Knowing What You Are
Saber Lo Que Eres
A student recognizes a deep, lifelong sense of inadequacy and traces it to childhood. The teacher redirects: the sense of lack is not a personal condition inherited from the past, but a belief held in the present about what you are.
Knowing What You Are
A student recognizes a deep, lifelong sense of inadequacy and traces it to childhood. The teacher redirects: the sense of lack is not a personal condition inherited from the past, but a belief held in the present about what you are.
Thank you for that meditation. I was deeply moved. Last week's meditation also moved me, and I've been processing things since then. Today's meditation brought out and put some pieces together. I have this tendency or pattern where I say something's not enough, something's not right. That resonates with me a lot, as you know from past meditations.
I've come to realize that I have a deep sense of not being enough, as if something is wrong with me. I always feel inadequate. So I have this pattern of trying to make things perfect, trying to do more than I need to, to justify myself or to prove something to myself or to others. I've known this for a long time. And I realize this probably developed through my upbringing, in my childhood.
Do you mind if I step in? You're describing the clarity of recognizing something, but you're framing it in a way that becomes personal. What you're seeing is real and true, and it is universal. It is what I'm talking about. It is the nature of the human experience, the human body-mind. It's what the Buddha spoke of as one of the fundamental truths.
The personal framing of a universal truth
When you say "I have this," it becomes something that happens to you. You recognize it, but it becomes a personal condition that you then frame as something which probably happened in your past, in your childhood. The sense of lack becomes the problem you identify as the problem that needs to be solved.
Then a knowing comes in, and it's a false knowing. It's a misunderstanding that makes it seem you now know what it is. If you know a little bit more about what it is, then you'll finally be able to fix it. So it becomes the very thing I'm talking about. You are seeing the sense of lack correctly. The problem is the misunderstanding as to its cause and its nature.
Belief as the root of lack
The nature of the sense of lack is belief. It is false knowing: believing something that isn't true. Any belief is false in this way, because the mind can only interpret and approximate reality. Some beliefs are harmless. For example, the belief that this is a thermos is harmless. Is it really a thermos? What is its nature? I don't know, but it's harmless.
Now, the belief that this sense of lack began as a result of your childhood moves into problematic territory, because it isn't true. There are things that happen in childhood that create conditions and pains, and that is a reasonable approximation. But the idea that the sense of lack we're talking about is a consequence of something that happened in childhood is not true. It's a consequence of a belief you're having right now.
It isn't a simple belief, like "tomorrow is going to be a sunny day." It's more complex and more subtle. It's a belief about the nature of what you are. In fact, it's knowing what you are in a mind way.
What the word "I" points to
If you look at what the word "I" points to when you say "I," as I mentioned in the meditation, there will be images and memories. When we use the word "I" and don't realize that these images and memories are not truly what "I" points to, there's a collapse. What I am becomes the story of the imagination, based on memories. You define what you are as something limited: as images, as thoughts. The sense of something missing begins. It's the forgetting of what you truly are, which is that present miracle.
So if we follow the line of how it happens: there's the false knowing of what I am as the images, as a story based on memories. Because I believe that's what I am, there's a contraction, an illusion. Something becomes not really lost, because it's still here. It's already here. The miracle of what you are is, but there's an overlooking, a veiling. With that veiling, with that definition of what I am as something known, in that illusion, something starts to feel as though it's missing.
So if you take that sense of something missing and decide that it is the consequence of something that happened in the past, it continues. It is that same false knowing.
It's like feeding the belief.
It's just more of that belief.
Relationships and the embedded story
Sometimes I feel it's really hard to separate from that story or identity, or to live unattached to it, when relating to others.
How do you mean?
I mean all my relationships and interactions with others. That history is part of a story of me. Not just for me, but for others, and for my relationships with them. I'm trying to navigate those beliefs that are so embedded in those relationships.
Life is life. There are relationships, and there are things that can be worked on, changed, and improved. That's an endless, never-ending process of growth. But it will never address that deep belief, or the sense that something is missing based on the belief that you know what you are.
So again, the relationship becomes the thing that needs to be fixed, because what's missing seems to have to do with a relationship. If that gets fixed, if I improve it, if I resolve it, then I'm finally going to be okay. All of what I'm describing is a strategy, a belief system. We spend all our lives doing that, and nothing works.
What growth can and cannot resolve
In one sense, things do work: you can improve relationships, you can improve your life, you can improve the world for mankind and womankind. But none of that necessarily resolves that sense of something missing, which is itself resolvable.
Sometimes we talk about that aspect of life, about how to bring this wisdom and wakefulness to it. But today I feel it's important to clarify: none of that processing and growing is going to resolve the deep sense that something is wrong with you, that something is missing. That belief, that something is wrong with me, that something is missing, is what we have to look at directly.