Full Immersion
By Michael Erlewine
No matter how we twist and turn, change, or shift, that’s just our outer form. Nothing deep inside changes that I am aware of. We, any one of us, still have to come to terms with what’s inside, with the mind and its non-dual nature. The true nature of the mind is right there, waiting to be recognized, discovered, and our access to it enabled. It has to be pointed out to us because it is so close.
We can change our face, our outer situation, but getting to know our mind is not so easy. What we can do is begin to get to know and become familiar with our own mind. And to do that we have to, so to speak, come down from our mental high horse, and stop minding everything. I wrote this fun poem.
THE REST OF THE MIND
You cannot rest the mind,
but you can let the mind rest.
Just let go,
And don’t mind the rest.
In other words, we can’t ‘think’ life. We can only live life and we can’t do that from way up there in the mental clouds, taking cover under concepts and the ‘intellect’. Why? Because it’s not satisfying, and intellect by itself has no feelings or sense. It is senseless.
If we want to feel life, we can’t just stick our toe in the water; we have to jump in and immerse ourselves, and we can’t do that with one hand on our mental steering wheel. It takes all of us, and a ‘Look Ma, No Hands’ approach. We have to inundate ourselves by complete immersion in life, if only for a moment.
And right now, most of us are more lost in thought and not feeling it, than we are immersed in non-dual experience. I would bet on that.
As mentioned above, no matter how hard we search for a back door to living life, to just continue coasting in the mind, there is no back door, and sooner or later we will come to this fact, that if we want to feel and have meaning, we have to jump in and take the plunge, enter the water, and that means full immersion and our getting involved, getting wet, so to speak.
We could say, “Come on in, the water’s fine,” yet most people take refuge in the mind and intellect, not in their feelings. Our feelings and actual sense experience can get scary for us, not that the crazy mind cannot. LOL. The exclusively ‘thinking’ mind already is crazy.
This frigid approach, of not even venturing a toe in the water, leaves us high and dry. It would be no problem; accept it is a problem. The German philosopher Hegel said this very well in his description of what he termed the ‘Beautiful Soul’:
“This soul lacks force to externalize itself… the power to make itself a thing and to endure existence. And, to preserve the purity of its heart, it flees from actuality and steadfastly perseveres in a state of self-willed impotence to renounce a self which is pared away to the last point of abstraction… and to give itself substantial existence or in other words: to transform its thought into being and commit itself to absolute distinction, that between thought and being.”
Get Michael Erlewine -- Archivist Popular Culture’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
And Shakespeare, of course, said “To Be or Not to Be.”
“Not to Be” is what we are pointing at here, taking refuge in the mind at the expense of life and living it, not daring to live and fully immerse ourselves in life. Intellectuals tend to do this with too much conceptual abstraction and not enough sensual experience. They lack good sense.
These folks literally lack common sense, the sensual, and they need to wash their mind in the waters and sense of life and inundate their freeze-dried words and concepts. Full immersion is what is required here and not just mere thinking and words.
That’s it. There you have the idea. And of course, it’s up to each of us to decide how much we are abstracted from life and how much we are involved and immersed. We vary.
However, hint, hint… if we are dissatisfied, we are dissatisfied, and no amount of intellection can fix that. Satisfaction has to make sense, and sense is sensual, and not abstract. Sense is always a physical experience waiting for us to have, if we will allow ourselves to feel it.
How to immerse ourselves in the sea of life is not quite as simple as ‘Just jump in, the water is fine.” Our habit of intellectual abstraction is by now totally established. We don’t just break it as we would break a vase.
That part of us, too much mentation, has to be deconstructed, taken apart, piece by piece and bit by bit like the old game of “Pick-Up-Sticks,” and right now we are not of that persuasion. We are not used to letting go or just jumping in. It’s everything we don’t do.
However, we need to do it!
Yet, this is easier said than done. We have painted ourselves into a corner of words and intellection and can’t get out, can’t let go of that. We first have to discover that the mind is not just conceptual, but is a hybrid, a cross between the abstract and full immersion.
That’s the magic and the mystery.
And to experience this we first have to exercise the mind viscerally and not just mentally, much like we would exercise a muscle. The mind is effective like a muscle. It has to be limbered up and massaged or kneaded like we might knead dough for making a pizza.
And this is done through various dharma exercises, physical and mental, which we might discuss.
[Midjourney graphic prompted by me.]
EMAIL Michael@Erlewine.net Note: If you would like to have access to other free books, articles, and videos on these topics, here is the link: SpiritGrooves.net.
As Bodhicitta is so precious,
May those without it now create it,
May those who have it not destroy it,
And may it ever grow and flourish.
