Beliefs, Imagination, and the Body
Creencias, imaginación y el cuerpo
A question about how much of bodily sensation is actual feeling versus imagination, and how beliefs create emotions that feel more real than they are.
Beliefs, Imagination, and the Body
A question about how much of bodily sensation is actual feeling versus imagination, and how beliefs create emotions that feel more real than they are.
I can relate to some of what was shared earlier. During the meditation, it was a really interesting exercise when you spoke of distance: my face, my feet, my hands. I felt like so much of it was my imagination and my mapping rather than the actual sensation, although that is also mixed up in it. As I was looking at something ceramic in the distance, I was imagining how that surface would feel on my face. Then I saw a stuffed animal and imagined how that would feel in my hands. And then I thought, "Well, am I also imagining how my feet are feeling right now? And my hands?" I'm not sure how much of it is imagination and how much is what I'm actually feeling right now.
If you're imagining what it would feel like to have a ceramic on your face, it's not on your face. It's imagination. And if you pay attention to a sensation in your feet and you're actually attending to the sensation, then it's a sensation and not imagination.
But I also wonder how much of what I feel in my feet I attribute to imagination. It's like I'm thinking about my feet rather than feeling them.
Sensation versus the mind's overlay
Exactly. That's what I mean. If you actually put your attention on the sensation, I cannot tell you how much you can learn to distinguish and discern. What happens is there will be imagination mixed in, having to do with feet, their shape, and so on. Over time, with practice, you can learn to discern what is actually thought, what is actually imagination, and what is actually sensation.
The actual sensation is going to be quite simple. It's going to be quite formless. It will not have the shape of feet. It will have a simple set of textures: tingling, warmth, or cold. It will be very cloudy in general, and moving, without much shape. Then the mind will wrap around it like a glove and make it feel foot-like, or leg-like, or hand-like, and constrain it within the boundaries of the skin. But the sensation itself does not follow the boundaries of skin.
Right. And when the topic of shame, fear, and pain came up earlier, I also wondered how much of that is imagination. When I experience those emotions, how much is imagination and how much is actually reality? The emotion versus the senses.
Reification: making thoughts feel solid
That's where it gets tricky. We would need to work a little bit on the semantics. What do you mean by reality versus imagination? If reality is only sensation, then some emotions will create sensations. Deep feeling will create sensations. But not all of the feeling is the sensation. A lot of it would fall within the category of mind or thought. Yet all of it you can say is reality, depending on what we define as reality.
What can happen is that a lot is going on that is imagination or of the mind, and then we do something called reification, where we turn it into a thing. It appears to be more solid, more real, more matter-like, more body-like than it actually is. That's what you're curious about. You're beginning to discover that much of what you think is real, happening, and a big deal (because it feels almost as real as your hands and your feet) is imagination. And I would say to that: yes, correct. That's true. About ninety-nine percent of it.
It's like I feel some sensation and then I have these thoughts, and I'm just imagining what those sensations are and interpreting them. It's a loop.
The loop of belief, emotion, and sensation
Yes. You can have a habit of having a fearful thought or a stressful thought. That can trigger a sensation in the system. Now that thought is going to feel more real because it's in the body; it has a correlation to the body. But you didn't realize that the reaction in the body was a consequence of the belief, rather than being the reality and the root of it. That's how we make emotions more real than they are.
It begins with an imagination that I then believe to be real and true. To whatever degree I believe it, it will create an emotion, which can then trigger sensations. Now it's a full body, full mind experience: belief, emotion, sensation, even the heart racing, all because of a fantasy that's been believed. Now it's the reality of the world, projected outward as the possibility of that thing happening, of that fear.
You can take this to really extreme places where it becomes very obvious. Think of someone experiencing paranoia. Their experience is real to them: someone is about to walk through that door with a gun, and they are gripped by heart palpitations. To that person, it is the reality of the situation they're in. But if that were an actual case, you could know that it all begins in the imagination. It all begins from a belief. There's a full body reaction and a full projection onto reality.
That extreme example is not so different from a mild one. The mild version is most of humanity's constant experience: unexamined belief systems, projections, emotional reactions, and sensations based on false beliefs. The difference between paranoia and ordinary neurosis is just one of degree. Neurosis is the more normal state of living within an illusion.
What is key in what you're saying is that, through the curiosity of looking, you're discovering that something appears to be happening somewhere in the body, which makes it seem more real, as if there's some sensation or manifestation that's concretely in the body. But it's actually a reaction to the belief, to the imagination. When all of those beliefs are dropped, or simply not believed, the body is a very calm place. It's a very peaceful experience. Once in a while there can be little eruptions of something, but they only remain if we keep entertaining the belief.
