Nothing to Lose
Nada que perder
A student describes losing interest in mental questioning and discovering the simplicity of direct knowing, leading to a conversation about how appearances arise from mystery and return to mystery, and why the sense of a separate self was never truly here.
Nothing to Lose
A student describes losing interest in mental questioning and discovering the simplicity of direct knowing, leading to a conversation about how appearances arise from mystery and return to mystery, and why the sense of a separate self was never truly here.
I found it quite easy to stay out of thoughts and just feel this, taste this moment. It is all there is, isn't it? I'm losing interest in questioning. It just feels like following the mind, and I'm not interested in that.
Just feel it. That's all it takes. Why did it take so long? It's not complicated. It's the simplest thing, and that's why the veil is the mind. The mind has the ability to create the illusion of complexity.
To reflect what I'm hearing: you've heard me speak about knowing, and the word "knowing" normally implies mental understanding, knowing through the mind. But when you say you're losing interest in that and finding the simplicity, tasting what is, that is the form of knowing I point to. It is a different way of approaching reality. Instead of the form of knowing that is a reflection through the mind, it is a form of knowing that is direct, and in a sense prior to the mind.
Once we begin to touch or activate that form of knowing, it becomes more and more available. I say this to encourage it. It is the path toward deeper and deeper freedom, deeper and deeper truth.
Direct knowing vs. interpretation
When you say "direct knowing," can I give an example? I hear the sound of a car and immediately I know a car is coming. Instantly. Is that direct knowing?
You instantly know the sound, and you instantly know the thought-interpretation "car." The key is that instead of getting on a train of thought (car, road, people, future, time), which the symbol "car" implies, instead of activating more mental interpretation, you know the sound, you know the interpretation, and you can also recognize: "More car-related interpretations are not useful or practical right now."
Now, let's say you hear the sound of a car, and the knowing arises: "A car is coming." Then another knowing: "I could be killed." If you are standing in the street, that sequence is functional. The mind says, "It's coming toward me, I need to be attentive, I need to get out of the way." That's the intellectual, mental knowing doing its proper job.
But if you are sitting in your house and you hear a car and then spend twenty minutes thinking about how tomorrow a car might run you over, that is not direct knowing. That is not tasting directly what is here now. That is going into intellectual knowing, trying to avoid death in some future scenario, lost in a train of thought.
To snap out of that train of thought is simply to come back to this, right here, this moment. It is what you described: the taste, the direct knowing of what is here, which includes thoughts. It is not about thoughts stopping. But what happens is that when the tasting of what is here is direct, the mind settles because we are not energizing it, not activating it. It is still functional, but it becomes useful, practical, and calm.
The turning point
As you start to taste the direct knowing, it becomes more and more present: the knowing of peace, freedom, and okayness, including and in spite of thoughts, emotions, and sensations that are difficult or challenging. The more the direct knowing is the center, the activated form of knowing, the more all of the mental activity that creates uncomfortable emotions and sensations will, on average, become less and less activated.
But the key point is this turning point where we stop obsessively, compulsively, addictively going to the mental form of knowing and start to trust, in a sense, the non-knowing. Because direct knowing is a non-knowing in the intellectual sense. With regard to the mind, we do not know. We do not know what things really are. We do not know what we are in the intellectual sense.
I used to think a car is a car is a car. Now I experience sound, see textures, and there is an appearance of the understanding "car," but what is it really? I don't know. I used to believe I am a person in this body and nothing more. Now that belief is not there. What I am, I don't know. There is an appearance of a body, an appearance of thoughts. What I am, I don't truly know.
But the direct knowing, the knowing that is non-intellectual, is knowing "I am." "I am" is a word, two words, an expression. But there is a knowing of peace, of being, of existence, and that what I am cannot begin nor end. That is non-intellectual. It is not a belief.
Everything appearing
I understand that all we are left with is everything appearing. Sound appears, just sound, and there is no someone hearing the sound. The sound just appears. It's like the birds suddenly appearing. There is no creator. It is not created by anyone. It just appears on its own. And that's what is left. The "I" is totally out of concern.
Yes, because the "I" would be the reference point that it is appearing to. What needs to be really clear is that it is appearing from mystery, from something not knowable, and it is appearing to mystery, something not knowable. And those are the same.
That is what you are saying about intellectually not knowing.
Yes. There needs to be a mental interpretation that then becomes a belief, which is intellectual knowing: that what is appearing is appearing to "I," and "I" am not what is appearing. That there is an appearance appearing to an "I" that is separate from what is appearing. That is an intellectual false knowing. It is a belief.
In this experience, it is often like this: sound appears, attention goes there, I become aware of the sound, and then more and more of that leads to a train of thought.
Attention can focus on it, but the sound appearing is known instantly.
Yes. Before I can link the "I" to it, attention has to go there first.
Attention is not a subject
What happens is that attention will naturally go to different things. There will be a change of focus and attention, but that is also an appearance. It is not a subject.
No. I have no control over attention.
You as a separate entity do not have control over attention, because there is no such separate controlling entity. But there is something that moves attention, and that which moves it is not separate from what it attends to. It is not separate from the clouds and the ocean and the birds.
It is life itself.
Exactly. It is the appearance, all of the appearance. You cannot separate the bird landing on a tree. In a sense, you cannot separate the bird from the tree. The bird landing on the tree is one thing. If there were no tree, there would be no bird landing on a tree. If there were no bird, there would be no bird landing on a tree.
When there is the appearance of a sound and attention goes to that sound, the origin of the focus of attention onto the sound is not an entity deciding in the moment. It is a series of never-ending conditions. It is like the flow of a wave. The wave crashing is not an entity and an event happening by a decision from a centralized place. It is crashing because the ocean is, and everything happening in all of the ocean makes that wave crash in that moment, which is also inseparable from the wind, from the bottom of the ocean, from everything that is happening.
But the mind interprets it as though it were responsible. If the mind were identified with the wave and the wave crashes, the mind will say, "I crashed. I chose that." We experience choices, but those choices are like the wave: they appear out of nowhere and they happen. It is true to say "I choose." That can be truthful and accurate. But defining what that "I" is matters. If "I" means "I, a person, a body-mind," that is false. But if I say "I, mystery, reality, choosing," that is, to a great degree, more truthful and correct than "a separate entity that is the one perceiving, choosing, having an end and a beginning." That is a mental construct. In a relative sense it is useful, because it can then be applied: I can interpret the "I" in a useful way when referring to a person who has begun and will end, who has relative responsibilities.
Wisdom arises from disidentification
But all of that becomes much more clear, and by "all of that" I mean the relationship to it and the levels of relativity of that reality, when there is disidentification from it. Wisdom starts to emerge spontaneously, on its own, and it is not personal. It is a mystery. And by definition, I cannot say "I am wise." If I say "I am wise," I am defining wisdom as specific to myself as a person, and by that I am back in the illusion that wisdom comes from a local entity.
It is so simple, but it is so easy to get swept back into the illusion.
Yes, and that is why we talk and talk and talk.
It's so fun. Nothing to lose. It's not here in the first place.
What do you mean, "It's not here"? What is not here?
There is nothing to lose because there is no "I" here, and there never was. It only exists in the dreaming "I," and I keep getting swept into that belief. That's all it is: believing. In this moment there is no reference to thought, no story. Thought is not everything; it is one of many things happening. I feel very patient.
What you are saying is beautiful, and I am very happy to hear it.