“Beware of dead weight, my companions. All is a dead weight to the man who has a firm faith in his godhood. He holds in himself the world, yet carries not its weight.”
— Mikhail Naimy, The Book of Mirdad
Reflecting on this passage from The Book of Mirdad prompted me to write the piece you’re about to read.
Cut-and-dry inquiry, assisted by logic and reason, can quickly slash through a whole lotta beliefs and faulty ideas about life and yourself.
And if you can rally your heart to the cause, even better, because you won’t be as easily fooled by intellectual preferences and emotional attachments.
But at some point, this kind of approach has served its purpose.
It’s when you have seen through these falsehoods but they haven’t been fully released from the system. They have become dead weight.
(Here ‘dead weight’ refers to emotional or energetic residue — not beliefs themselves, but the subtle traces they leave in the body and nervous system.)
Have you ever carried a limp body?
If so, then you know how much heavier it seems than one with basic muscular tension intact. It’s a lot harder to carry.
This is why when people stumble into inquiry and cut through their limiting beliefs, often emotional charges stick out like a llama in a herd of cows — they have killed these beliefs but continue to carry the corpses.
Most of us carry dead weight — some more, some less.
But the point is that you can drop it.
Dropping dead weight is not a matter of analyzing it endlessly with your logical mind; it’s a matter of allowing the heaviness to be fully experienced without a self-serving agenda driving the whole thing.
The problem that many insight-first proponents face, as I have, is that they think they’ve seen through all the habits of thinking and feeling (which they might have). So there shouldn’t be any of the old painful stuff left.
But there is something left and refusing to acknowledge it keeps it in place.
***
I often rave about the direct recognition of our true nature free from all the “path” stuff. But what people sometimes misunderstand is that they draw behavioral and emotional conclusions about it, as if to say, “If what you say is true, then this and that should be like that and this.”
There are no rules for this and that.
And I’d never say ignore emotions. Because what most people struggle with is emotions. Even the ones who are very much about pure nonduality don’t struggle with the concepts very much; they, like everyone else, mostly struggle with the, often irrational, emotional charges rearing their heads in everyday life.
While it’s true that ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ are concepts, dumping dead weight tends to reduce negativity and make room for more positivity — not the flashy kind, but a quiet lightness.
And no matter how cool of a cucumber I claim I am, certainly I prefer feeling good. Obviously, you can’t guarantee always feeling good, no matter how awake you think you are, but this will make your baseline level more pleasant (because there’s less static). Facts.
It seems like a topic of a lot of hush-hush in nondual circles but even “awake” folks carry dead weight. I’m not saying that to negate anyone’s awakening but to drive home the point that the cleaning up of lingering emotional charges is not the same thing as waking up.
Waking up places all of the stuff you’ve struggled with in a new perspective. It no longer defines you and it’s not about having to deal with it from the viewpoint of a separate person. To put it simply: it ceases to be a problem in need of fixing.
And yet, the body-mind can react in familiar ways. Habitual thinking and feeling based on the belief in separation comes up to be experienced fully. Emotions are felt more purely — as energy and not as personal failures or signs of lack.
Recognizing your true nature doesn’t mean that all dysfunctional psychological and energetic patterns dissolve instantly. That’s perhaps why we can sometimes see teachers act in unskillful and abusive ways.
The good thing is that waking up entails cleaning up — it’s an automatic process. Cleaning up or integration, as it’s sometimes called in Zen, isn’t a requirement; it’s inevitable.
Realization allows all kinds of suppressed and unacknowledged stuff to come up because, without the me, the suppressive mechanism doesn’t really work that well anymore.
Even if you’re “only” concerned with self-knowledge, or perhaps because of it, you won’t be able to avoid any of the emotional stuff. You’ll have to no-face it eventually. And you can play a somewhat active role in this (yes, even though there’s no self).
