The Core of Spirituality: The Matrix is You
“Who am I?” It’s the question that burns at the root of every life issue. Your search for purpose, the right job, the right friends, the right body: they all seek to create a version of you that you desire and avoid a version of you that you dislike. You’re not alone. Every philosophy, religion, and study of human behavior is centered on this one issue: answering the question of existence.
The quest for this answer may seem to have been relegated only to those who have the time, privilege, and intelligence to seek it. But, intellectuals and monks aren’t the only ones dealing with this. It’s seeped in our art, music, and everyday actions. To see what I mean, let’s take a look at a snapshot of the every day for an every day kind of woman.
Sarah’s Frustrating Weekday Morning
Sarah wakes up and dreads choosing an outfit. She looks at her closet and sees clothes that don’t feel like “her”, clothes that she doesn’t think will be appropriate for her office, and clothes she feels like she should wear but are uncomfortable. Sarah’s choices are being measured against her thoughts about herself and how she projects others will view her. After getting dressed, she goes to the mirror to put on the make-up that makes her face feel cakey (choosing a perceived “better” appearance over her own comfort).
She notices the shape of her belly and thighs, becoming upset at herself for the dinner she ate the night before. Then she remembers…oh shit…and gets even more upset at the snack she ate at 11 pm and wants to forget. So upset, in fact, that she pushes that memory away before it has time to really let her know she felt anything about it. Sarah has jumped to making value judgments about food, body, and doing what we all do so often: pushing an uncomfortable thought and the feeling that arises because of it into the subconscious.
She rushes to the car, makes her way to Starbucks to get coffee and a breakfast, and eats in the car while driving to a job that pays the bills but doesn’t give her enough money to buy all the things she would buy if she had more. This thought fills her with frustration, and she can almost hear the “ugh” of disgust that crosses her mind. Her feeling of disgust moves to another negative thought about the coworkers she can’t stand. In designing her life around external comforts, in a system she is quite literally buying into, Sarah doesn’t have time to be present with even the pleasure of eating. She is living in an imagined future and unable to enjoy the beauty of her here-and-now. And her focus on the future creates a negative feeling of lack. Her mind is then making connections to other frustrations to provide more evidence to support her perceived state of being.
“The mind is a restless monkey, difficult to tame.”
But Sarah is an Imaginary Person. She Doesn’t Exist…Or Does She?
Used for good or ill, the power of story is that what it invokes in our imagination creates an internal experience. If believed, this experience becomes embedded in us as “reality”, and our nervous system becomes trained to respond to similar perceived threats to our safety and comfort (i.e. if you perceive the world is dangerous, your body will be hypervigilant and cause you all types of health issues).
Sarah has experiences that tell her to gain weight is a bad thing, and she has stored information that tells her eating late will make her gain weight. Seeing how her actions didn’t align with that fear-based thinking, Sarah felt shame for her actions. The discomfort of shame led her to repress the emotion and ignore the thoughts about it. She’s caught on a hamster wheel of believed stories. But are any of them actually real or true? Or are they just based on socially agreed-upon fears?
Sarah will now likely be hypervigilant to any situation where she or others will judge her food choices, and she will either avoid these situations or rebel and say “fuck it” to the world and eat whatever she wants.
In both scenarios, the decision is reactive, based in fight/flight, and predicated on the thougths she believes about reality.
Every way we see the world is a reflection of our thoughts/beliefs/concepts about it. If you believe Sarah exists and feel empathy and connection to her, she is as real to you as if she was standing there in front of you. Your story has become a kind of mirror to your own experience. She is a projected thought. You could see her as someone you identify with, someone you judge and look down on, or someone you want to be like. How you see Sarah is primarily based on what you believe about your thoughts about her.
This is the same mental loop that Sarah is caught in, but she doesn’t quite see it yet. Instead, her thoughts are becoming her reality, as those thoughts are changing how she experiences her body, her food, her job, her coworkers: her LIFE.
Sarah believes what society is telling her, what she is telling herself, and what she tells others. By believing every thought, Sarah is creating the very world she lives in. Like in the movie The Matrix, Sarah has little parts of her mind trying to make everything seem hunky dory, blinding herself to the full experience of reality. When she could have been focused on the feeling of warmth in her room, the complexity and wonder of her skin in the mirror, the sound of the birds while walking to her car…she was instead focused on projections: analysis of past and projections of future.
