Discovering Samsara

To some degree we are all able to feel tensions, aversions, and emotional-physical reactions to environments and situations, and in my first few years of meditation and sadhana these reactions were felt and experienced much as they had been before in my life. Our culture and role-models taught us that experiencing something that was pleasurable or rewarding (which varies according to the group one identifies with) should lead to an attempt to maintain it, and that experiencing something that was not gratifying should lead to an attempt to make that feeling go away. This seems natural enough, but I am now discovering how unnecessary and energy wasting it was (and is) to go through this process – the way I had been interacting with the energies of life was conditioned by the cultural norms I had been brought up with and used as reference points, but I believe some of these reference points do a disservice to the general well-being of many people.

For example, last fall I went several months feeling very stressed and anxious because I was far behind in all of my classes at university. From cultural conditioning, I immediately and repeatedly labeled this feeling as “bad” and went about trying to combat it by exercising, pulling late nights of study, going to see teachers, etc. I was unaware that the feeling could be dropped on the spot and that mental and physical peace restored at the very instant I felt anxious. I was unaware that the thoughts about needing to do this, that, and the other to rectify this situation that I found myself in were propelling samsaric karmic activity further. It is a trap to think that since the activities I was exercising were not “bad” that I was not perpetuating my own suffering. Good intentions aside, I was distracting myself from Presence.

This cycle happens from moment-to-moment (not just from situation to the next) on all scales of the game. The above story is a large external example, but such things also go on in the minutest scale – in the form of every single thought and concept that pops into my mind. Although you may be different, I have found that every thought I have causes some emotion, and then that emotion is either grasped on to or rejected, until the next thought comes and another reaction follows, which I will then invest more mental energy in (if not physical energy) in some seemingly appropriate manner as I was taught to deal with it both by example and by my own self-conditioning.

When I was growing up, it was never explained to me that the thoughts and feelings I was having was just energy moving and changing. Or that this energy I was experiencing was indicative of a greater natural wisdom. There was no mention of larger cycles of time and energy. It was as if the fact that humans were but a single species on planet Earth, which orbited the Sun, which was part of a solar system with nine planets, that was in one of six arms of the Milky Way Galaxy, that was in a cluster of galaxies, among billions of other galaxy clusters inside a Universe (forget about the scientifically unproven traditional notions of realms of being and consciousness) made no difference at all, and that the psycho-emotional and physical realm of human interaction was truly the only thing that mattered. The primacy of human intellect, in my formative years, erased even the trace amounts of lessons about inter-being, and sensitively/energetically relating not only to my environment but even to other people as well. I was lead to believe that mental formations – which were based on a very limited self-concept that completely erased any contextualization of myself, and the human race in general – were concrete and real objects that should be responded to. For example, we see a movie where a boy dates a girl and the ex-boyfriend gets jealous and needs to do x, y, and z to win the girl back (and we learn when we are jealous that if we make ourselves better, than we too can be sexually fulfilled), or we watch the news and see that some new technology will help us learn Latin that will help us on the SAT tests (so we do not buy the gadget due to money issues, and feel ill-prepared for the SATs when we go in to take them), or we read a book and discover how eating organic will make us more beautiful and spiritual (so we rush off to the organic market to buy organic crackers for our kids, but are angry and tense because we are running late). We never are asked to observe an emotion or desire and meditate on it; we are never pointed towards a reality where there is more to experiencing life than obtaining some image of an external/materialistic version of contentment and satisfaction. We are taught that our thoughts – and the emotions they cause – need to be tended to. Good thoughts make us feel good, bad thoughts bad, spiritual thoughts spiritual, anxious thoughts anxious, fine thoughts fine, and we live our lives trying to ensure that the thoughts (and therefore feelings) we hold are in line with our extremely limited self-concept.

A more natural state however, is not one where a myriad of thoughts are given a huge investment of time and effort, or one where tranquility and harmony are obtained like an object.

You, perhaps, are different – but for me every single feeling I used to have could be traced back to a thought or conceptualization of some sort. Having my thoughts create my emotional/phenomenological experience of the world lead me to manipulate and rectify “things” to get what I thought was necessary. However natural it may seem, and however little suffering we may think we feel (especially if our concept of suffering is that of having to be a victim of some external atrocity) this cycle is for many of us a major part of our samsaric suffering.

Samsara is not based on the content of the thought itself. The content could be “good” or “bad,” spiritual or mundane, random or logical, but – as far as I can tell from my own experience, the content of the thought still makes absolutely no difference! It is the energetic investment that I put into my thoughts that really perpetuated the suffering.

Through meditation I began to see this, and I started to use strong effort to drop the thought, and then observe how the emotion would immediately dissolve after the concept had been let go of. With so many thoughts at any one moment, doing this was frustrating at first. But that feeling, too, was based on a concept, which was dropped and the emotional reaction of frustration was also lifted. By doing this technique I was able to taste the good-heart-feeling of an ever-purifying experience of presence, and this gave me much encouragement and motivation.

The expectations, ideas, and desires I hold still distract me from Presence and prevent me from fully “being here,” but not nearly as strongly as they once did. Although this may seem a bit extreme – letting go of ALL concepts/thoughts, etc.- it is just a baby step along the way that is allowing an opening for me to experience things energetically first, without having to filter through a self-absorbed mental facility. Once the energetic reaction is always first (the hallmark of “being intimate with your energy state”) it seems to me that my responses will actually have the potential to be appropriate and uncontrived – in other words an expression of Essence.

If your experience of life has been anything like mine has been, it may be really difficult to see that you are “suffering,” but perhaps that is because, in relation to the culture and people that you learned  from, the idea of suffering is far from the view of our lineage. The suffering is the distraction from your Essence Nature. The distractions are conceptual fantasies based on our sense of self, and self-absorption. The conceptual fantasies are intensified and ingrained by our continued involvement with them.

It may take several years, like it did for me, to realize that one – you have tensions, and expectations, and hopes, and desires swirling around in your experience every moment; two – that you become involved in maintaining a state of being that fits another concept you hold as a state of being you wish to be in (as an object); and three – that this is suffering. But if you do see this then you can choose to dissolve the conceptual fantasies, and reside in an energetic experience of life. It seems to me that we will lose a lot of what we are familiar with, and a lot of what we have been taught by our culture and peers about “normal” functioning by doing this. However, I am also starting to see how the skills, virtues, and other natural capacities I have are not erased now that I am starting to engage with life from an energetic base. In fact, the skills and natural virtues and propensities we all have, will surely allow us to effectively function and interact with the world. What is more is that these skills and virtues -coming from a person who is always energetically and sensitively engaging with life – will actually bring an aliveness and sincerity into our interactions that could never have been there before. Projecting and experiencing life through a samsaric lens created by the thoughts and emotions we carried in reference to a limited self-concept is not the expansive state that is truly natural and free from suffering.

May we all discover the depth and breadth of our suffering, and desire to change. May all beings know their true Nature.

Hari Om

Jaya Guru Dev