Soul And Personality (What Is Now? Podcast)

How do you know what's capital T True? Saqib and Charles explore this question and more in today's experiential conversation. Each of these sessions begins with one minute of silence followed by an unplanned interpersonal exploration of the present moment and finishes with a short guided meditation based on the themes of the session. Thanks for joining us!

Transcript

Welcome to the what is now experience we begin with one minute of silence and then explore whatever arises so please join us for this one minute of doing nothing how was your experience today something i noticed was that it seems like in a shorter period of silence so we just sat for two minutes um i noticed that relative to a longer period of sitting of what you might call meditation in the two minute shorter period of time my mind seems to have less of a tendency to move into wandering thoughts about planning or the rest of the day or like these typical things that seem to be more active for me in a longer period of sitting or a longer meditation i was just wondering why that is because that's i've noticed it'd be slightly frustrating for me a little bit recently because i've attempted to sort of galvanize my meditation practice and return to something very simple of of very intentionally focusing on just the breath and like really trying to diligently return to just the breath count to 10 get distracted come back to one just like really focus in because along with this book i've been reading called the mind illuminated um just been sort of trying to go through that very simple practice but i've noticed how my mind is is just it's so wandering to all these different things but in that short period of time i noticed that it really wasn't i wonder if it's like my mind a part of my mind knows on some level that i only have a short period of time yeah if you sit versus my mind knowing that i have like 30 minutes for example to sit so it's not that important uh to really do it right now i have more time to do it so now i can do whatever i quote unquote want to i don't know what you think about that was that was kind of the forefront of my two-minute experience there no i think i i have a very similar same experience and uh you know uh i think i was having a similar experience even today in that two-minute silence where i was feeling that you know uh when we sit for longer uh durations sometimes we get i i would start getting agitated you know okay it's a long meditation one hour is like you know i should i think maybe end in 30 minutes or something but when i did this two-minute thing i was like oh you know we should have had more of this in these two minutes or maybe we could extend for five minutes so i think there is something uh relative here in that sense where you know you it's like these two minutes become a gift where you don't want to let go of this opportunity of diverting of you know being focused and being uh connected to to this moment uh so for me it's that and what you said was i think also relates to the practice of focus in the sense that i think what i feel is that it does take a certain amount of force of will to come to this moment because it's like you know the subconscious mind it is like ready with those thousands of thoughts to bombard you with those thoughts but you kind of practice force of will to uh to not let that happen and to not get carried away by those thoughts so you know as you said you would bring your focus to your breath breath or something or you know some object or you would just kind of use that force of will to like i don't know how you do that but i do that that i would use that force of will to you know to focus my mind on a particular thing for so when when it is two minutes as you said you know it becomes easier because you know that you know it's just two minutes we just have to do this for two minutes but if it is for like half an hour then you are like you try to do that for two minutes then three minutes then your mind diverts and then you come back again and so you know it i think there is some relativity there yeah just making me think that when it's two minutes you're maybe on some level you're more aware of how short of a time that you have so then there's some increased internal motivation yeah or will like you said to actually just be here versus when we have a sense that we have more time there's maybe less less of that will to really be here it just made me think of like the awareness of a life if i was if i knew i was going like the example if i knew i was going to die tomorrow so much of the wandering thoughts and cares and stresses and worries would immediately vanish and i would you know do everything that the deepest part of me wants to do before i die i would try to do as much of it as possible tell people how i feel you know to shed all of the stuff that doesn't matter as much as i could because i realized on a very real level how little time i have left versus you know at this point it's still on some level feels like i'm going to live forever so there's not that much pressure to do all these things that i most deeply want to do i can do it tomorrow or i can do it next year or the next year but maybe i'll increasingly feel that pressure yeah as time goes on or maybe if i have like what can be called a boundary experience where i almost die or i have someone close to me die that might shock me into an awareness of that but then if i probably if i'm not careful i would quickly fall back into ignorance of the fact that this is actually really fleeting yeah yeah yeah it's beautiful you know so what what i'm taking out of this is that would then it would be right to say that if we have like if we know we have less time let's say if you know we are going to you know we are we just have we just have like one or two days to live then does that mean that i will become more mindful would you say that i would guess so yes that's interesting actually i think i will start living my life more fully you know because i know that it will not be there uh in in just two days time so i would appreciate the food that i eat more i would appreciate nature more or the side of the relationships uh seeing the moon or hearing certain sounds or taking a shower or i would appreciate all this stuff because i would realize how few opportunities i have left to experience those