Dear friends.
As we approach the ending of this year's sessions (end of April), we are going to explore some of the fruits of practicing presence, some of the faces of presence. Presence shows up in many flavors or tastes. Sometimes we feel a stillness, or a kind of clarity. At others we feel a settled gentle compassion. Sometimes we feel this sense of surging strength or capacity. In the Sufi tradition they say that God has ninety faces, the hundredth being unknowable.
This last Monday we looked at the quality, the flavor of the essence of truthfulness. Since this word truth can be daunting we used the words realness. We all know this particular taste of presence. Realness rings true, things line up, we feel clear and we feel alive and awake. We feel a sense of opening in our heart and the mind clears, and there can be a deep 'ah', or 'I get it'. And most importantly we feel real. The phrase 'the truth will set you free' makes sense. The realness of the truth feels free, unencumbered. There is a kind of inner freedom.
In contrast to realness we explored falseness. Mostly we are not aware of how false, fake or even dishonest we are. But as you turn towards your experience, as you practice being present you may begin to notice the actual flavor or taste of falseness. You may feel edgy, sticky, brittle, mushy, vague, agitated, dull, sleepy. Falseness has a bad taste. Something feels off. We feel defensive, off kilter. When feel this way we may become more defensive, trying to cover up something, trying to hide. We may even pretend to be real and honest. The superego can arise at this time attacking us for not being authentic. It can shame us for not being real. Or if we do expose more of the truth it can attack us mercilessly afterwards for being too open, for being vulnerable and exposed.
We can't help but be fake. Our ego is fake. It is made up of layer and upon layer of defense mechanisms, habitual unconscious patterns of responding that we learned in our formative layers. It developed to protect us from the pain of an unresponsive, abusive or miss attuned environment. We needed this shell to survive and function in the world . Thank god it developed. The fakeness arises out of the mechanicalness of the shell. We think we are free and spontaneous but once you turn inwards you begin to see the same repetitive, conditioned patterns. It is shocking at first to see how mechanical we really are.
Inner work is not just driven by the desire to be free from suffering but also for the longing for realness. We want to know and feel the truth of who and what we are, both at the level of our engagement with the world but also in the depths of our being. The inner journey inevitably forces us to face all the falseness, all the ways we distort ourselves, tie ourselves into knots in order to be accepted and loved, to avoid conflict, to be successful in a world immersed in so much superficiality. We try to be authentic and we try to be truthful. And these are vital efforts. They are part of our development. But you may notice that these efforts often involve hiding the falseness. We try to improve ourselves. But something is still off.
Curiously by embracing the falseness, by admitting it to ourselves and perhaps to others we actually begin to align with truthfulness. We are being real about our fakeness! This is not about a guilty confession. Nor is this about bashing people with 'my truth'. This gesture of aligning with the truth of my falseness takes sincerity, courage, vulnerability and especially a kind of love. This means admitting we cover our confusion, our doubts with a false bravado, an arrogant certainty; we are strong and yet we pretend to be small, we are silent and yet we desperately want to speak up; we pretend to be loving when we really feel hatred or indifference. Perhaps the most surprising cover up of all is when we deny our true presence, and insist that we are deficient egos. We discovered on Monday night that recognizing the inevitable falseness, allowing it to be held gently, allows an opening into presence. This is the presence of realness, of truthfulness.
Over and over we have seen that by turning toward our experience we open, and the grace of presence may arise to greet us. Presence holds all of us, all of reality in fact. Presence is not some mental, philosophical notion. It is palpable, it is welcoming. Nothing is rejected. This is not the realm of the judgmental punishing God or the superego. It is the mystery of blessing, which invites us to open into all our brokenness, into all our sins and all our falseness. As we turn inward, unlike what happened when we were children, we discover that presence meets us, greets, holds us and we can relax into the vulnerability of our humanness.
Questions from last session. Tell me a way you are false? Tell me a way you experience realness? Explore the movement of falseness to realness and back to falseness. How does realness feel? How does falseness feel?
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