The hunt for solid ground
Have you noticed that so much of your self-talk is an attempt to draw some conclusion about yourself? To find a way to define yourself and what you want, and to describe your relationship to the rest of the world?
You are constantly trying to pigeon-hole yourself.
“ I’m from this country. I like these kinds of people. I’m a conservative/ liberal. I want to be rich, I want to be successful, I want to be admired. I’m young. I’m old. I’m an honest person, a good person, a shameful, pathetic person. I am amazing, I am the best, I am worthless, no-body likes me… etc.”
This is hunt for solid ground: your attempt to get some sort of mental foothold, some sort of fixity, an understanding or grasp of who you are, so that then you can decide what you should do.
Solid Ground
Have you had any luck finding it?
If you’re anything like me, you’ll have found several temporary footholds throughout your life. It’s possible to feel like you’ve managed to conceptually understand something about yourself and what you want… for a little while. The issue is we all change with time, as we learn from new experiences. Every change, is a loosening of that foothold. It shifts, shakes up and sometimes destroys the mental ground we try to stand on. This is why the mind is so over-active. It is always working to stitch together a fabric that naturally tends to unravel with every new experience. It is an infinite workload – a task that is impossible to complete.
Trying to analyse and make conclusions about yourself is a futile endeavour that is completely opposed to nature of reality.
Your personal identity is not only immensely complex, but it is also changing all the time, and so is the world around you. Just look at it, nothing is permanent and unchanging. Just look at how different you are to how you were a few years ago. How your view of the world, your priorities and desires have changed.
But thoughts, descriptions, definitions, concepts are fixed by their very nature. That is what makes them useful for analysing things. Each word has a particular meaning that is fixed. To describe yourself using words requires you to internally resist change so that you can freeze yourself into something that can be explained. It’s like trying to get a river to hold still so you can make a painting.
Big, traumatic life events can cause this self-image or sense of solidity to totally shatter, sending us into inner turmoil, where we feel lost, like we are falling. We then seek to clutch onto anything and everything stable to feel safe and valid again. A classic example is desperately seeking a rebound after the end of a relationship, or falling prey to substance abuse after a stable fixture in your life falls apart.
A lot of people operate under the assumption that this solid ground is obviously good, and anything that threatens this a bad thing to be avoided. But this is not true. A shattering of solid ground is a tremendous opportunity for spiritual growth, because the reality is there is no such thing as solid ground. There is no single fixed thing that we can call “me”.
Separation is a construct
If the there is no fixed “me” that can be described by words, why does it feel like there is? Why is it so hard to let go of a conceptual description of yourself?
It’s because we are addicted to analysis. What could be a useful ability now becomes a habitual compulsion. We cannot help but always dissect our experience of existence into parts that can be labelled and talked about. We forget that this approach to the world is optional. It’s not the only way of looking at things, and it is in fact not the truest way of looking at things.
There is a more fundamental, primordial way of looking at experience, and that is to look at all of experience as a single whole instead of separating it out into individual things. Separation exists only in the labelling system of the mind, and labels are just labels. They are not the same as the reality they are pointing to.
Let me give you an example. Look out of a window and what do you see? The sky, clouds, maybe the sun. Are these separate things? It might seem that the obvious answer is yes, but ask yourself, are they separate for any other reason other than the fact you have different words for them? You can instead just look simultaneously at the totality of your experience without interference, without labelling, without separating experience and creating “things”. This is the essence of meditation.
In this view of the world, there is no “me” and “not me”, there is just experience. Everything arises and passes in your awareness, but there is no ownership attached to any particular part of the experience. Not your thoughts, not your feelings, not your body. These things are not fundamentally any more “you” than things you perceive. Everything simply is.
All separation is a mental construct. The sense of “me” that is separate form the rest of the things you experience, is also just construct. It can be a useful construct, but, like with any tool, it’s only useful if you can put it down. The problem is we are so used to obsessing about this “me” that over time we lose touch completely with that fundamental wholistic perspective. We stop living in the real world and instead live in a world of mental labels, and we don’t even realise it. We clutch on so tightly to our labels that it can be hard to even understand what it means to say that there is no separate “me”.
Let go of false solidity
The firm sense of “me” you feel, maybe as a pressure in your head or a tension in your chest, is actually no more than just a sensation. There is no actual fixed “me” that is separate from experience.
The more you cling to labels to get your foot on solid ground, so to speak, the less you can handle the fluid and changing reality of life, the further removed you are from truth, and the weaker you become.
The thing is you are free to listen to your internal resistance and avoid upsetting and breaking the conclusions you’ve created for yourself. You can live life running away from events and experiences that disturb you and trigger aversion. Especially in today’s world, nothing’s stopping you from settling into a cozy routine and sedating yourself with mindless, hypnotic entertainment until you die. You can create your mental palace of self-concept, and do everything to make sure it’s not destroyed – but it ultimately becomes a prison. You will fall into a rut of suffocating stagnation. You were not meant to live confined within rigid walls of beliefs and convictions, and there is something deep inside you that yearns to break free of these limitations. If you want to live life fully, passionately and joyfully, you must abandon your need to understand everything, especially yourself.
Intellectually driven people have a particularly tough time getting with this. We have relied on our thinking and our analysis for so much of our lives, it can be hard to accept that it is the very thing that is stopping us from being strong, happy and free.
You have a choice – you keep on analysing your life and subconsciously limit your potential, or you can choose to let go, and dare to see what happens when you let the ground crumble away beneath your feet.
Take the plunge.