Interpretation and What Lies Beneath It
La interpretación y lo que yace debajo de ella
A student worries that interpretation gets in the way of truly understanding the teaching, and reflects on the difficulty of speaking honestly with others.
Interpretation and What Lies Beneath It
A student worries that interpretation gets in the way of truly understanding the teaching, and reflects on the difficulty of speaking honestly with others.
I think I'm too worried about interpretation.
Why?
It's my belief that interpretation is what doesn't help me to truly understand what you are saying. And I think that itself is a belief, isn't it?
Yes, and I'm telling you, it's a correct understanding. Interpretation is all you can do. All there is in communication is interpretation. That's all there is. And the understanding that you need can happen anyway, in spite of interpretation. Everything you need at the level of understanding, communication, and relationship is available and can happen. There is something deeper that understands, and it's not the words. That's what you can trust.
You've put a lot of effort into figuring things out, thinking about things, understanding things. And now you're realizing that all you can do is interpret, and therefore you can never truly know what somebody is saying. That can be hard. But that's what allows you to open up to a deeper place, where the understanding isn't coming from the words, or not only from the words. You have everything you need in order to understand this deeper truth, this deeper reality. The words are just sounds, shapes, colors, images, paintings.
Yes. It feels like whatever I just said I understood is not quite it.
And that's okay.
It's fine. But it's not at the level of words. I totally agree with what you are saying, but it's not because of the words you are saying that it makes sense.
The reaction of others
This is why I feel like I don't communicate well with other people. They hear words and they react.
I don't think it's anything particularly special about you. You just defined humanity.
But it's too much reaction.
Yes, that's the normal human mind.
At this point I'm still sensitive, and I don't like to take that much reaction from people, so I don't speak much.
Nobody likes that. What I mean is: don't worry about it as if it's something special about you, some challenge particular to you. Anybody who starts being more authentic, saying how things are for them more directly and honestly, will likely get more reaction from others, and that doesn't feel good. What I'm describing is natural to the process of freeing up and being more authentic and honest. It's not a challenge you have specifically. It's just natural to this process.
But at this point it's only an idea that, until I'm okay with people's reactions, and with my own reactions to other people's words, I won't be totally okay, unaffected.
It depends on the level of reactivity. For example, I'm much more okay now with most of the reactivity in others toward me, but not all of it. It depends on the level. So it doesn't end. It's always a bit of a dance in human relationships.
Conditioning and the play of concepts
And this conditioning is playing out on its own. Whatever belief, culture, background, it's still dancing and doing its thing. And you want to put a boundary toward the other, a judgment, and then it all gets confused again. I was getting clear, and now I'm confused again. It's all ideas and concepts that I'm playing with. Sometimes it gets very confused, because we're using words, and then we're speaking from a level of reality where there are no words, and then words come back, and it's fine.
The only thing I can say to that is: yes, all of that is natural. Just see that it's a very small part of your experience. You're describing the part of experience that is thoughts and concepts. There is a lot more happening than that. Until we see that this is just a very small part of experience, just the mind, and we only focus on the mind, then it looks like everything is mind.