The Teaching My Blood Whispers
The Teaching My Blood Whispers
Surely this one has the answers I seek
In my early 20s, I read about meditation much more than I meditated. The ratio was probably around 50:1.
There was a hunger, a need to pull all the information I could closer and closer, and if I read just one more book, if I watched just one more youtube video or listened to just one more dharma talk, something would finally click. I’d understand. I’d feel okay.
If only I could find The Thing outside of me that could inject the answer into me, then I’d be okay.
I’m not close to alone or unique here. It’s a constant. Carl Jung said
You study books and give ear to all kinds of opinion. What good is all that?
I remember Demian by Hermann Hesse having some choice words too:
I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teaching my blood whispers to me.
The teaching my blood whispers.
This trope is as old as books, probably older. There are tales in Tibetan Buddhism where teachers send off their students with a reminder, “now that I’ve taught it to you, remember you have to actually do it.”
It’s easy to forget.
This impulse, this need to look for answers outside of ourselves—it’s about to get a brand new meth.
These language models are impressive. They’re going to change the world, for better and worse. But for many of these changes, there will be nothing new in kind, only degree.
We crave answers outside ourselves. We’re unsettled when we quiet down, and so we do not hear the whisperings of our blood.
There’s little difference between spending hours reading a meditation manual without meditating, and spending hours hours talking to GPT-4 about meditation without meditating. Either way, the impulse is the driver.
If you actually are meditating, the difference gets a bit more dangerous, but that’s someone else’s scope, not mine.
We’re stepping into new futures. We need to step in with open eyes.
If, like me, you have patterns and weaknesses for certain impulses, and you’ve conquered the older versions of them—it’s worth considering ways that the new world plays on the same impulses. And how it might be more effective at it.