Death and the Divine Life
So many of us live in this way because the mind is actively at work to identify what can maintain our most primal survival instincts: staying alive. This is the gift of the mind — to analyze and judge the past to find the best tools for “successful” survival and project them onto perceived future possibilities. At its very root, perceiving life in this way may be natural, and it’s rooted in fear. We know this because when scientists remove the fear response in the brain, dangerous environments are no longer avoided. (1)
As we know it now, it is our brain’s purpose to maintain our existence. If Sarah lets go of the past information she uses to define who she is and what keeps her safe, and doesn’t believe the ideas she has about herself, then the question arises: Who is she really!? Does “Sarah” even exist? How will she act? If we’re not who we think we are, and we’re able to respond to each moment without connecting to a story about how we “should” act, then our personality, story, past … does any of it matter? This lack of meaning can provide true freedom and also a sense of nihilism. It can cause the mind to fight against freedom because it can feel like death to our very sense of self and ignite that most primal instinct in us that fights against eradication.
To be identified with your mind is to identify with your most basic human instincts. To move beyond your mind concepts is to connect to the infinite possibility held within each moment of experience.
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Let’s explore how this concept is at the root of almost all spiritual practices. At this point, I think it is important to note that, for our purposes, spiritual “practices” are different from a spiritual “mythology”, or set of beliefs about reality that are rooted in a cultural/religious tradition.
Practices aim to connect a person to a more expanded sense of self, to the “divine”, or “god”, or the state of being beyond humanity. In the Torah of Judaism, the apparent divine calls itself, “I Am”. Notice how this phrase denotes a sense of being that both negates any definition that might limit “am-ness” or being-ness and allows for expansion into infinite possibility. “I Am” … can be anything and nothing. It is a phrase that exemplifies in words the symbology of the yin-yang: that reality is both nothing and everything, all at once. Light and dark, death and life - the dance of simultaneous, apparent opposites that make up each moment of experience.
But before we get too esoteric and into a full-blown comparative analysis of religious symbolism, let’s review the basic concepts discussed here.
The Illusion of Self
The answer to “who am I?” is often complex, wrapped in layers of identity, beliefs, and experiences. Yet, at the core of many spiritual practices, there's a unifying principle: the "you" that we perceive is not the real you. This apparent “self”, that which we think about ourselves with the mind, is a limited construct, a product of our thoughts, emotions, and perceptions. If you believe your thoughts, then your whole world becomes them. In other words, the cage of your reality are the constructs (aka beliefs) of your mind.
Breaking Free From the Mental Loop
The mind, while a powerful tool, can also be a prison. It can trap us in cycles of fear, desire, and suffering. The goal of many spiritual practices is to break free from this mental loop and identify with a larger, more expansive self. This is often referred to as "awakening," "enlightenment," or "self-realization."
“That which is not the mind, that which is not the intellect, that which is not the ego, that is the Self.”
The Psychological Perspective
Western psychology, particularly a branch of psychology called depth psychology, has also delved into the nature of consciousness and the self. Carl Jung, for example, explored the concept of the collective unconscious, a shared reservoir of archetypes that influence human behavior. He argued that by understanding these archetypes, we can gain a deeper insight into our own psyche and transcend its limitations. Archetypes help us tap into other aspects of reality that we may not think we have access to, based on our own experiences; but that, nevertheless, we can embody. Archetypes are symbols we can use to connect to the infinite possibilities of self that lay beyond our own experiences.
“The unconscious is the part of the psyche that does not know itself.”
For those of you who grew up in a religious tradition or in a culture that talked about religious stories, this may be a perfect time to discuss and possibly redefine the movement from archetypal/mythological story being used for contemplative spiritual practice to story being translated into historical fact.
Notice how myth remains “imaginal” and history moves into a mental construct of reality. History is limiting in scope and is often defined subjectively (have you ever heard “history is written by the victors?”). Imaginal realms remain open to endless interpretation because there is no “absolute truth” we seek to find in them. In this way, they remain “infinite”, or god-like, in a sense.
This is the power of myth, or the imaginal.
Myth and archetype only maintain their power when they remain somewhere “out there” in a mythical realm and not in a perceived historical past. Taking myth to a construct of past brings it, again, into the realm of the mind, used to form beliefs about now and for setting limits to experience and behavior. In this way, myth can and has been used as a form for control. In Ancient times, there was a reason the gods remained in the realms of the gods, beyond human experience. Perhaps it’s time we return those gods to their homes.
Spiritual Practice: Techniques for Transcendence
While the goal is the same - transcending the mind - the techniques to do so vary widely across spiritual traditions. This is great for you, because it means all methods can help you get there. So go ahead: pick your poison. And don’t be fooled, poison they are, for they are meant to destroy your notions of who you are.
Let’s examine some of the most fundamental practices that are a part of every tradition.