So when I notice that, I would say to myself, "Oh, that's just my belief manifesting," or, "That's just my imagination being active."
The problem is the belief, not imagination itself
The important thing is the belief, because I can imagine somebody coming through that door with a machine gun and I'm not going to feel scared, because I'm not believing that to be real or true. So the problem is the belief.
The way you can investigate belief is this: when something feels off and you feel like you're suffering or struggling, when there's some form of uneasiness or worry that's chronic and lingering, there's going to be an underlying set of beliefs. Those can be looked at. Ultimately, there's only the one belief that rules them all, which is the belief in separation. That's how we approach the root of it. But it is very helpful to look at beliefs in general. You can look at the things that are recurrently disturbing to your peace of mind or well-being: the worries, the things that will go wrong, that shouldn't, that are likely going to go wrong. Those are beliefs. And what happens is they tend to be self-fulfilling, which makes them harder to question.
Self-fulfilling beliefs
Consider this example. If I'm worried that whenever I go up the stairs I'm going to trip and hurt myself, I'm going to walk up those stairs focused on tripping or not tripping. I'm going to walk up nervously, in a clumsy way, because I'm involved in a lot of thought around coordination. That's more likely going to make me trip. But if I'm walking up the stairs relaxed, letting my body do its natural thing (which is knowing how to go upstairs), I'm far less likely to trip.
The same is true with skiing. It's very well known: if you're in a state of flow in a high-performance sport, you will perform well. If you're concerned about doing the wrong thing, you get into a state of mental obstruction and contraction, and then things won't go well. In this sense, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. If I believe that the thing next week is probably not going to go well, my whole energy and mental process is going to revolve around the stress and around trying to avoid the thing I already believe is going to happen. That's going to obstruct the process of it going well.
Now, the opposite is not the answer either. I'm not talking about positive thinking, the belief that everything is going to go well. It's more about not knowing.
Not knowing: the tightrope
Think of walking on a tightrope. If I'm convinced I'm not going to fall, I'm not going to pay attention, and I'm going to fall, because I assume no matter what I do I'll be fine. That doesn't work; that's positive thinking. But if I'm convinced I'm going to fall, I'm going to be nervous, and I'm going to fall. Those are the two opposite belief systems, and neither works.
However, if I am attentive, if there's an openness and a presence needed and a coordination needed, and I'm not in either belief (that I'm likely going to fall, or that I'm most likely not going to fall), if I'm in a state of attention and presence and openness and not knowing, then something happens where the body-mind starts to function in its most efficient way. The balance becomes natural. It's like learning to ride a bicycle: once you learn, your body does the balancing without you thinking.
So my beliefs narrow my focus into something that may not be real.
Yes, and it puts you in a state of thinking about something elsewhere.
It's a direction that leads towards less possibility.
Limited possibility and non-presence.
Now I understand a little bit more about what you mean when you say "not knowing" and "expansive."
Children and the recovery of openness
There is a process of the body-mind where it learns. We've been doing that all our lives. That's why children are really good and fast at learning: they don't have so many beliefs, or very few.
Right, because if you tell them not to do something, they're going to go do that rather than consider all the other possibilities they could have explored.
They're just in a state of more openness and trust, and then the body-mind is really fast at learning.
That capacity can be recovered. It was believed that something happens in the brain, that thought patterns become fixed. But it's not true. Not only has it been proven recently that those were assumptions made mistakenly in the past (the idea of the brain becoming fixed), but it has also been disproven. And from personal experience, I've discovered the same. When the biggest shift happened for me, I saw myself learn things that I thought were impossible for me. For example, with piano, I had started too late in life. I learned, then I plateaued. I reached a ceiling of how well I could play, and that plateau lasted for about thirty years. Then that shift happened, and my learning just took off. I'm learning as if I were ten years old: constant learning, as if something completely freed up. I'm not doing it. My body and my mind are just learning on their own. It happened when that shift occurred.
So my beliefs really make my world small.
Yes. Any belief limits reality to the constraint of the belief. Anything that is a belief is a system that imposes a limitation, even if positive, and carries assumptions. For example, if I win a million dollars, that's a good thing and that's going to change my life. And yet so many people who win the lottery find their lives become a mess. That's very well known. They lose their friends, they lose their family, they lose the money.