The Character You Forgot to Stop Playing
El Personaje Que Olvidaste Dejar de Interpretar
A dialogue about the sense of personal doing, the belief that our will is our own, and why the identity we live inside is as absorbing, and as temporary, as a child's game of make-believe.
The Character You Forgot to Stop Playing
A dialogue about the sense of personal doing, the belief that our will is our own, and why the identity we live inside is as absorbing, and as temporary, as a child's game of make-believe.
I found what you were discussing earlier very interesting. Even when you see through some of the illusion, it's as if habits and other assumptions keep mechanically working. I was listening to another teacher who described something similar: how we personalize certain things and not others. For instance, I find myself hungry. That isn't something I do. It appears. I don't make it appear. But going to the kitchen and making dinner, that is something I do. I don't find myself doing it.
So we personalize. "That's me doing it." But I'm not making the hunger appear.
Right. But what is this thing you describe? I understand the pointing toward action within the action. Yet you say there's a sense of doing, because the difference between the hunger appearing and the cooking appearing is this sense of doing. What is that?
The binary of personal and impersonal
Yes, and it relates specifically to what this other teacher describes: sectioning some parts of experience as personal and some as not, making it binary, black and white. Either "me, I'm doing this," or "not me, not I, not doing."
For example, if I touch the table, the normal interpretation is that the sensation is the table. "I touch the table, I'm sensing the table." It isn't true. The sensation is my fingers. All I'm ever feeling is my fingers. The sensation is just the skin. But in the mind, the normal interpretation is that one hundred percent of that sensation is table. And now one hundred percent of the sensation is the cloth of the couch. Clearly it seems so, because they feel very different. One is smooth, the other is not. But all I'm ever feeling is skin.
See how in that simple example the normal interpretation is completely reversed. If you begin to look at all the other subtle places, it all breaks down. The sensation of doing, if you look at what it's made of, is just something appearing that comes and goes and is happening impersonally.
So there's an issue here, because we tend to attach significance to doing, as something a subject is making happen. As if that assumption were implicit.
Yes. The whole illusion is that the one doing is Nicholas, and not anything other than Nicholas. Whereas reality is better described, not perfectly, but better described, this way: everything that is happening is God, and I am doing nothing. I, Nicholas, am doing nothing that has an origin exclusively within myself.
Exclusively, yes.
Exclusively, meaning there is something separated, isolated, closed, with its own agency, its own will, its own origin, born within itself. "I, born within myself, I."
"My will is thy will"
This is how I currently interpret it. Before one of the later shifts, I was reading and sometimes contemplating a directive I understood as "my will is thy will." I thought it was a prayer, a prayer in which I offer my will to the will of something greater, the will of God. An offering, a commitment: let my will be thy will.
Then I realized it's actually a description of truth. A description of the realization that there is no will that is mine. There is only one will. But the illusion that the will is my own is what creates the friction, the problem, the suffering, the unnecessary pain in myself, and the unnecessary pain I might cause in others through belief in the illusion. Yet even that is not exclusively my will: the believing in the illusion, the suffering happening, the pain being caused.
In that sense, all suffering and all pain is divinely created for the sole purpose of awakening: the awakening of love, of loving being, of loving action within the relative, as part of manifestation. Because it is not absent in any other way.
So are you saying that life is lovingly giving us all the suffering we need to awaken?
I would put it a little differently, because you're still describing life doing something to you. You are that life. You are the choosing of this experience, the choosing of illusion in order to wake up. You are creating both the illusion and the opportunity to awaken. There is no such other. There is no such thing as life as other. There is no otherness.
In that sense, does this connect to a phrase I've heard, that in the long run complete fulfillment is guaranteed for everyone?
Yes, because it is already present. It is reality, and the illusion is temporary. The illusion is temporary because it appears in time, whereas peace and satisfaction are timeless.
Why the mapping is so sticky
One more, just to hear what you think. Today I was at the beach feeling all these sensations, and I was really paying attention to this mapping: that sound over there, that sensation there, me here, other people there. Maybe that's the stickiness you spoke of. I had to pay close attention to see it as thought, to make an effort to see it that way and not as reality. I'm wondering why it's so sticky, so hard to see it for what it is.
