The Peace You Cannot Understand
La Paz Que No Puedes Comprender
A conversation about the difficulty of distinguishing knowing from being, one teacher's account of how the nature of reality gradually revealed itself, and the discovery that anxiety often serves to veil a vulnerable, grieving heart.
The Peace You Cannot Understand
A conversation about the difficulty of distinguishing knowing from being, one teacher's account of how the nature of reality gradually revealed itself, and the discovery that anxiety often serves to veil a vulnerable, grieving heart.
The meditation was really good. It was quite new to me to differentiate between knowing and being. At first, while you were guiding us, I couldn't really see a difference, but later on something became more obvious. I'm curious. Are you speaking of Sat-Chit-Ananda?
Yes, I am, and it is. They are hard to differentiate at some point, because they are not separate.
I had to look quite closely to find a difference, but they kind of blend.
They blend, because it is actually one. It's not a thing. Sat-Chit-Ananda is one, and then you can distinguish being as three aspects.
So this is just the mind being used to distinguish little differences.
Yes, but it's valuable to distinguish them. It's like recognizing different flavors of the nature of reality. The knowingness, the beingness, and the blissfulness are the same. Ananda is most commonly translated as bliss, but you could talk about it as peace. I was referring to it as quietness. It can also be spoken of as silence. It's an absence as well.
Does one of those capture it better? Bliss does seem to arise from it quite a lot, but what you call quietness or peace goes deeper, more like a sister to it.
Yes. The blissfulness can deepen or come and go, more or less, but the silence, the quietness, the peacefulness, is simply the absolute nature.
It feels like there's another level below that, which you've spoken of as the peace, the peace of understanding. Is that it, or is that another level below?
The way it first appeared
Ultimately, this is all my interpretation of what others have spoken of. For me, it was a recognition: "Oh, that's that." You start to connect dots across different teachings and scriptures. But how it happened for me was that something began to appear in my experience that seemed new, that I had never tasted before. It was located in the center of my head, and it felt like a substance. I started calling it silence, but it's really hard to describe. It was very strange. It felt extremely pleasant. It was very blissful. Over time it began to grow and take on more feeling, until it became all feeling.
Is that not what Sat-Chit-Ananda is pointing to?
I had no thought of Sat-Chit-Ananda when this was happening over several months. I have a very curious, scientific mind, and I was in absolute wonder, asking, "What is this?" As it became wider, it became less recognizable. When it was located, it was very much in contrast to something else. Then it became everywhere and also nowhere. That's where it was really strange. It's still here, but it's nowhere.
I was looking for what it was, trying to find it, describe it, understand it. I remember one day pacing back and forth, asking myself, "What is this silence?" This was months after it was already present. I tell this story to emphasize how hard it is for the mind to grasp. It was present, and I could not grasp it or understand it. I remember the moment I said to myself, "It's not actually silence. It's like peace, but a peace I cannot understand." That's when I connected the peace with the process of understanding. Even then, it didn't come with a label. It was just a sense of "Yes, that's what it is." I came to those words through my own exploration, and I called it peace.
Absence rather than substance
Then I realized it was actually the absence of something, whereas at first it appeared to be a substance.
The absence of what?
The absence of an illusion. I believe it to be the absence of a sense of self, a localized self, a sense of "I am something." It started in a very located place, where I thought I was, as a kind of pressured, blissful substance, hard to describe. Then it expanded and expanded, until all of my experience was that. Even when my mind was very activated, or I was in physical discomfort or pain, that was there.
Then I realized: this was always here. It did not appear. The illusion progressively fell away to reveal that this was always the nature of reality, always has been. I can also describe it another way: seeing that what I thought I was, the belief in that, dropped. It's surreal to see that I never was that. There was always the imagination that I was that, but I never really was what I imagined myself to be. That's more of a logical description, though, which is not how I experienced it. The experience was a strange sensation in the center of my head that appeared more and more, very nice and very blissful, and then spread, until I recognized: this is always here, and it's also what's not here. That's what this is.
I have a tendency, and I know it's a tendency, to try to map that onto my own experience.
You would know. But how events proceed is different for everyone.
Yes.
I believe that has to do more with the integration aspect. The expansion seems to me to have been a side effect of the recognition that happened before.
Could you call it non-dual recognition, or something like that?
Recognition versus state
It's all non-dual recognition. Every step of the way is a deepening recognition of anatta, a recognition of non-dualism. I had non-dual and anatta recognitions many years ago, decades ago, really complete and profound. But they were states, which is different. With a state, that's seen, and there's no going back from the seeing, but the activation is still functioning. What I'm describing is different. It's when it's so clearly recognized that this is obviously the nature of how things are, that it's always been this way and cannot be any other way, versus a state that you invent.