Meditation
A cornerstone of many traditions, mindfulness meditation involves training the mind to expand into the full experience of the moment, noticing that your sense of “being” is separate from your mental chatter. With practice, the mind can become just another experience that happens within your field of awareness (aka what you notice).
Thoughts become like the sound of a bird chirping in a tree. You notice it’s there, but you don’t identify yourself with the bird. After a time, you may realize that everything that arises within your awareness comes in through your senses, and that those, too, are within the field of awareness. In this way, awareness you are within awareness and also not separate from it. And now “you’re” in trouble, because you’ve realized there is no you at all - only an experience of awareness experiencing more awareness.
(If your mind feels like exploding now, it’s ok. Keep going.)
In forms of meditation that focus on a divine being, such as in the Christian tradition of meditating on the trinity (father, son, and holy spirit), again, you’re able to move the mind from identification with a perceived human self to an infinite being-ness. Can you notice the common denominator here? Within the trinity and mindfulness meditation, all states of being are existing at once: a word or thought that creates limitations on experience, a physical human form, and an energy that moves within all things beyond time and space.
Prayer
A form of spiritual communication, prayer can involve supplication, praise, or contemplation. Prayer connects you to a power that is “outside” of your apparent self, allowing the conscious and unconscious mind to connect to powers that seem beyond your ability. But when you connect to these powers, they shift the way you perceive reality, and, therefore, shift your reality.
The “calling upon” a divine entity, spirits, saints, angels, guides, and/or ancestors moves the mind to a symbol for an energy that exists within the mythic or infinite realm, that which is beyond the capacities of the mind to define within a construct. It is like a bridge between the world of expanded, infinite possibility and your sense-based experience of the here-and-now. Prayer, then, is another form of calling the infinite into awareness.
Dream Analysis
In some traditions, and especially in psychoanalysis, dreams are seen as a gateway to the unconscious mind - that field beyond the “personal” consciousness that includes all potentiality of mind. By analyzing dreams, individuals can gain insights into their subconscious patterns and beliefs. In other words, dreams open you up to realities that lay beyond the limitations of your “apparent self”, or the constructs of your mind. Thoughts, feelings, and drives that do not fit within the confines of the personality you wish yourself to be often arise in dreams.
Like mythology, when kept in the mythic realm, these dreams can give you access to parts of yourself that can be used to expand your reality in many ways. You can use dreams to expand awareness of the parts of you that may not fit into social norms, parts of you that have been suppressed from trauma, and parts of you that are arising to be seen by conscious awareness.
The Common Thread, aka LIFE
Despite their differences, these techniques share a common goal: to help individuals recognize the limitations of the mind and connect with an expanded level of consciousness. This more expanded self is often described as infinite, eternal, and beyond the boundaries of space and time. It’s often called the “deeper” self, which may give the illusion that it’s small or within, but this is just a product of the constructs of language. Beyond those constructs, big/small, deep/shallow, within/without lead to exactly the same place - the infinite.
In the end, life itself is the spiritual practice: the process of separating you from the apparent self. You will, after all, die one day. It is this knowledge, perhaps, that has driven humanity to find ways to die before they die, to move into the liminal, or in-between, space — the apparent underworld shadow land of the infinite powers, both divine and dangerous, and the human lifetime of being “you” that you get to experience with your senses.
And the truth of our scary fairy tales and myths is the deepest truth of all: you can run and you can hide, but you can’t escape the grip of death. Perhaps this is why we all have a desperate sense to cling to something. The question is: is there really anything to cling to?
And that, my friends, might just be the reason every spiritual practice comes down to one thing: love through death. Maybe, just maybe, it is the surrender to death that allows us to touch the divine and, in doing so, become infinite.
“Truly I tell you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be lifted up and thrown into the sea,’ and does not doubt in their heart but believes that what they say will happen, it will be done for them.”
Meditation prompt:
Find stillness by finding a comfortable position, and begin to notice your breath. Visualize your breath like air moving through a full, green tree. Notice how the leaves sway left and right with every inhale and exhale. Then, begin to notice your thoughts. Notice what begins to arise after reading this material. You may notice thoughts of disagreement, thoughts of doubt, thoughts of worry. Allow each thought to arise, and use the phrase, “oh, interesting” to meet each thought. Notice each thought as though it’s a bird call you hear in the trees. It catches your attention for a moment, and then allow your attention to move back to the swaying leaves in the branches, moving left and right with each inhale and exhale.
Continue this practice for as long as you’d like. Notice what happens to your state of being as you let each thought come and go.
When you are complete, please feel free to share your thoughts, feelings, and any other comments in the comments section. I’d love to connect with you.
Sources
(1) https://neurosciencenews.com/fear-memory-brain-mapping-27572/
