Does the Great Matter map to the thing I'll try and point to here:
The rejection of your non-existence, bending perception and epistemics in order to make your own not-being in some sense incomprehensible, and therefore unknown/scary/something your whole system contorts itself to avoiding. Similar to other trauma-patterns which reject the reality they try and avoid, but made of the evolution-trauma of the deaths of your ancestors.
and if not, is there a diff you could use to point in a better direction?
Yes, very much so.
I can remember being 4 years old, laying in bed, scared I would die in the night and wake up a skeleton. Only, then I would realize what it would mean to be dead, and I not only couldn't really conceive it except abstractly, but felt deep fear even trying to conceive it. But, being the kind of person I am I guess, I made myself look at it for as long as I could. It didn't really work, but I'd try.
You could say I had to try to stare into the face of my own death for 37 years until I was finally able to see it.
1As I see it, my death is "worlds that exist without me". If I die today, tomorrow the Sun will still shine, only I won't be there to see it. The people I know will be there, only I won't be with them. It's similar to imagining people living on a different planet. Things will happen, beyond my control, without me being able to see the result, just like if they happened in a distant galaxy.
I will not be there. There will be no me anywhere. Ever. That kinda sucks, because right now I have some wishes about things I would like to do and experience and learn; and if I die, that's not going to happen. But there won't be any me to experience the frustration.
If someone killed me right now, instantly and painlessly, it wouldn't be a frustrating experience at all. (It would be no experience.) The frustration comes from my ability to make plans, to have expectations; and then imagining those plans and expectations failing. So right now, I strongly prefer that I live. But if I died, I would have no preferences anymore.
So I think there are three components in the fear of death. First, if you imagine something bad happening afterwards. (You wake up in Hell, where the devils will painfully stab you with pitchforks, forever. Or the people will bury your unmoving body, while you are helplessly screaming in your mind; then you will be lonely, suffocate, and experience pain as your body decomposes.) These things are bullshit; none of that is going to happen; that's just you imagination insisting that in some sense you will still be alive; but you won't. Second, the circumstances of death are often unpleasant. Yeah, that is a legitimate worry. But it's not about death per se, it's about the things that may happen near the end of your life. Third, the loss of control. You won't be able to do the things you wanted to do, or to help the people you love; you won't even learn how various things turned out. I think it is perfectly legitimate to wish for things to be not like that. (Whether you can actually do something about it, that is a different question. But I think it is perfectly legitimate to say, even if you can do nothing about it, that you'd prefer if things would be different.)
(Actually, fourth, quantum immortality. I do not have a good model of what it actually feels like, once things get strange enough. Maybe it doesn't feel like anything; maybe the entire idea is flawed or substantially incomplete. I don't know.)
Yes.
For me the actual experience of resolving the Great Matter felt like dying. It's not a coincidence that some folks call it Dying the Great Death. That part was not too dissimilar from the ego death that can be experienced with various drugs, though with the difference that it feels less like being temporarily blown apart and more like a permanent dying of something.
But after that I spent several months with easy access to a feeling of bliss. The bliss eventually gave way to tranquility and later equanimity. As I often describe it, every moment of every day is a 9/10 (and only not a 10/10 because I know I give up some feeling good to be actively living in the world), even when I'm quite sad or upset or anxious or anything else. Relatively speaking, though, this means that most of the time things are "just fine" or "okay" because there's not the constant fluctuation between suffering and release.
I do want to caveat this answer, though, by saying that the process to get here involved the worst suffering of my life. Long weeks of hopeless despair, years of confusion and dissatisfaction. I'm only happy now because I went through all that, and I only went through it all because I had no choice—I couldn't find a way to be happy without going through it.
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It was July 30th, 2023. I had spent the last several days in sesshin with my sangha at Bay Zen Center. Physically exhausted from the effort, I came home and collapsed on the couch. I spent a couple hours watching TV, catching up on Twitter, and then, at about three in the afternoon, I stood up, looked out the window, gazed deeply at a particular branch on a particular tree, and finally resolved the Great Matter.
What’s the Great Matter? It’s the question you can’t answer. It’s the fear you feel when you contemplate your own death. It’s the void lurking at the center of your existence, and no matter how hard you try, you can’t see into it. You’ve lived with it for as long as you can remember, fighting against its friction with your every action. It can’t be pointed at directly, but you know it’s there because it’s in the place you can’t look.
That’s all rather mysterious, and thankfully some people have managed to grapple with the Great Matter enough to say a little more. They often talk about non-dual experience, of crossing the divide between the relative and the absolute. They say things like there’s no separate self and that all is impermanent. And if they’ve read the right websites, they might even describe the Great Matter as the contradiction inherent in the intuitive self-model, and say that to resolve the Great Matter is to have the insights that transition you into a persistent, non-symbolic experience of existence (PNSE).
Or, in short, to resolve the Great Matter is to become enlightened.
But the longer it’s been since the Great Matter was resolved, the less I like the word “enlightened”. I did a whole video essay about it, but in short, the main problem is that “enlightenment” implies a permanent state of attainment and carries misguided cultural connotations. Other words like “awakened” drop some of that cultural baggage, but unfortunately keep the attainment framing.
And you might be saying to yourself, why would an attainment framing be bad? Clearly something has been attained! But, the only thing attained is a resolution of the Great Matter itself, which is the act of having an insight and having that insight spread deeply through your entire being, nothing more. The rest has to come later. All that resolving the Great Matter does is remove the obstacle that was blocking the way on the path to freedom from suffering.
And if you want to be free of suffering, you have to put in the work. First, you have to put in the work to resolve the Great Matter, which often involves untraining many of your maladaptive habits. It requires grappling with your addictions, your traumas, your hangups, and your insecurities. And then, after the Great Matter is resolved, you have to continue that work, but now on a deeper, more subtle level than was possible before. It does feel easier, because you no longer have to deal with both the habituated mind and the Great Matter, but that feeling itself can become a trap that will ensnare you if you aren’t careful.
Now, some people who resolve the Great Matter do so while living in a monastery or hermitage, or move to one after such resolving. In such a place, one has the opportunity to minimize decision making and planning. And when there’s no decisions to make, there’s no need to model the self, and so the constructed self-model can be let go and forgotten, replaced by a mind that only concerns itself with this moment. That can be nice, especially if done for a limited time to strengthen one’s practice, but it comes at the cost of helping the world.
To help the world, you have to live in it, and that means constructing a self-model to make the predictions necessary to plan and take actions. The best one who has resolved the Great Matter can do, if they are committed to benefitting all beings, is to find a way to live holding that self-model lightly. To see, in each moment, that the self and the not-self views are equally real, for both are needed to tackle the great many challenges facing our world.
I’ve left out many details you’d probably like to know. That’s because I write this post with some hesitation. Although this is not the first time I’ve publicly admitted to being “enlightened”, it is the least obscure and most easily found. But I decided to take the risk, because I feel that it’s been long enough that I can speak confidently of my own experiences, however they are labeled, and because by speaking about those experiences, I may be able to help others.
When I had not yet resolved the Great Matter, I was very confused about it. Some people wrote some straightforward things that were confusing. Other people wrote confusing things that were straightforward. I needed all the help I could get from others pointing the way for me. Now it’s my turn to help others by pointing. This is one attempt, and I hope it proves useful.