The Interpretation Machine
La máquina de interpretación
A student shares how the teaching on the mind's loyalty and creativity sparked deep self-compassion, leading to a wider conversation about confusion, interpretation, and the courage to meet pain directly.
The Interpretation Machine
A student shares how the teaching on the mind's loyalty and creativity sparked deep self-compassion, leading to a wider conversation about confusion, interpretation, and the courage to meet pain directly.
Thank you so much for that meditation. It was so powerful for me when you said how the mind is loyal and creative. That just hit me so deeply. It gave me a sense of compassion for myself, and I was just so moved by that.
You're very welcome. It's a really big misunderstanding about the mind, even in meditation and spiritual circles. We can fully love our minds. The mind is made into the enemy.
For the longest time, when you speak of the choice, I could never quite see the choice. Not that it's completely clear to me now, but I feel like it's a little more clear. My mind has been such a servant, helping me to avoid and escape from the pain.
A very useful crutch when we cannot put our full weight down. Too much pain, too much fear. And then at some point, we can see that we can choose, and we're ready.
The toggling is in the mind
You speak of how it's all there. Sometimes I get confused. I think I'm probably confused all the time. When you say that the fear and pain and the peace are all there, it kind of toggles.
The toggling is in the mind. In reality, there isn't that toggle. That's the interpretation, which warps perception and warps what we experience. It literally changes what we experience as reality. So when the interpretation changes, it can feel like things are toggling or flipping, but what's really there doesn't.
Yes, that toggling feels very confusing.
It really is confusion at one level. But it's a positive confusion. To see that there's confusion, to see that there's something other than the certainty of what you think is there, is a positive thing.
The rope and the snake
Think of a metaphor from Ramana Maharshi about the rope and the snake. Someone is walking in the woods in India, a common experience. It's a little dark, a little bit into the evening, and there's a rope on the path. But to the person whose mind interprets the shape as a snake, it is a snake. They do not see a rope.
There's a shape that is known as a snake, interpreted as snake. The experience is "shape, which is snake," the same way we hear "sound, which is bird" or "sound, which is car." It is not experienced as "shape, which is really rope, but my mind interprets it as snake, so I think it's a snake." No. It is shape-snake. The reality of what is actually there is not seen. It's also not seen as an interpretation. It is simply known as snake.
The mind then has the reaction to snake. The body has the reaction to snake: fear, jumping back, nervousness. It activates parts of the brain that are very quick to react. But my point is that what appears, what is known as reality in that moment, is snake. There isn't a layer where there is known to be an interpretation that is snake and maybe it's not snake.
Then there can be such a layer, and this is where confusion comes in. If this person hypothetically thinks, "Hmm, I'm not so sure," and looks a little closer, there's a moment where the question arises: is it snake or not? That's confusion. The mind is trying to map it. Then, through a process of inspection, it can be recognized: "Oh, it's actually a rope." Fear is gone in that instant. So the confusion is a good thing.
Seeing the interpretation machine
When you say, "I'm confused in this moment," and then recognize, "Actually, I'm probably confused most of the time," that's when you start to distance yourself from the immediate interpretation of the mind and start to look at it as an interpretation machine. Which is all it is. It's interpretation, all interpretation. Therefore all of it could be wrong. All of it is limited. Things could be way beyond what any interpretation could map. That's where we start to see, more and more, that the mind is just an interpretation machine. Everything it produces is an approximation. It cannot ever map reality fully. It's only an interpretation.
The more that is seen, the more confusion there will be. There's a process, because you're no longer energizing the one-sided interpretations. The mind is going to start to readjust. If it happens too quickly, it can feel like a bit of a breakdown or a meltdown. But it can also be very positive when it happens more slowly, as a relearning of how to be without always looking at mind as truth and reality.