things yeah yeah and that's a beautiful thought you know i was just listening to a song last night and although you know this song was in like in urdu language because it's a pakistani song the meaning of that song was that you know when uh when death will come to us what we will remember and what we won't remember so you know the the like the poet was talking about that in the song and he said that we won't remember you know our belief systems we won't remember our culture or you know what we believe in or basically what our ideology is or you know what what rules should we follow and what rules shouldn't we follow what we will remember is those moments where we lived life fully and where we listen to our when we listen to our heart so that's what we would remember those moments we just listen to our heart and we lived life fully and we just did what we want to do and you know i think i was also reading a research about people who die what's their biggest regret and i think it is basically those moments and what do they remember basically the most and it is those moments where they kind of lived fully and you know just did what they would like to do from their deepest of their heart so just imagine if we start i'm thinking if we just start living life like that then i think that that's beautiful we bring beauty to our lives that way in the context of that song this makes me think of the language of the personality and the soul or it could be any kind of language but it's one way of sort of dichotomy and that in that case we would forget the personality and remember the soul or like we would vanish all those layers of stuff that is built up on top of something that's just here and is most pure and has come out in little moments of like revealing my heart or just being really present with something or someone that those would be the things that i remember that are underneath maybe the level or layer of my personality my belief systems the stuff that generally is so important to me all that might just drop yeah so it will be like a ego death before the actual death which is maybe what like we all i don't know about we all but some of us really hope for or what like this path of spirituality or meditation seems to sort of be after is quote unquote achieving that ego death so i can die to myself before i actually die so i can really be alive in the time that i have to be alive yeah yeah beautiful i was just uh you know this question was coming to my mind right now that uh and i was just thinking about you know i'm glad we are talking about this because excuse me i was just thinking about this yesterday you know because uh i had to do a recording and i couldn't do that do that because i felt like just you know uh reading something and i was like oh my god i was getting this a bit of stress like i'm not recording and i need to complete this you know by this date and and what i'm doing is i'm just reading this book right now and you know i'm basically just kind of enjoying myself and not worried about you know doing something or you know creating something or should i do that should i not do that you know it can maybe again those fears would come up that you know if i if i don't produce if i don't you know create these meditations and recordings then my work will be affected and all those things but also at the same time my heart was saying something else so what i want to ask you is what do you think is it a good idea to just follow your heart all the time or you need to do things at times which you don't feel like doing that's a good really good question too because there's maybe something to distinguish there also because maybe distinguishing if that is my heart or if that's subtly my personality or there's like a it's somehow a protection from releasing my heart or my soul but it feels like that's me and that's what i really want to do is maybe to just read in this moment like i'm thinking of i'm working on writing this book and just before our call i was just thinking about this feels like the hardest thing that i've ever done and maybe it's also because there's nobody telling me to do it and i don't have any particular expectations but it just feels like the sort of the deepest thing that i could be doing but i so frequently find myself resisting it or wanting to do something else or maybe read frequently reading is something that i find myself wanting to do but i came across kind of a cool quote related to that from robert persig he wrote zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance he said reading is the enemy of writing which really resonated with me like because it can very subtly feel like that's good and that's sort of developing the momentum of writing but it might actually be directly sort of taking up energy that otherwise could be given to writing but it's hard maybe to distinguish like what is right in any moment and maybe that's like the art form of life yeah do i do i really want to read right now do i deeply want to complete this meditation or write in the book but it's like it's requiring a certain energy uh that i don't want to exert in this moment um i don't know if any of that makes sense but what do you think about that i totally yeah i can totally relate uh because you know what you said about reading and writing sometimes we can also bring our awareness to uh the fact that you know reading is just getting uh information from outside and i was you know kind of contemplating about this just a few days ago but i was thinking okay when i'm reading because i was even questioning my habit of reading that okay why am i you know reading these days and it's just these days that i'm reading very much uh usually i don't do that much you know i would i'm not a very average reader i would say but i would just like maybe read a book a month and that's enough so but this time i found myself reading a lot and i was asking you know why am i doing this so there is i found that there is this desire to have information so but then i was also questioning am i not trusting my inner information and am i giving more value to this outer information that's coming from outside so it brought me to a great insight where i realized that you know sometimes it is also okay to let go of that reading because we sometimes don't we value the author's information more than our own inner wisdom and if we you know i think maybe