness, that "something's wrong," and then a curiosity: "But what is this? Wait, is it a thing? Is it a..." And then, "Oh..."
That's exactly it. The curiosity itself brings you into a more intimate relating. And it's actually a part of you. That which you find horrible is ultimately an energetic that is life. "Heart" may not be the right word, but however you would describe it.
Yes. There's essentially something wrong, something like that.
The core belief behind separation
It's the core belief and sensation that drives identification. There has to be somebody who knows what this is in order to declare that it is wrong. Or not at all.
It's the core arrogance that is separation, that is identification: "I know what I am, and what I am knows this is not how it should be. I know better. I know how it should be, and it's not like this."
Judgment from love versus judgment from separation
It sounds like such a radical trust, that you can't judge anything in experience at all. But it's subtle, because there are different kinds of judging. One thing is the sense that this is, at the fundamental level, deeply not right, not okay. That is different from recognizing this as divine creation and still choosing to take a position where you want to change a great deal of it. But changing it from a place where you start with complete love and acceptance for what is, and then ask: how do we make this better?