At some point, remaining charges will be so subtle you won’t be able to seek them out actively. You’ll have to allow them to arise naturally in the trenches of daily life.
I found that when I look for dead weight (e.g,. tensions, contractions, attachments, etc.), most often it’s absent. Instead, it tends to show itself in relationships or other social situations. That’s the dojo.
I want to emphasize that none of it means that there’s something wrong with “you” or with whatever emotions you’re experiencing — after all, without the story, it’s just raw sensations. There’s no you there to be corrected and there’s nothing wrong with feeling bad. Which also means there’s no fixed goal or agenda here.
If anything, there is a practiced tension that can relax.
***
So how can you drop dead weight?
Simple. You acknowledge it and do nothing about it. By “do nothing” I don’t mean numbing or avoidance; I mean an agenda-free opening, where you’re not doing anything to the feeling.
It’s important to note that a useful attitude is not one of “dropping,” “releasing,” “letting go,” even if those words are useful descriptions, but one of “allowing.”
Why is that?
Because whatever appears is not separate from what you are. If you treat it as something to grapple with, you’re creating a you that needs to deal with something that is not you — that’s precisely what nonduality dispels.
This is easier when you realize that what you are is nothing but open allowance. When you allow everything to be as it is, you’re allowing yourself to be as you are.
So you don’t want to rid yourself of anything; you just want to see and you can’t see clearly if you’re insisting on seeing what you want to see instead of seeing what is actually there to see.
In other words, you allow any emotional charge to discharge itself without interfering.
A simple experiment is to bring up any painful thoughts or memories and allow them to be there as long as they need to. As you’ll probably notice, it’s not difficult. You intuitively know which stuff your mind navigates around, and then you just go there.
Someone might claim that you can’t get to the juicy suppressed stuff that is really beneficial to see. Even if that were so, you can get to some painful stuff and that will lead you further in and eventually out. Follow the crumbs and you’ll end up at the loaf (or the guy who ate the loaf).
Releasing dead weight won’t alter what you are (not), but it will make life more fresh, open, relaxed than stale, closed off, tense.
Some would say that realizing your true nature is a binary thing — it’s perfectly black and white. This is not beyond dispute. But what we can all agree on is that the content and quality aren’t one or the other. It’s black and white and grey and blue and purple and oh! don’t forget orange.
And as much as I agree that no emotion, negative or positive or neutral, is an issue, I can also say that quite some “negativity” that used to arise no longer does. It doesn’t happen by fighting it but by the exact opposite — by ceasing to fight it.
That doesn’t mean you’re supposed to become an emotionless automaton. It just means that the emotional reactions that once served to protect a conceptual “you” are recognized as no longer necessary and as a result, can dissolve.
When you stop fighting it, you see that whatever you’ve been fighting is already dead and you’ve been wrestling with a corpse all along. Then the match ends and you can move on.
Anything else I can say about this would be needless overcomplication. So instead, I will restate everything in two final TL;DR paragraphs:
Dropping dead weight (i.e. allowing emotional charges to be fully experienced) leads to more ease. The way to do this is to give these emotional charges unconditional attention — not as something to wield but as what you are. To put it simply, feel everything that wants to be felt — without wallowing in it, without ruminating on it, without analyzing it, without trying to do anything with it.
Suddenly, the world is lighter because you realize that what’s been heavy isn’t the world — it’s your grip on what’s already lifeless. In dropping dead weight, we don’t lose anything real. We lose the illusion that we were ever carrying it to begin with.
***
“Let things alone and labour not to change them. For they seem what they seem only because you seem what you seem. They neither see nor speak except you lend them sight and speech. If they be harsh of speech, look only to your tongue. If they be ugly of appearance, search first and last your eye. Ask not of things to shed their veils. Unveil yourselves, and things will be unveiled. Nor ask of things to break their seals. Unseal your selves, and all will be unsealed.”
— Mikhail Naimy, The Book of Mirdad
Luka
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