In fact, we don't look at reality. We look at the mind's interpretation and take it as real. Then we start to see: "Oh, I'm looking at everything through a filter. Let me put the filter aside. I have a direct relationship with reality." We can still check what the interpretation is presenting as a way of relating to reality, but we're no longer looking at reality through the filter of mind.
A gradual process
This is a process, though it can ultimately happen quite suddenly. First it's a process of seeing: "What I think is reality is thoughts." Then, the more that is seen, you can start to recognize: "There's that which is actually reality, and it's not thoughts." You can start to direct your attention directly at that and relate to it directly. Then the interpretation machine becomes something optional, something you consult or glance at. And it starts to get better and better, because it's no longer trying to do the impossible, which is to define reality one hundred percent, control it all the time, and do it so convincingly that we don't even notice it's not reality.
Right. It's so convincing.
It's so convincing. But at the same time, it's so convincing because we're wanting it to be. It's doing its job. It's a servant. That's why it's convincing: because you're asking it to be convincing. But it's so draining. It takes up so much energy for it to be that convincing, and whose energy is it using? Yours.
A mind that is not being asked to convince us it can know and control reality all the time is a mind that is at peace, because it's not being asked to do the impossible. It's also taking a lot less energy. It's like saying, "Just give me some interpretations where they're useful and valuable. I'll deal with reality myself, directly." And the mind is like, "Thank God. It's been forty-five years."
Confusion as a good sign
I'm singling out the confusion because it's a good sign when you start to experience it and recognize it. It means we're starting to switch away from using the mind in a very effortful way: always maintaining certainty about what everything is, how to do everything, where things are going, how to make them happen. Knowing the unknowable, controlling the uncontrollable, understanding the incomprehensible, making the limited into the limitless. The mind will try to do all of that if you ask it to. It's just going to take a lot of energy, and it's never going to be that convincing. Which is why everything feels very unsettling, because our constructed reality is always on the verge of falling apart. It's an illusion. It's a house of cards.
I can see how I always want to buy into the story.
And you're asking the mind to make the story more viable. So it goes both ways. As soon as you start to see through it, we despair, and then ask for a more convincing narrative, a more convincing illusion. And there are all of these tricks, because the mind can also create very intense emotions which then feel very real, which then validate the beliefs through very loopy rationale and thinking.
Meeting pain directly
The only cost of leaving this, or undoing this, is that we need to deal with fear and pain directly. All of that drama with the mind is just in service of avoiding meeting fear and pain directly. I'm saying it as if it's a simple thing. I know it's not. Fear and pain are very intense.
Yeah. It's hard for me to see it happening when it's happening. But then when I'm in the thick of it, it's like, "I'm choosing this, aren't I?"
And then the option is to just rip the bandaid off instead of stretching something out to the end of time. What happens is, once we really touch and taste and dive into whatever true, real pain is present, whatever true, real fears are present (which are often just energy carried from the past, present in the body and the mind), when we truly allow ourselves to touch that and taste it fully and directly, it's quite short, the amount of time it takes before it becomes a relief. It lightens up.
We've been avoiding it for decades, and then it's just two hours of feeling deeply. Maybe the next day, another forty-five minutes. The day after, maybe it's two months of thirty minutes a day on average. Compare that to thirty years of avoiding, thirty years of creating around-the-clock struggle, contraction, distress, and worry.
So I'm presenting both sides. Yes, I get it: it can be very intense and difficult. But at the same time, rip the bandaid off. It's a lot easier. It's a lot better. Trust that your body and your mind can naturally process those very deep energies of deep feeling. It feels like we can't, because it feels like it felt when the pain and the fear first happened. We were very young, and to a young mind, it felt overwhelming. The memory of that is still wrapped in that packaging. The wrapping says, "What is in here is completely unbearable and it will destroy you." But that's the packaging of the three-year-old mind. You see it now and think, "Oh my God, put it away." But if you really look at it, it wasn't that bad. It burns a bit at first.
Thank you.
You're welcome.