What does Without a Net mean?

What does Without a Net mean? 

I like the ways it’s used in different contexts. Musicians use it to designate playing live for recordings, with no fallback way to correct mistakes. High-wire and trapeze artists use it to describe their most daring way to do stunts. The saying “playing without a net” in tennis means something played without rules or much structure.

A net is something that can catch you when you’re falling, but it can also trap you. If you try to look through a net to see something, it’s obscured. 

This episode will tell you more specifically what the Net is in this context, and why we would want to be without it.

We’ll start with problems in life. It probably goes without saying that almost all of us all have some level of discomfort and dissatisfaction with ourselves and the world. The world meaning  our circumstances. the greater culture, our relationships and daily doings.Most of us have disappointments, at least now and then, and they seem to stem from life situations, issues with other people.

There’s always an assumption that we and the world around us are not as they should be. There is sometimes a dramatic sense of it, and in between outbursts there is often a pervading sense of existential angst.

Some of us look for things to do to fix that. We try to make ourselves look better, get super busy with accomplishing, take substances to escape, or basically get away and hide, one way or another. We strive for the good life or avoid discomfort. 

We solver types look for solutions for existential angst by trying to figure and plan and calculate, looking for answers on the internet or in books, staying in busy mode, or journaling and talking out all the thoughts and feelings. We look to an expected outcome at the end of a process of all this self-improvement.

Others feel some version of hopelessness and do what they can to check out. 

The opposite of all this is celebrating whatever we are experiencing as a playful expression of being. 

It would be nice if saying it made it happen. It takes more than someone telling you Be Happy Right Now to experience peace and joy on a regular basis. It doesn’t take changing us or our lives, it takes changing our perspective. When our perspective changes, everything changes.

Life’s circumstances are not the cause of our suffering.

We can experience peace and freedom regardless of what’s going on outside us. We can perceive clearly and regularly that we’re right where we should be.

WAVE

There’s an old metaphor in which the ocean represents God, or the ocean of consciousness, and we little beings are the waves. We are an individual part of the ocean, but we are still the ocean. The ocean represents the fundamental ground of our being and the matrix that underlies our universe, and inherent in it is the love, freedom, joy, and presence that we seek at the end of our existential angst.

Most of us perceive that if we are the wave, there is a barrier between us and the ocean. We, and all the other waves, are separate individuals. There’s something preventing us from fully experiencing ourselves as the ocean. What’s the barrier between us and directly experiencing the joy and freedom of consciousness?

THE NET 

I call it the Net

It is a web of judgements, and labels which become our beliefs and viewpoints, from which spring our coping skills. They are a weaving of stored impressions, created from a lifetime of experience. They are the barrier to our ability to experience life directly. 

You could picture it like a mesh. It’s as if this mesh makes up the lens in a pair of simulation goggles that cloud our perspective, and leave us with only a virtual reality instead of clear perception. If we took those goggles off we’d see our True Nature, and know that we are the ocean and the wave.

The Net has places with a tight weave, where our stored impressions affect our perspective to the point that we have Blind Spots. They are our sticky habits, strongly held opinions, attachments, and unhealthy tendencies. As a general term I like to call them blindspots because it’s not judgmental. It suggests an issue that can be resolved with restored vision.

If we experienced reality directly, without any assumptions and interpretations, we’d see ourselves and the world with clarity and truth. 

Life seen through the Net is clouded, jaded, and warped by long held beliefs. Much of the net is so ingrained and calcified that not only don’t we recognize it, we think it represents our authenticity and our personality. We think our way of being is our nature, and our problems can only be solved with the set of attributes our personality brings to the table. If we were that little wave, we’d have only that much water or resources to face our issues. 

The things that happen in life that we think are our problems and not our problems. The Net is the problem.  

Our Net was created, one strand after another, as we learned how to survive in the world. It developed through our glorious powers of creative experimentation. We learned to navigate our world through trying this and that behavior. The results, situation by situation, added up to determine how we saw the world and ourselves. 

No matter how lame with think our personality is now, it was created as our best experimental outcome for staying alive and safe. We were little artists and scientists, using our skills at trial and error to make our best guess at a winning personality. 

The Net isn’t bad, it’s just overkill. It overshot its mark. 

Now it has us thinking we are seeing reality clearly, and we believe what it shows us. That is the cause of our suffering.

