Tears During Meditation: Cleansing or a Manifestation of Ego?

AVAlexander Volchek

It’s a very clear sign, an unmistakable sign: when you cry, that is the ego.

OLOlya

People often say that tears during meditation are a kind of cleansing process. What are tears during meditation?

AVAlexander Volchek

When people practice meditation, they can experience different states during those practices. Some of those states involve their body beginning to experience certain emotions, or their system beginning to experience them. Those emotions can also come with tears. And often, when a person cries during some deep state of soul and spirit, they see those tears as something positive.

Because the person sees something positive in it, when they cry and someone tells them that all tears are ego, that 99.9 percent of them are ego, their basic response is, ‘What about tears of love? What about tears out of love for someone close to me? What about tears when I’ve seen something beautiful?’ There’s a very interesting aspect here. Of course, there are tears when someone hits you hard, for example. Right? And separately, there are tears when another person close to you has died. What’s interesting is that when tears are associated with something positive, particularly a powerful emotional state in meditation, or what someone calls tears of love, they naturally can’t connect that with an ego-driven motive. They can’t call it an ego-driven motive or a manifestation of selfishness at all.

How do you make sense of this, of what is going to happen with it? To begin with, consider this: when you enter any state of expanded perception, or expand your perception in general, or immerse yourself in certain spaces, for example during meditation, you can often encounter particular states and phenomena. And generally, the deeper you go, the more you encounter states and phenomena you don’t ordinarily come into contact with. Your mind-body system, your psychological state, your mental state, and your physical body will respond to this in different ways.

You might get goosebumps, for example, or tears might come. Does everybody actually cry when they are in that place? That is something to look at. We will see, of course, that not everyone cries. Moreover, the more often you encounter the same energy, the less likely those tears become. Their likelihood decreases, yes, very substantially. The same tears that came the first time. You can see this very clearly in individual meetings with people. When you meet someone in person and begin to take them into a deep state and enter certain spaces with them, at particular moments, with certain words or energies, they may experience a state in which the body begins pouring out a stream of tears.

People may even hear from time to time, ‘It’s good to have a cry.’ And there is even a certain explanation for this. Having a cry while actually living through something… Again, we are looking at a very specific range of experience: encountering and living through certain new states, seeing more broadly within yourself who you really are, experiencing certain aspects of your real life. Of course, you may encounter that kind of mind-body phenomenon. But the next time, or the third or fourth time, it may not happen. Again, this is a common process in individual contact. When will those states arise again?

Those states will arise again if you haven’t worked through and fully experienced that whole aspect. When something has remained accumulated inside. And it really is an accumulation of the ego’s machinery, an accumulation in your ego system. It’s a very clear sign, an unmistakable sign: when you cry, that is the ego. You really need to adopt that as a rule for yourself. Someone resists and says, ‘But what if they are tears of love?’ Adopt the rule that if you are crying, it is ego. Straight away. And look at it calmly, independently, as something normal. Imagine you were mistaken, and some unique possibility occurred in your system that is, in effect, practically impossible, and it turned out not to be ego.

Well, what’s the problem? Do you think you will lose something, be worse off, or fail to notice something? Nothing bad will happen. You will simply pay attention once more to the machinery of the ego operating inside you as a person. There’s a common comparison people make now: when you have already brought someone’s ego to light and they clearly can no longer get away from it, they always say, ‘Well, everyone lives with an ego, and you live with an ego too.’ The point isn’t that everyone lives with an ego. The point is whether you can work on your ego without comparing yourself to other people. Whether you understand the truth of life, its true course, its values, when you want to get rid of that ego machinery or keep it from acting through you.

Although, of course, it is already a manifestation of you as well; it is recorded at the level of your spiritual system. When you know you shouldn’t allow that system to manifest, you will do everything you can to keep it from manifesting, for other people’s benefit. Let it benefit you too, but also other people. Then the idea of comparison falls away. ‘Well, I have an ego, but you have an ego too.’ What is the point of that comparison? Notice that as soon as you say that, you increase your ego system even further. You don’t give yourself the chance even to observe it neutrally, or to come into contact with it in any independent way at all.

You further increase that ego system and the activity of its machinery, and this is very important. You become even less able to notice and understand how that ego structure works. To return specifically to your original comment, that when a person cries, the ‘I’ contracts the astral body: that is indeed so. But fundamentally, what difference does it make to people what it contracts? They treat systems such as soul, spirit, the astral body, or the ‘I’ as purely abstract, without understanding what they are at all.

They attach some everyday, religious, or social context to those words. But what is the soul really? What is the spirit really? They simply have a context that is, in reality, just a social one. Someone will try to start figuring out how the contraction of the astral body affects them. Meanwhile, they will overlook the most important thing I have said in these ten minutes. The main thing to pay attention to is knowing that tears are the ego system, the ego computer. This once again shows its activity, its presence in a particular issue, or in some related social issue you might have been sitting there discussing.

In other words, it is present there; it lives there. That means that in this area you lack awareness: you don’t understand what is happening or where. You simply don’t understand. You don’t. Someone cries and says, ‘I understand everything now.’ No, you don’t. You need to live through enough time to be in that state of awareness without tears before you can even begin to say you have worked through it and understood it. And the person tries to go further and figure it out: ‘So what’s happening to my astral body? What are the issues there? What’s happening to my etheric body?’ All right, then. Aren’t you interested in figuring out what happens to your astral body when you interact with the ego computer every day?

