Tomas: Kia ora. Good to see you.
Anicca: Yeah, you too. You enjoying early spring over there?
Tomas: Yes! Quite ready for some warmer temps. And you’ve got autumn starting, eh?
Anicca: (Nodding) Yes, gorgeous. Turning leaves and all that.
Tomas: Well, let’s dive in.
In this month’s Foundations you said: Radical Inquiry is subtractive. It doesn’t ask how much more you can understand. It asks how much of what you currently take to be true can survive direct examination.
This got me remembering a point in my own dismantling where I’d examined enough of what I took to be true to be able to see that nothing can survive direct examination.
And that realization knocked me sideways because I still had a good bit of shit I hadn’t examined. So, here I was simultaneously able to see how fake I was while I was still being animated by this unexamined structure I couldn’t get out from under.
I remember feeling an almost claustrophobic revulsion for this thing I called “Me”. And that feeling of hatred became a big motivator for me to keep going.
Anicca: (Nodding.) That’s a dicey place! I can remember passing through that terrain myself and it does turn up the heat. Others I’ve worked with have spun out pretty hard there. Self-hatred isn’t an easy thing to endure.
Tomas: (Laughs) No, it’s not! You told me to sit still there and I thought you were fucking nuts.
(Both laugh.)
But you were right, because the heat it generated ultimately helped burn the rest down.
Anicca: Yeah, most people can’t sit still in that and end up grasping for some type of relief.
Tomas: But in hindsight it can be seen that it isn’t until you really start hating the false thing you’ve become that you have the fuel to go all the way. McKenna talks about this.
Anicca: Right. Once you truly apprehend the machinery, what was once experienced simply as me becomes visible as a repetitive, needy, defensive mechanism, and the reaction can be something like hatred or revulsion.
At first you want to understand the false self, but eventually you can’t stand the sight of it. You start to see the same pathetic machinery everywhere you look. The need to be liked, the need to be right. The endless explaining and defending. The rehearsed grievances, the fear, the posing, the bargaining. All the things that make up the juvenile self.
Tomas: Yeah, I remember that stuff so well. It was almost eerie when I could finally see myself doing those things. Not humanity, or the universe, or all those unconscious people out there. Me doing it.