All of our experimentation led to beliefs that neither we nor the world are doing that great. We surmise that we are lacking, and so is the world. We believe we and the world are lacking the sense of belonging, order, safety, and understanding or wisdom that would make us happy. 

The belief in lack is the root of our suffering. We think we’re the wave without an ocean. 

The good news is, that same creativity and experimentation that we used as a small child to create the Net can be used to see beyond the net. In fact, a spirit of childlike wonder and curiosity is exactly what’s called for to live Without a Net. 

Very basically…

First we have to recognize we have a net. 

We don’t assume we are seeing clearly all the time. This admission takes a little humility, and since it’s true, it can be a relief to accept it. 

Next, we assume that at least some of our reactions and behaviors in life are driven by our net-warped way of seeing. When we take action while clouded by the Net we will inflame the situation.

Our first skills to learn is, when upset about something, to arrest our inflamed reactions. We may feel like fighting or fleeing, in subtle or not-so-subtle ways, but if we resist reacting from drama-fueled feelings, we can allow the situation to unfold more naturally. We don’t add our agenda to the mix.

We can get creative about ways to deflate the situation or at least not make it worse by keeping our agenda out of it. 

But we’ll always be triggered in the same ways until we address the underlying cause of why we got upset. Holding back our knee-jerk response is nice, unless it ends up stifling hidden things that need to be seen. We must get inquisitive about what makes up those strands of the Net. 

This is where we get more curious and experimental and creative. We can undo the Net the same way we put it together. In early childhood we practiced, situation by situation, seeing what worked and what didn’t. 

We can treat the Net as something interesting, something that will give us clarity eventually. We get real about what it’s doing to our perception. Our every trigger gives us chances to see the Net’s secrets. 

This kind of activity is not often thought of as something fun. So we also want to reframe this kind of work. Find ways to make it a creative endeavor. We can be like that junior scientist or artist who is passionate about finding results for the thrill of it. The prospect of being free of suffering is pretty thrilling!

I would never do any of this work alone or recommend it. The nature of the Net is to take things personally and seriously. When we mess with it, it acts like a shapeshifter. We need people with us to keep us from getting sucked back into new ways of believing our Net is telling the truth. A supportive community is essential. 

At the same time we become less attached to our old ways of seeing, we can also cultivate new ways of seeing. These go hand in hand. We start to see through the Net, but what’s through there? 

Direct experience of reality, free of our assumptions and interpretations about it, is our natural state. Without a sense of lack, we have acceptance and gratitude, no matter what our outer life dishes out. We feel at home in our own skin and at home in the world. There’s a sense of rightness about life. We feel present and engaged, curious and light. 

The great thing is, we don’t have to address our so-called problems with any sort of self-improvement work. Instead of seeing ourselves as the little lone wave, having to use its own resources to tackle life’s situations, we see ourselves as the ocean, too, with all the backing of its power and will. We let our actions in relationships and life situations arise from this kind of strength and knowledge. Our sense of lack is far outweighed by our trust in the source of all abundance.  

So to sum up what we do to learn to live Without a Net:

We assume that our perceptions are skewed from the Net, so we act accordingly. 

We are kind to ourselves by responding to triggers in a way that mimics a Net-free perspective, even if it feels phony at first. We act better than we feel.

Then we take those upset feelings and creatively investigate the Net that gives rise to them. We do it with others who know how to make us feel safe in the process.  

We also do practices that teach us how to see Without a Net. 

There’s no part of it that doesn’t require persistent practice, but it is simple when broken down. 

As our Net thins out, our responses to relationships and life will be more and more free of the weight of our warped perceptions based in lack. We will act naturally from a place of trusting  presence. 

Even without a net, life  still has its pleasant and not-so-pleasant realities. We are still fascinating individuals with quirks and foibles. But without our net, we don’t take it personally or seriously. We learn to love the pattern of the whole, and we see our little corner of the pattern as just how it’s supposed to be.

So that’s what we mean by the Net in this context, and you got a super brief explanation about how to start moving toward living Without a Net, which is what we do, with a lot more  detail, in our WAN Course.  

Here’s a practice to carry with you. When anything bothers you, instead of saying “it’s them, or it’s the situation, or it’s my circumstance,”  can you admit that your way of seeing might be clouded? Could you admit that the Net is causing your present perspective instead of trusting that you’re seeing is crystal clear?  See what happens.