if you can apply this to your writing if you feel like that maybe when you are writing your information that's coming that's coming more from your soul you know because you are not having that information in flow from outside but it's like channeling that information onto the paper from which is coming from your deepest wisdom totally you're having to it takes that there's like a receiving energy and then there's a creating energy yeah and that creating energy this seems totally different from the receiving yeah kind uh and with writing at least for me it's like i'm constantly having and it comes back maybe to language too i have this interesting relationship with language and we've talked about language quite a bit yeah because so much of my perspective anyways is that there's there's sort of capital t truth that cannot be put into words and then we attempt to use words to symbolize and represent that truth and try to get as close as we can but we never can actually have it in any sort of tangible or external form and so in writing i have a certain like message that i am trying to get across but i i'm sort of strangled in a sense in that i never can actually like get that across i'm constantly having to decide this is what i'm going to say even though it's not like i have this pre-packaged thing that okay i just i have this thing so i'm gonna just go through and write all the points of it and deliver it to you because there is no pre-packaged thing there's a there's some sort of basic like soul based thing which i have a sort of skeleton of what it means conceptually and intellectually but then as i'm writing i have to just choose like in the moment does this feel right even knowing that it's never going to be capital r right like there isn't a right thing so i'm just so it takes quite a bit of some sort of energy to be continually doing that or to create something that has like a more narrative form and like it has to sort of make sense as a collection of things versus like interaction like this where it just sort of exists and it doesn't need to make sense in any sort of broader scheme of things it's just sort of happening and flowing which is also what i hope for the book itself that it just it's sort of all contained maybe in a paragraph but it hopefully makes some sense as you make your way through it yeah but it is challenging it is it is and you know uh what i although i'm not a writer i've just written like you know maybe a few blogs or something sometimes i write but i'm not like a writer as such so but what i experienced in my writing was that you know there are two kinds of situations i am in when i'm writing one is when i'm trying to put things into words and that is where i find my rational mind getting involved a lot you know kind of trying to put in words what i'm trying to explain that becomes challenging but automatically when i feel more connected there would come uh you know times when it just kind of flows as if it's not my words and it it you know it also it's interesting that it becomes very poetic and you know this is what i feel about a lot of poets that the words are kind of not coming from the rational mind but there are they are very kind of they are flowing from somewhere else and it is as if those someone else is speaking and you are just putting it onto paper it becomes very poetic in that sense and i think that's how a lot of poets and you know including rumi uh rabindranath tagore they have kind of channeled these poems i was just listening to a you know osho was talking about an experience with the rabindranath tagore so he's an indian poet uh you know a very wonderful poet and he's known for his poetry so rabindranath tagore once like wrote a poem and it was like kind of very beautiful however there were you know he so that poem was to be like presented at some international conference i think it was un or some other conference and uh he like he there was this person who was a kind of an editor because it had to go on on the global stage so he wanted to check whether the grammar is okay or not so he he said that four words in your poem is beautiful but four words in your poem are grammatically incorrect and he changed those words so when he went to this conference and when he read out his poem people like cheered and you know said wonderful amazing but they said that you know everything is perfect just these four words don't make sense and that's when he realized that you know these four words have gone out of poetry and rationality kicked in and that's why these four words don't fit in right so i think when it becomes flow it flows from the soul it kind of becomes poetic in that sense and it kind of you know then encompasses the meaning of you know the whole more than as compared to when it is coming from the rational mind this is this is my experience yeah it makes a lot of sense to me i'm just thinking about how potentially a work of art or poetry or a book could become very muddled when it's like bouncing back and forth between what is more poetic or more of a direct expression through that channel and what is more based on the intellectual rational mind of well you don't say something like that because of the rules of grammar or might make it like a less pure form and that's also a challenge that i am facing as i go through because i constantly have the sort of voice of the editor or some potential reader that's like that doesn't make sense so you gotta take that sentence out it didn't make sense but it's maybe really because you weren't open to it or you were looking at it only through the intellectual mind and if you were to stay with it or be open to it then it could sort of reveal something important to you so it actually is important for it to be that way that seems wrong at first i've heard of art as like a bridge and the bridge needs to be stable enough for people to to traverse the bridge to get to this other place but it also needs to take you to another place that you didn't know was there before so it's like but it's this maybe subtle ability of creating the bridge that can take someone because if it's if it's too far away then the person might not even be open to it and they won't go there but if it's open just enough but it still challenges you then it will take you into this new perspective or understanding or feeling like i think of music sometimes some of my