If We Didn't Try to Hold the Flux

Surviving DC, July 22, 2002

"It's a tension, I think, because what both science and at least some philosophical and even religious traditions tell us is that the world is impermanent. Nothing in it stays the same. We don't stay the same. Our bodies don't stay the same. The people that we love and the things that we love don't stay the same. That's just the truth of the matter, that there's this constant impermanence, this constant flux. And some philosophers have argued over the years that we should just embrace that. We would be freer if we didn't try to hold that flux for a moment. 

I have to say, my feeling about it is, part of what makes everything so precious to us is exactly the fact that we know it's going to disappear. We know it's impermanent. We know it won't last. But what we love is this thing now. For me, the most dramatic example of this is our relationship to our children. We know they're going to go. We know that in twenty years from now, if they treat us with affectionate contempt we'll be doing really well. But that doesn't change the fact that right now, it's this child and not any other child in the universe. Just this one.

I think there's something really deep and profound about our human lives that the fact that we can do both of those things--we recognize the impermanence, but that we feel the attachments--that seems to me to give our life its very special texture."  

~ Alison Gopnik, from "Object Lesson," Radiolab, Season 12: Episode 8

---

See also: 

• Gopnik, A. (2009). The philosophical baby: What children's minds tell us about truth, love, and the meaning of life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. (library)
• Instincts

The Threads of the Ego Experience Pulled Free

"Due to its nature as a construction, rather than as a metaphysical entity, the sense of being an ego can be radically deconstructed. Accomplishing this deconstruction requires noticing and tracking the sensory phenomena that together make up the construction of the self, and then patiently untangling them from the whole. One by one, as the threads of the ego experience are pulled free, perception shifts to encompass all of creation."

~ Michael Taft, highlighting key themes from his talk "Deconstructing The Perception Of The Ego/self" at the Science and Nonduality Conference, October 26, 2013

See also: The Atomic Components of Narrative Elements

Changing the Plane of Focus

Sam Harris in conversation with Dan Harris, "Taming the Mind" (April 12, 2014): 

Everyone has had the experience of looking through a window and suddenly catching sight of his own reflection staring back at him from the glass. At that point, he can use the glass as a window, to see the world outside, or as a mirror, but he can’t do both at the same time.

Sometimes your reflection in the glass is pretty subtle, and you could easily stand there for ten minutes, looking outside while staring right through the image of your own face without seeing it.

For the purposes of this analogy, imagine that the goal of meditation is to see your own reflection clearly in each moment. Most spiritual traditions don’t realize that this can be done directly, and they articulate their paths of practice in ways that suggest that if you only paid more attention to everything beyond the glass—trees, sky, traffic—eventually your face would come into view. Looking out the window is arguably better than closing your eyes or leaving the room entirely—at least you are facing in the right direction—but the practice is based on a fundamental misunderstanding. You don’t realize that you are looking through the very thing you are trying to find in every moment. Given better information, you could just walk up to the window and see your face in the first instant.

The same is true for the illusoriness of the self. Consciousness is already free of the feeling that we call “I.” However, a person must change his plane of focus to realize this. Some practices can facilitate this shift in awareness, but there is no truly gradual path that leads there. Many longtime meditators seem completely unaware that these two planes of focus exist, and they spend their lives looking out the window, as it were.

---

See also: 

Harris, D. (2014). 10% happier: How I tamed the voice in my head, reduced stress without losing my edge, and found self-help that actually works--a true story. New York: It Books. [library] 

Harris, S. (2014). Waking up: A guide to spirituality without religion. S.l.: Simon & Schuster. [library]

Finding an Identity is Easy

"Stop worrying about your identity and concern yourself with the people you care about, ideas that matter to you, beliefs you can stand by, tickets you can run on. Intelligent humans make those choices with their brain and hearts and they make them alone. The world does not deliver meaning to you. You have to make it meaningful, and decide what you want and need and must do. It's a tough, unimaginably lonely and complicated way to be in the world. But that's the deal: you have to live; you can't live by slogans, dead ideas, clichés, or national flags. Finding an identity is easy. It's the easy way out."

~ Zadie Smith, from On Beauty

Orphaned Ones

They Have Come as Light in Disguise to Unlock a Secret Inside You
by Matt Licata, from A Healing Space

Will you provide a home for the unwanted? Will you offer refuge for the intensity that is surging through you? Will you grant asylum to your own confusion? Will your give safe harbor to your grief, your sadness, and your despair? Will you risk everything to know how whole you really are? 

As a little one, it was intelligent to split off from overwhelming emotional experience; it was an act of kindness and creativity to disembody in order to protect your developing nervous system. It is all so fragile, really. You opened your world to those around you, to get what you needed; you were wired for love. It was too much to hold it all, though, to let in the disappointment and the abandonment, and the possibility that you were not lovable exactly as you were. This you could not let in. Your little heart could not absorb the implications.  

But these disowned parts of you — these fragments of fear, pieces of sadness, and particles of shame; even the shards of joy, great excitement, and other undigested “positive” experiences – are calling for you. They are knocking at the door of your body and your heart, seeking a sanctuary where they can finally be touched and metabolized. What you are is love itself, a luminous space of pure awareness, with a capacity to hold and transform whatever comes into your experience. You are a vast field of intelligence; your body is made of the stars. 

Friends, will you continue to turn from these orphaned ones within? Or will you allow them to finally come inside? Will you receive the transmission that they have come to bestow? Yes, it may appear that they have arrived as agents of darkness and despair, but things are rarely as they seem. These ones have come as light in disguise to unlock a secret inside you.