Do you ever have moments where you find yourself stepping outside from your routines? Suddenly, the world looks anew. The emotions and reactions you grew accustomed to don’t fit. You don’t fit. You? Where are you? Do you even exist anymore?
What are you? What am I? No, not the body. Because that’s my body. Whose body? Couldn’t be the mind either, because that’s my mind. Who?
Sometimes my thoughts go in this tangent. As I distill this, I find myself leaning into a deterministic spiral. Are my behaviors patterned from the thing that happened to me and around me? If an action is taken, is it merely an impulse based on something before it? Is it turtles all the way down?
My recent meditation sessions have been like this. A step outside. Not pleasant, not unpleasant either. Different.
Usual meditation sessions have me on the shore of a lake. I see it. There are ripples on the surface. Though cloudy, I can see sediments below the surface if I try. And these sessions go with me noticing the water moving around, each ripple a different thought, and each thought transient.
Sometimes there are powerful emotions in me. Big emotions. Emotions I recently learned I have no words for. Emotions that I have bottled up or ignored out of fear. These emotions come as rocks of varying size being thrown in. Each with its respectively sized splash. Yet, their size does not make them any less transient.
They fade.
And sitting by the shore, a narrative comes to mind. I am unconcerned by it’s facticity. Who is there to judge it? It exists now.
In a good session, this narrative ripples out into nonexistence. But sometimes it is hard to let go. It sticks around afterwards. It is a monkey on my back for an inordinate metric of time. And sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes it is an insight that opens doors.
Sometimes, rarely, the narrative disappears and I find myself no longer on the shore. In fact, there is no me. The lake is all that exists. Its experiences are the only truth. There is no narrative to be had.
An emotion arises, a ripple forms, and there need not be a deeper reason for it. Does it matter what caused the ripple to form or what the caused the splash? Sure. But does it help at the moment to focus on it? No.
In the Sallattha Sutta buddha is said to have spoken about the two arrows. One which comes from an external source causing physical anguish, and the other coming from within us causing mental anguish.
When we find ourselves as the lake and not the watcher by it, we step out of our habits of the second arrow. Though meditation has been paramount in experiencing and practicing this. It is not the only way I have experienced it.
My recent trips were far from routine. In it, this stepping outside occurred. Moments where big emotions took hold in me and there was a singular experience. Lacking the words to articulate this, I have been resorting to the word “breathtaking”. That’s a misnomer.
It “blew me away”. That is what I would have liked to say. But not because I was overwhelmed with delight, surprise, or blown away in a literal sense. But, because for those moments, there was no me. There was the me now experiencing things as it happened.
It is not always that pleasant though. Stepping out can be terrifying. Without “me”, many things stop mattering. Or everything matters. Equally terrible. Sometimes, these stories we create about the emotions make it more tolerable for us to digest them. Big emotions, while transient, are big emotions. If we do not know how to manage them, they can be difficult. Stepping out might not even be real. Who knows?
I could have written words to have something to write today. Or maybe there’s a narrative in this? Guess that is up to you, if you exist.