The Cocoon
Article 2 of 6 on What is Real?
If you haven’t already, it may serve you to first read The Deeper Meaning of ALOHA and the first article in this series of five articles: The Three Approaches to Understanding Reality.
“Imagine you are walking in the woods and you see a small dog sitting by a tree. As you approach it, it suddenly lunges at you, teeth bared. You are frightened and angry. But then you notice that one of its legs is caught in a trap. Immediately your mood shifts from anger to concern: You see that the dog’s aggression is coming from a place of vulnerability and pain. This applies to all of us. When we behave in hurtful ways, it is because we are caught in some kind of trap. The more we look through the eyes of wisdom at ourselves and one another, the more we cultivate a compassionate heart.”
~ Tara Brach
“When people used to complain to the Buddha that they were upset, telling him, ‘Our children upset us, our partner agitates us.’ His simple reply would be, ‘You are not upset because of your children or your partner; you are upset because you are upset-able.’”
~ Eknath Easwaran
“One of the metaphors for ego is a cocoon. We stay in our cocoon because we’re afraid—we’re afraid of our feelings and the reactions that life is going to trigger in us. We’re afraid of what might come at us. But if this avoidance strategy worked, then the Buddha wouldn’t have needed to teach anything, because our attempts to escape pain, which all living beings instinctively resort to, would result in security, happiness, and comfort, and there would be no problem. But what the Buddha observed is that self-absorption, this trying to find zones of safety, creates terrible suffering. It weakens us, the world becomes more terrifying, and our thoughts and emotions become more and more threatening as well there.”
~ Pema Chödrön, Taking the Leap
Each of us is blocking our ability to consistently experience our True Nature of ALOHA. ALOHA has always been available to us. It’s just now hidden by habitual mental patterns we’ve clung onto.
In the Shambhala Buddhist teachings, our tendency to distract ourselves from ALOHA with outside circumstances, with endless projects, with entertainments, with adventures, with habitual patterns, with busy-ness, with stories, with gossip, with run-on thoughts and non-stop talking is referred to as the “cocoon.” The cocoon is our conceptual/ego mind, our “personhood,” if you will.
The cocoon is a mental impulse that we create to keep ourselves from feeling and from dealing with things that seem less than desirable or that we’re afraid of dealing with.
The cocoon is dark, smelly, and slimy yet, because we’re so accustomed to hiding out in there, we have a deluded sense that it’s comfortable and safe.
Most of the time, perhaps, you're not conscious of what your mind is doing - but you can become conscious of that.
In fact, in order to understand ourselves, we must become expert at being aware of what our mind is doing and how it informs and infects our emotions, the things we say, and the things we do.
Over the years that we’ve been alive, we’ve taken on other people’s messages as beliefs - as our own truth. These “truths” (or more accurately, “this conditioning”) became the habitual ways that we interpret, react, respond, and interact with everyone and everything in the world.
Dare I say we’ve lived our lives on auto-pilot according to how other people have told us and expected us to live, think, react, and believe.
Sure some of those “truths and beliefs” have been helpful at times but it’s likely we’ve never reviewed any of our truths, any of our beliefs, any of our conditioning intentionally to see if they are still valid or need updating or discarding.
Do they still serve us and others well? Or not?
We probably go through our closets way more often to discard the things we no longer need or use than we’ve ever investigated why we think the way we think. And it’s because no one told us we could – or should. But now I’m telling you.
I propose for your consideration that we currently live our lives guided mainly by habit - from the conditioning we’ve taken on as our own beliefs - and that by doing so we’ve created an imaginary world: The world we live in and think is real.
Again, the cocoon has a certain comfort to it. It encases us so there’s a sense of coziness, a sense of “safety,” because all that conditioning has been with us for so long. We’ve come to rely on it. It’s easy. We don’t need to think. But mostly, we don’t have to feel or deal with uneasy things.
But that’s all a false sense of comfort, a false sense of safety.
In reality, there’s a subtle claustrophobic quality to the cocoon that we’ve been ignoring for years. It’s musty and stale and dank.
The cocoon is the mechanized manifestation of our vow of obedience to our ego.
But, thanks to the clarity and authentic safety of mindfulness-awareness meditation, we can trust in ourselves, have faith in ourselves to look at our cocoon – at how our mind works and at our habitual patterns of thinking, reacting emotionally, speaking, and acting.
And by doing that, we can make a crack in our cocoon. We can breathe in some fresh air. Maybe catch a whiff of the fragrance of flowers. We can see and feel the light and warmth of Truth. The fog of conditioning can start to burn off so we can see clearly, and directly.
This is how we must work with our mind if we’re to fully experience our True Nature, ALOHA, and live free of struggle, anxiety, depression, disturbing emotions, and suffering.
“People have a hard time letting go of their suffering. Out of a fear of the unknown, they prefer suffering that is familiar.”
~ Thich Naht Hanh
“The moment you start watching your thoughts, a higher level of consciousness becomes activated.”
~ Eckhart Tolle
Watch for the next article in this six-part series called What Are Thoughts and Thinking Really?
If you’re interested in learning more topics such as this, consider enrolling in one format or another of my course called The Path Of Meditation that Leads to Living ALOHA by clicking here.