What you describe resonates with something very deeply.
If there's any curiosity about how to see more clearly: whenever there is distress, whenever there is a sense of something missing, or struggle, or suffering, that's where you can look. It's happening because an illusion is taking place. Look through that. Look at it more closely. What I noticed was that certain patterns of the mind were still sticky. Certain triggers, contexts, and situations would tie me up in distress. In the end, there were two recurring triggers, and I looked at those more and more closely. It was sensations I did not want to feel.
So that experience you described happened once everything was cleared out in terms of reactivity?
The strange thing is that it's not that there's no reactivity left. If I said yes to that, it would give the wrong impression. There's a lot less, significantly less. But what's different is hard even to understand, what changed so fundamentally. When reactivity happened before, a kind of blind beam would come up. The illusion would really rise. Now, when reactivity happens, there's very little sense of an illusion coming up. It's more like the body-mind activating and needing a bit of time to settle. Before, there was really the activation of "I don't want this, I don't want to touch this, this is not okay, this should not be happening."
Sensation beneath the narrative
So there's a lot to be said for shadow work, or inner-child work, or that kind of thing.
Yes, though ultimately it's about sensation. Working through the narratives helps you see through the illusions that make the narrative sticky, which makes it easier to get in touch with the sensations. But it's going to be a sensation very close to fear and pain. The fear is basically, "I don't want this sensation, because this sensation means the end of me. This is going to kill me." It's a sense of death. Or pain that is so unbearable I cannot live with it.
Speaking more directly, anxiety is the most obvious one for me.
Anxiety is a ruminating worry. It's a little nudge.
So, do you see it clearly?
Why are you anxious?
Why am I anxious? Well, what might a history of social anxiety say about this?
Don't explain the cause in the sense of time. Look right now.
Well, more in the now, but...
So when it appears, don't look at why the anxiety is there in the sense of what caused it in a sequence of time. Look at what it is in service to, in the moment it appears. In that sense, why? What it's in service to in the moment is the thing.
Yes, I think that's it. But it feels like it might be covering up a lot of grief. That's perplexing, because anxiety feels worse than grief.
Anxiety as a veil over grief
No, the anxiety is numbing the grief.
But right now I'd rather feel grief than anxiety.
Yes, because it's working. You feel the anxiety and not the grief precisely because it's working. It's doing its job. It's creating a subtle veil over the heart.
It feels like a rather big veil.
It's subtle, but it works. It's like a cloak of invisibility. Wrap it around the grieving heart, and there will be anxiety.
That doesn't really make any sense, though it might be true.
It would make a lot of sense once you see through it. It could be sudden, or it could just be.
I've touched all of that. I think it's so simple: the vulnerability of your own heart, your own love, unavoidably pouring through and present. The vulnerability is too much, and then the question is how to manage it. It has never felt safe enough. But it needs to feel a bit safe in there.
That's it. That's the heart of it. Safety is exactly what I'm talking about. That worry is about safety, or the lack of it. Fear, worry, anxiety. The veil says: what I feel is evidence that I'm not okay, that this is not safe, because there's sadness, fear, or grief. And therefore I need to make sure things are safe before I can touch this. The grief, the sadness, the vulnerability, the openness, the love, the heartfulness: it's too risky. I'm not safe.
But I am.
But you are, exactly. The worry is a sense of "I'm not safe, I'm not ready yet." Then anxiety becomes time trying to be ready, trying to find the moment to be safe.
So the recognition is that you are safe, or that the lack of safety is part of the illusion. Over time you drop the anxiety, the worry, the fear, and just feel whatever it is: the vulnerability, the sadness, the love, the tenderness, whatever form it takes. Would it help to have someone hold your hand?
Holding your own heart
It might. But you can also hold your own. That's a beautiful expression of vulnerability, starting to touch it. At the same time, it carries a flavor of worry or fear: "I can't be with this unless somebody holds my hand." Almost nobody touches this easily.
It has been easier when someone held my hand. Maybe that's where it's coming from.
That's how it is for us humans.
And the work is to be able to go there on your own, ultimately, for that freedom to be total.
Your heart breaks, and you're there with yourself as it breaks in total, vulnerable grief and despair. You're just there, holding your own heart as it breaks. For no reason, no goal, simply making room for your heart. And it will surprise you: it doesn't really break. It feels like it, and then it frees you.
Thank you.
Thank you for sharing and being so vulnerable. Thank you all for joining. Have a lovely day.