There are two reasons. One is habit. When you do something many times, constantly and repetitively, it keeps going on its own. The neural pathways, and so on. But what also feeds the loop and the habit is attachment: attachment to what you want to be, to what you believe you are.
There is what we truly are, our true nature, which can be recognized in self-realization. And there is what I would like to be, what I want to be. This whole journey of awakening begins with wanting to be something you're not. It begins there.
The child at play
Think of how children play characters: cops and robbers. It's fun. You want to pretend you're a robber. It's creativity, imagination. It's fascinating, beautiful. If a child cannot play, something is stifled. If a child cannot imagine being something it's not, a whole world of creativity and vitality is stifled.
It is the same for consciousness, for reality, for creation. To truly experience the journey and the adventure of being something you're not, you need to fully forget what you are. Otherwise you don't really experience the knowing of being something you're not. A child does this well. When a child plays a cop or a robber, the belief is profound.
As adults, we have lost that ability. Why? Because we are fixated on one particular character. A child can play any character in imagination. Over time, we have chosen a particular imagination, a particular character, and developed it through imagination, time, and experience. We have shaped it. Over time it becomes so complex, so full of evidence points, because the past happened, because a person said this, so much evidence, that this play of imagination about what I am has become the imagination of what I think I truly am.
Now there is a fixation on a very particular character. Call it Julian, or Nicholas. A very particular imagination, highly developed. A script I've been writing for decades. If I were to play cops and robbers with my nephew, I couldn't get very far into it, because I no longer have the capacity to believe it fully.
I'm using this as a metaphor, so you can see how the character is an imagination. The imagination now involves all the problems this character has, the solutions it needs, its past, its future. It becomes believed so deeply that I have forgotten what a child knows. A child doesn't know it conceptually. A child is simply this natural openness, where there is no particular character that I am. There is just experience, the mind imagining, everything happening, but no particular character at the center.
The journey, in a sense, goes into the character and back, to consciously recognize our true nature: that openness, that characterless openness. But for that to happen, if I don't fully forget what I am, I can't be fully immersed in the experience of the character.
Getting fed up with the character
The last part of the journey is beginning to have glimpses of remembering what you truly are, and growing tired of being that character, tired of the suffering it brings. Believing yourself to be the character is painful. That is the definition of suffering: believing you're something you're not.
Experientially, it's like being constricted. Imagine telling a three-year-old, "You must believe you're a robber, and you have to do this for the rest of your life. That is the role you get. You can't be anything else." That is very distressing. And it isn't about being able to imagine being some other character. It is about being able not to be a character at all, not to be an imagined character, but simply to be.
The character's narrative also carries all the problems, pains, and sufferings that belong to the nature of that character. So, over time, for some of us, this is what invites us to remember.
The pull to keep the character alive
There is also attachment to a character, even when we recognize the suffering nature of the illusion. In the return journey, there is the seeing, the knowing that this is the nature of suffering, and the longing to remember and drop the character. But there is also part of us attached to the character, not wanting it to end, not wanting it to die.
And because the body-mind has been impersonating that character so completely, believing it to be what we are, the biological response to the ending of the illusion is as if the body will die. There is no distinction. So sensations and emotions of fear can arise.
Again, using the story of a child: a child who believes he is a particular character in a story, the robber or the cop. After three months, you tell that child, "No, you cannot play that role anymore." But all of his friendships are based on it, all his relationships, everything he has been doing for three months. So it is frightening to no longer be able to play that role. Thoughts arise: "How will I even function? How will I even eat? Will I even reach for food?" And here we are talking about decades.
This is great. Thank you.
Realization within functioning
I'm wondering about this in terms of functioning. What would be the difference between, say, a realization where the person is driving, doing everything, and remaining still, compared to people like those who couldn't eat much of the time, or didn't know where the face was? There's a difference. Is that the level of identification still left with the body, or what is it?
That has to do with a state.
[The recording ended here, mid-answer — the rest of this exchange was not captured.]