The Simple Level of What's Happening
El Nivel Simple de Lo Que Está Sucediendo
Discover how awareness already accepts everything you feel, and how much of life's difficulty is simply added by the thinking mind.
The Simple Level of What's Happening
Let's see if we can focus on just seeing the subtlety and simplicity of what really is, what's really happening.
What I call deeper is just generally what's more subtle and simple.
What's more true is normally what is simpler before the mind adds complexity,
what is real and what's really happening,
and where the misunderstanding arises that relates to the complexity of the mind,
interpretations, assumptions that turn what's happening into something difficult.
Life can get challenging, in that sense difficult, intense.
There's something at the deeper and more subtle level where it could just be simple,
even in the challenges.
Simple and okay.
What experience is made of
And whatever is happening, what it's made of is the level of experiences,
the sounds, the colors, sensations.
And thoughts will have this mirroring quality where thoughts could seem made of sounds, but they're imagined sounds.
Inner dialogue is imagined sounds.
Thoughts could have colors, shapes and forms like sight.
But they're imagined, they are created within the mind and not through perception.
And then there are emotions, which are in some sense imagined sensations,
created through thoughts.
And so pretty much everything that is being experienced, the content of what's happening now, all of it,
the whole universe, the very thing you experience,
including all memories, all the story of you, the experience that you know of self,
the world you experience to be inhabiting,
the time and the future that appears and is contemplated and known,
all of it is perceptions, sensations and thoughts.
No boundary between them
There's no boundary between any of them.
There's no line or space separating sounds from sight, sensations from thoughts.
Their nature, their qualities are different but don't appear in separate spaces.
It all appears in the same space.
And you can play with this.
Look for the spaces that are different between sound and sensation,
and you'll see the only difference is just their qualities.
And so in our minds, we can see them to be in a different space, but that's just the qualities
mapping the same sense, the past and the future.
In our experience they seem to be two very separate places.
Past is in one place and the future is in another very separate, different place.
But both past and future are imagined,
occurring in the same place of our imagination,
made of the same contents of thoughts, images, sounds,
imagined sounds, imagined narratives.
Some seem to be grounded on memories of what happened.
We call that past.
Another seems to be imagined based on predictions of things that normally occur, and the mind predicts the future.
We predict the sun will come out again because it has come out over and over again.
We predict we will be hungry if we don't eat because we have, over and over again.
The challenges of experience
All of this is simple enough, and life has true, deep challenges.
The vividness of experience, the intensity of experience,
moments where it seems unmanageable or unbearable, too difficult.
If we look at what that is made of, what unbearable and unmanageable and too difficult is made of,
it's the intensity of sensation,
the value of sensation,
and the qualities of sensation,
the qualities of emotion.
The qualities, I mean the flavor.
Is the emotion like a strawberry, or is the emotion like a very bitter taste?
Is it pain and fear?
Or is it spaciousness and calmness?
So it can be seen that the root of it,
it's the nature of these, let's say, unwanted or rejected, resisted sensations,
flavors, different flavors of pain, different flavors of fear.
And to a degree, in some form, they're always present:
in the sense of vulnerability,
in the sense of discomfort,
a subtle background worry,
an anguish or a sadness.
Noticing what's here now
And just see what's present for you now.
What is it that's a little more on the difficult side?
What is it that one has a habit to want to change right now?
Is it some form of sadness or pain, or is it some physical discomfort or physical pain?
Is it tension?
Is it a worry or a fear?
Is it a mix of these?
And just notice that there is, in this moment, already here, this infinite acceptance.
Whatever is being experienced is by definition fully known.
100% of the voice that you're hearing when I speak,
all of what you're hearing is heard entirely with no resistance.
Any resistance is an afterthought.
The hearing is total.
The ability to hear, the hearing is total.
The same applies to sounds and sights.
Every thought that is appearing, that is present in awareness, is known totally, exactly as it is.
The rejection of a thought, which is just another thought, is known exactly as it is.
All of the bodily sensations,
the breath, the skin, the flesh, the muscles, the tensions,
the energetics of body sensations,
all fully known.
The total acceptance of awareness
Awareness, consciousness, this reality, accepts by definition.
If it is heard, it is fully known.
If it is sensed, it is fully accepted.
If there is pain, it is fully accepted by consciousness.
The knowingness of it is total.
If there is fear, worry, sadness, the knowingness of it is total.
And that's the deeper, more subtle, more true, fundamentally true reality.
At that level there is no struggle.
There is nothing to do.
There is nothing to change.
There is nothing wrong.
It is this total openness.
The openness does not require us to open,
does not require our minds to quiet,
does not require the absence of thoughts or pains or fears.
That openness is fundamentally the nature of reality.
The experience of resistance and struggle and suffering is an afterthought,
an overlay, a veil.
The mental overlay
Look into your experience right now, or anything that is familiarly unwanted,
this familiar sense of: if only this was different.
Something that should be, or something that shouldn't be.
It's one or the other.
Something missing, or something that's here that shouldn't be.
This is the mental overlay, it's the mind's belief in that thought.
There is, say, a sadness or a fear or worry or physical discomfort,
and in the mind, the thoughts:
if this was different,
if this pain wasn't here,
if this sensation wasn't here.
If only it was like it was that other moment,
this comparison with memory, imagination.
If only it was different, then I would be okay.
Then this would be okay.
Then I would be okay.
And that thought is just fine.
It's just another thought.
So when believing that narrative, and the experience is something is missing, I am not okay,
it becomes the center of experience, the focus of our attention.
And what is lost, in the reality of this moment,
is also our willingness and the ability to fully feel, fully know what is happening exactly as it's happening:
to fully taste the sadness,
to fully taste the worry,
to fully taste sensations or discomforts
without the interpretation that it is fundamentally wrong, fundamentally not okay.
Feeling fully
In most of what we avoid to experience fully, the avoidance is just a ghost.
There's no need to do anything to fix the sadness.
Just feeling it fully allows it to come and go.
There's often no need to do anything to fix the discomfort in the body and tensions.
Just feeling more fully, relaxation begins.
The worries and the fears, most are unnecessary efforts
to avoid natural pains of life.
Just feeling the discomforts and the pains as they come and go, fears dissolve.
As we let ourselves sense fully whatever is in that sensation,
know fully everything that has happened,
the wisdom of living arises more spontaneously, more deeply, and with deeper wisdom.
You provide tolerance, openness, a lovingness, a freedom, a joy, curiosity,
rather than avoidance, fear, and tension.
And as the creativity of the mind is infinite,
the forms of illusion are infinite,
in the same way the depth of sensing and allowing and savoring the moment is infinite.
That depth is infinite.