Owning What You Saw
Hacer Tuyo lo que Viste
A student shares a long-standing pattern of self-doubt and dissociative fear, wondering how to relate to fleeting glimpses of clarity when ordinary life feels overwhelming. The teacher encourages a practice of "correct remembering," urging the student to take in the nutrients of each glimpse rather than discarding them.
Owning What You Saw
A student shares a long-standing pattern of self-doubt and dissociative fear, wondering how to relate to fleeting glimpses of clarity when ordinary life feels overwhelming. The teacher encourages a practice of "correct remembering," urging the student to take in the nutrients of each glimpse rather than discarding them.
My narrative usually takes a certain shape: "I've been doing this for so long, and I'm still trapped." So, what's wrong? I get a lot of glimpses, but my feeling is that I still live my life in varying levels of dissociative terror, especially given the state of the external world. I'm overwhelmed, and a lot of it involves some form of ADHD and everything else. It's kind of a miracle to me that I even got this far. But this last discussion made me realize that I've always assumed the only way to deal with these glimpses is to wait for the next one and not really have a plan to do anything. I don't see how, from that state of living in my mind, subject to the illusion of a scary place, I can have any relationship with the glimpse. The part of me that would try to manage the glimpse would just be acting from all that fear. So I've resigned myself to hoping that the more I cross the threshold, the better it will get. I appreciate the idea that there's something more to it, though I didn't quite grasp what you were saying, other than: strengthen the part of you that knows it's true, do your best to remember what you know to be true. I think I'm actually making progress; I just don't feel it.
The key is hindsight
Character is not that significant or important here. The key has to do with hindsight: look back at what you call glimpses and really try to see what you understood. It needs to be something you know because you saw it to be real. It's a knowing that comes from you and nowhere else, and it's a knowing that is not conceptual.
You've probably heard Francis speak a lot about nirvikalpa samadhi. He translates nirvikalpa as "having no phenomena." Vikalpa means forms. That's one type of glimpse. But vikalpa can also be translated as "concept." And that glimpse is actually a form of knowing.
Two kinds of knowing
There are absolutely two kinds of knowing, completely separate. One is conceptual, mental knowing. The other is what another teacher describes as "intraceptualism," defined as the knowing that comes from the knowing of self. That knowing comes from realizing what I am not, seeing that what I thought I was is illusion. And that throws you into some proximity of self. That is a glimpse.
What is seen is, in a sense, two things. First: I thought that was real, and it's not. I thought that was something, and it's not what it appeared to be. But there's also an aspect of non-conceptually knowing what is more real. If I describe it, it becomes conceptual knowing.
Right.
Picking up the gold and dropping it
Trying to have more glimpses is like walking down a path, seeing gold, picking it up, dropping it, and looking for the next piece. A better metaphor is the medicinal plant. You find this medicine, but it's not enough, so you walk on looking for the next one, and the next. You keep walking, but you're not absorbing the nutrients. The nutrients would come from really seeing what it is that you saw. It is your own understanding, your own seeing. It's not coming from any teaching. You saw it for yourself, to whatever degree.
It's almost like sitting and giving yourself permission to know that, to really let yourself take it in. There is an aspect where we carry such an amount of negative thinking about ourselves that it's hard to even feel like we deserve to take this understanding.
Right, because it's almost as if this default state of mind isn't worthy or something. All it can do is appropriate the glimpse and not really live it. So what's the point? Why try to blend the two?
Worthiness has nothing to do with it
It is exactly this sense of unworthiness. And it happens because it has nothing to do with merit or worthiness. It is given to you by you, you could say. It is given for no reason. You have done nothing to deserve it, because it is actually yourself. But to the mind and its identification, there is going to be this sense of: I haven't deserved this. I haven't earned this. Why me?
It's true, because the mind doesn't deserve it or not deserve it.
What I'm inviting is for you to throw all of that out and even take an opposing stance: I saw this. I'm going to take in the nutrients of the reality that I saw. I'm going to be what I am, to the degree that I saw. I'm going to not be what I am not, to the degree that I saw. And you are worthy of the freedom and the peace that can come from that.
I think a lot of what you're describing, or at least the problematic part, is partly a frustration and anger at myself about not being in total peace all the time, in fact being far from it. So it becomes more of a psychological hang-up.
That's part of the going back. It's basically the addiction to negative self-talk coming in through the back door. But the more you really commit to, in a sense, owning what you saw, that becomes your antidote.
Correct remembering
You can bring it to all of the moments that you can in life, any moment where you're pausing, where you have a few seconds to enter a deeper contemplation. You can remember: what did I see? What does the memory of that glimpse tell me? I saw this. This is real. So how do I relate to this moment from this knowing of what is real?
That then becomes your go-to form of relating to reality. But it does require what my teacher called correcto recuerdo, which translates to "correct remembering." We see something, we have a realization, and then we forget it. We throw it out. We battle with it. We don't think we're worth it. There are a million ways in which it gets discarded. For example: "That's just a mind glitch," or "I'm crazy." Especially when powerful experiences happen, people who are not on a spiritual path can interpret them as some very weird mental event and run from it as fast as they can. There's a sense of, "I'm going crazy."
But what the wisdom of that glimpse invites is for you to really take the seeing and own it. Own it as in: this is how I see reality. This is my deepest understanding of myself and reality, and I'm not going to throw it out. I'm not going to wait for another experience to show me the same thing again, or something deeper. Because the glimpses will become deeper as you deepen in your integration and incorporation of that form of seeing, which is really seeing with less and less illusion. It's not seeing in a particular way. It's having fewer and fewer false beliefs about yourself and other.
Do you think mantras help?
A mantra born from a glimpse
Yes. I had a glimpse in a retreat many years ago, about twenty years ago, and it gave me a mantra. It's the silliest thing, and I always thought it was so silly, but I repeated it for many, many years. I found it very useful, especially when I was in a stormy place.
So your own seeing gave this to you?
Literally. It's what we're talking about. I spent two days in a retreat, and even my teacher made a comment (I wasn't supposed to hear it) along the lines of, "I think we have a teacher in the room." They were talking about me. There was a day where something really shifted, and that was also a form of confirmation. What I saw was: you think you are your mind, and you're not your mind. So that became my mantra. "You think you're your mind, but you're not your mind." And whenever I ended up in a storm, I would just look at that storm and repeat that mantra.
Another teacher of mine said, "You could use the mantra 'Mickey Mouse,' because it's just creating content for the mind." But for me, it was more powerful to have something that was the fruit of a glimpse. I saw this. This is real to me. This is a reality I saw. Just remind me of the time I saw this. So when I can tell that I'm completely forgetting and living as if it wasn't real, I need it as a mantra, because in those moments my mind is in fear and all of that comes up. I would say it and repeat it and repeat it and look at that crazy storm. And it really helped, because I think it was anchoring in a true glimpse and a true understanding of the illusion I was buying into.
Thank you.
You're welcome.