favorite songs are the ones that i didn't really like at first but i had to because they were they didn't you know automatically make sense to me but then i stay with them i'm like oh this is like my favorite my favorite song on the album is this one but it's the one that i was like i don't know about i don't know about that one at first yeah yeah yeah and it also poses the question that you know how much like is it is it okay is it okay to be grammatically incorrect or not because i feel that you know that perfection grammatically becomes boring and it it destroys the the creativity and maybe it is okay to you know say some things which are you know which are out of place or which are you know that don't make sense you know i was just reading a book yesterday i think the name of this book is divine magic by patrick dunn so what he was explaining he was kind of trying to explain that how would you know greek philosophers would have conversations so so he was he took these two characters who had peculiar names greek names and they were having a conversation and they suddenly started talking about albert einstein and i was like this doesn't make sense like these greek philosophers they were supposed to live in the third century or fourth century bc they are talking about albert einstein this is this is a flaw and immediately after that came a paragraph where he said where these two characters were talking to each other and they said why are we talking about and albert einstein we were supposed to live in the third bc the other person says no we are just fictional characters we're not limited to that yeah we are not limited to so we are not and he also talked about time that we can travel you know future and back so it was kind of funny yeah and i thought love wow this is this is just amazing you know now it it factually doesn't make sense but it's it's creative and poetic in that sense right it's beautiful so sometimes i feel that grammar or you know being factually correct also limits our creativity totally uh that's the way i've been trying to approach reading too is when i notice feeling restricted by a particular like rule or something it's like the rule doesn't matter at all i mean yeah it only matters until there's that example of someone who breaks the rule and it works and there is that exception for everything yeah absolutely this is so helpful you know i think i'm also uh kind of preparing myself to start writing so this conversation is very interesting because sometimes i would also get those ideas you know i need to be factually correct i need to you know these editors should like and this should happen but sometimes i would feel like just let's just write and not because it also becomes a kind of a blockage in writing you know you want to be so factually correct and all those things that you kind of you don't even complete the book or don't you know it doesn't flow out of you right then eventually i thought let's just write and let it flow whatever comes out you know yeah not be so kind of restrict myself it's nice to just sort of move into who cares yeah that's a just relieving thing to just say like yeah who cares just just move in to that or why am i even thinking of these hypothetical people uh and it makes me think of like back again to the personality or living based on the rules of the personality versus creating something just for the sake of right now you know as if as if you were going to die tomorrow and you just want to create this thing you wouldn't be worried about what these hypothetical editors would be thinking about it or what maybe the readers would be thinking about it or how much money this is going to you know bring to you if you do it in a certain way or market it in a certain way it would just be maybe solely focused on expressing directly from that channel yeah it's beautiful and you how you tied into what we were discussing previously about death and that's beautiful yes i think i think what i would conclude from this is the more kind of mindful we are when in writing or you know doing any sort of similar stuff the more it kind of the more beauty it has to it rather than you know with our fears in our mind that you know i should be right factually or grammatically or whatever right that is yeah well maybe along with that to finish would you want to take like 30 seconds to sit and be aware of just being alive for that very brief time that i would love that sounds good well i could just watch the clock and tell us when to start and end so we can take 30 minutes to just be here starting i can now oh sure okay it's about 30 seconds well thanks for this exploration and i'll be i'll be taking this i think any time that we can maybe remind each other of this thing of how fleeting i mean it's easy to intellectually think of how fleeting life is but to actually remember it and feel it in any way to share that with someone else or have something that reminds you of it i can hopefully like push you in the direction of being able to bodily remember it and then be a motivator to act on behalf of your soul and whatever it is that you're doing yes absolutely absolutely and you know one last thing i would like to add to that is when it comes from within the way we do it you know here it is it is kind of coming from within and the realization is more profound because it is something which is something realized deeply within us but when it comes from an external source when we are listening to someone else or reading something then the realization is not that profound because it's an external source it is not deeply realized or something which is within so i think that's why i find these conversations very very you know effective in that sense because it's a very deep realization and it stays for long sounds good i look forward to exploring with you next time same here bye thank you for joining us in the what is now experience we hope that you liked the episode if there were any insights or ideas arising for you as you were listening to our conversation then you can share those ideas through your comments we would love to know stay tuned for the next episode namaste

Reviews

Thank you both for sharing….. I am a writer and enjoy reading and I’ve never really thought about the different kind of energy the two activities require nor how impacted my writing can be by the ego. I am grateful for your insights!