The River and the Whirlpool
El Río y el Remolino
A student describes the overwhelming nature of sensory experience and how the suggestion that everything is "coming from me" rather than "at me" shifted her meditation. The teacher uses the metaphor of a river and a whirlpool to explore who is actually overwhelmed.
The River and the Whirlpool
A student describes the overwhelming nature of sensory experience and how the suggestion that everything is "coming from me" rather than "at me" shifted her meditation. The teacher uses the metaphor of a river and a whirlpool to explore who is actually overwhelmed.
During the meditation, some things really stuck out for me when you were speaking of the sounds, the visions, and the kaleidoscope, and how it wasn't coming at me but from me. That really shifted my experience. Once I felt it was more coming from me, I could feel myself expand rather than contract. For the first time in my meditation, I actually felt like I was reaching out to all the people in my life. It was so different.
It's such a huge shift. All my life I've been trying to avoid, avoid, avoid. I get so overwhelmed by the noise, by the images, by the conversations, by just watching people. It feels like it's all coming at me. And when you said it was coming from me, it was just like: it was all me.
It feels so overwhelming all the time, just the senses. Maybe that's why I avoid. Can you speak to how I should relate with that?
You should look at what is overwhelmed.
There's no sense to it. I feel like I can't contain all of it. It's so much. I can't.
I understand. I've been there. Everyone can relate to some degree with your words.
The paradigm shift
The key is this: you had a shift with the idea that everything is coming from you. It's pointing to a paradigm. There's a paradigm where everything is coming at me and I'm trying to manage it. That's a false perspective. Now, "everything coming from me" is truer, but then what that "me" is needs to be investigated, needs to be experientially explored.
You said you can't take it all in. The "me" that is a mental construct can't. But what you really are, can.
What if you already contain everything?
We can approach this with a series of "what ifs." What if everything is coming from you? What if what you are is infinite, already containing everything that is appearing? What if you are the source of everything that is appearing right now?
Right now, everything that's appearing is being absolutely, completely, effortlessly welcomed by you. If we had a dialogue where I asked you to debunk that with your experience, you could say, "No, it's not effortless welcome, because I feel this rejection, this pushing away." But that, too, is all being effortlessly welcomed. All of your psychological and emotional struggles are being fully known, experienced, and welcomed by the emptiness of seeing.
The mental construct "I" that's trying to manage and control it is struggling. But that's not what you really are. It's a construction.
The whirlpool in the river
Imagine a river. Life, your experience, what you are: that's the river, and you are both the source and the river. But you want to be something more specific, so you create a little whirlpool. Now you're this little spinning whirlpool in the river, and you can finally call it "I." But anytime there's a rock, a fish, or another current threatening that whirlpool, you're struggling to keep it going. To that whirlpool, everything is overwhelming. It's a huge effort; you're stirring and stirring and stirring.
But you can recognize you're actually the river. If where you are is the river, then the whirlpool can come and go. It can appear when it's useful.
What that metaphor points to is this: the river is everything that is appearing at any moment, the kaleidoscope of experience that is just appearing effortlessly right now. You are doing absolutely nothing for all of it to simply appear.
So is it the sense of "I," the belief of "I," trying to make connections, trying to make logic of all these experiences?