When the ego system is constantly activated within you. But to understand this, you need the forms of perception called Inspiration and Imagination. At a minimum, you need spiritual vision to see these energies, to see how the ego affects your spiritual system and your spiritual bodies. Your nonspiritual bodies too, by the way, including the physical body itself. You need to see it. Otherwise, what do you want to hear? Do you want me to draw some energies for you or tell you that certain areas of you are being eaten away? What do you want to hear? You want a social answer, an answer in material and social terms, descriptions in those terms that will never move a person toward real perception, toward true perception, toward real movement.

And real movement here, once again, has a very simple, understandable, clear, obvious foundation. Working with tears, with the whole question of tears, is not a one-time task. It is work for years, for decades ahead: observing what happens at different moments throughout your life. You say, ‘What if I only felt a little like crying?’ That’s such materialistic reasoning. Just phenomenally materialistic reasoning. What if it wasn’t a little? What if it was half a little? What if it was three littles? What if it was ten littles? What if you felt half of half a little like crying? What if you cried very hard, with tears flowing or streaming? What if you wanted to cry but stopped yourself, held back, and didn’t cry? Can you imagine how many variations there are? And then to pick all of that apart and reason about it.

‘What if I stopped it a little and blocked the energy?’ People also say, ‘You didn’t cry, so you blocked the energy; you cried, so you blocked it.’ These are disastrously pointless lines of reasoning. That’s why I think scientists ought to… There are probably some studies already. They will write dissertations in psychotherapy or somewhere else and discuss what happens with tears if you stop them or don’t stop them, at what moment they arise, when they arise, what happens where, and so on. There is such a tangle of causal events and cause-and-effect connections behind why it happens to you. A phenomenal tangle. You see, besides tears, there are a huge number of other ways of expressing what is happening to a person. You’re discussing a subject and suddenly forget it or get distracted.

You’re discussing a subject and suddenly feel terribly sorrowful. You’re discussing a subject, you felt bad, and suddenly you feel very good. You’re discussing a subject and your thoughts disappear. You’re discussing a subject and an enormous number of thoughts arise. There are an incredible number of variations. Each of them needs to be considered individually. Really considered individually, studied: what is happening, how it is happening, why it is happening. Individually. Work to understand it, try to become truly aware of what it is. Actually become aware of what it is, rather than vaguely noticing or looking at it somewhere off to the right, to the side, to the left. Truly enter into it, truly study it, look at what is actually happening and where the truth really lies.

Tears are just one example of how a person’s life expresses itself. Some people will say, ‘We don’t cry, so we have no ego.’ That means nothing at all. Because, in terms of human mind-body phenomena, there are obviously states in which tears are suppressed. You have to look at how you actually feel, at what lies behind you. Do you understand? If, in perception, you were to separate a person into layers… I’m looking at you now: imagine separating you into layers. Imagine those layers were your different essences, your different phenomena, your different worlds. That is a very interesting aspect. Different worlds, different manifestations of you, while you exist in a mixture of those worlds, all operating simultaneously. And then look at those worlds. What are they like?

You won’t be able to block it; you won’t be able to close it off. You can do whatever you like, but you won’t be able to shut off the perception of it. You can start smiling, laughing, changing your mood, thinking about something else, but you can’t change those structures. Some structure, some world of yours, will begin to rearrange itself. Within it you have shifted from sadness to a good state. Elsewhere something may change in your facial appearance. Some masks may shift, one replacing another, for example. Or a mask may disappear altogether, or appear. But there are states that are fairly difficult for you to change or control from a materialistic standpoint. You can open up and say, ‘Go ahead and look at all of me. It makes no difference to me.’ Well, what difference does it make? If you want to look, look.

It’s like someone sitting in a café, taking out a phone and starting to take pictures. Some people don’t care if they are photographed. In a great many countries, the law allows you to photograph people in the street. Not a particular person right in the face, but a general scene. Others start getting furious; they can’t sit still. Someone photographed them, and what has happened to them? It’s the same here. Imagine seeing spiritually. Now imagine that you meet someone’s eyes in the street and feel that they see you, see you inside out. That is a much more profound state than seeing someone naked.

I’ve had this, by the way. Many times in interactions with people, I’ve heard them say, ‘It feels like we’ve been stripped naked. Not just stripped naked, but as though a hundred people are looking at us too.’ That is when you feel that your system is open to perception. And you have to feel it. Imagine that: you have to feel it. But there won’t be tears there, because when you cry, your perception is narrowed. Here, by the way, the description of the effect on the astral body fits very well: it contracts, it is blocked, it is being affected. Your perception is narrowed. That is obvious; the vectors have finally intersected. The vectors have intersected. A person’s perception is definitely very narrowed, seriously narrowed at that moment.

Of course, you have to learn this. You have to learn that observation. You need to remember these states as they happen, and look at when they happen. And remind yourself every time that as soon as you are in tears, your perception is not adequate to what is happening. In that subject, too, your perception is inadequate. That is number one. Just something to remember. Yet I’ve seen so many sessions where people cried and then didn’t remember it. They didn’t remember. Notice that for many people, tears are a sign of weakness. Tears are a sign of weakness. It’s very interesting to ask whether aggression is a sign of weakness for that same person, or what it is. All of these are signs of weakness, aren’t they?

Aggression, holding back tears, and closing your own system off from certain influences by saying, ‘Then I’ll shut myself away completely in my little house and sit silently with a gloomy face.’ Or trying to put on a good, happy face. Or hitting back at the other person: ‘Now you’re going to cry too. I’ll tell you what is really going on with you.’ These are all signs of weakness. On the whole, a person is fairly weak in terms of their consciousness and their system. If everyone became aware of that level of weakness, ego-driven self-doubt would seem like a little dandelion compared with the real weakness within a person. Just a dandelion, nothing at all. Child’s play compared with the real weakness a person has.