Backfire: Impression Grabbing

I see one thing I often do in meditation is instead of being in the moment, to grab onto my impressions of it. It’s like when you tape record a single sound and replay it over and over again, creating the illusion of continuity, where there is none. You take it to be what is happening now, when in fact it’s merely a mental impression of that which was, which is now long gone, and what is happening now is something entirely different. What you are getting hung up on is not even what was, as what was no longer exits; what you are looking at or hearing is something like an after image of what was, and no longer is, and has nothing to do with the present moment, except that your impression of what was is happening now. Meanwhile, you are overlooking everything else that is happening now. You are being taken in by your own mental impression, and all you are experiencing is the image you constructed from what had already happened, but thinking this image is what’s happening. Reality has moved on, but you missed it.

Why do we do this? Could it be that we are afraid of change, and prefer the security of thinking we can grab onto something safe and secure and wrap ourselves in it? But then we are treating reality as something outside of us. Why else would we prefer this illusion to the flow of experience?

Desire for certainty leads to attachment to what is already gone; in other words, uncertainty. How silly, and yet although I know this I keep on doing it. I wonder where I picked up this habit.

No wonder I sometimes find life so boring and tedious; it’s just the way I think, not the way it is. Actually it’s changing constantly, but what I usually think of as reality is nothing of the kind, but only my thoughts, feelings, and impressions of it. Of course my thoughts, feelings, and impressions are real, but they are only a very tiny part of all that is, and if I get stuck on them I limit my vision; whereas, reality is enormous, perhaps even unlimited.

So then, when I have pain, it’s so tiny in relation to all that is, but sometimes it becomes my world, and then, as far as I am concerned it’s everything. How horrible is that! But to the extent that I can disentangle myself from this view, and see everything instead, so too, to that extent I will suffer less.

We so seldom respond to reality because we don’t know what’s going on when it’s going on, and this leads to all sorts of mistakes, which create problems for us. Instead we base our actions on pseudo-reality, the one we create because we are afraid of the flow of change, though it’s really just us in disguise.