The general name for the collection of personal impediments which is the same as our life story is Cocoon. The feeling of cocoon is expressed dynamically by D. H. Lawerence:
"Oh
when man escaped from the barbed-wire entanglement
of his own ideas and his own mechanical devices
there is a marvelous rich world of contact and sheer fluid beauty
and fearless face-to-face awareness of now-naked life
and me and you and other men and women
and grapes and ghouls and ghosts and green moonlight
and ruddy-orange limbs stirring the limbo
of the unknown air, and eyes so soft."
Selected Poems, D. H. Lawrence, Viking Compass Edition
From the Shambhala point of view, our habitual categories of thought and the fear-directed activity flowing from our thinking create a kind of insulating cocoon which is highly personal and idiosyncratic. This cocoon is described as close, claustrophobic and smelly with our own smell. It is unpleasantly constricted and yet comfortable, and it interests us like the feel and smell of our own bodies. This "cocoon" is main obstacle to seeing more deeply into the nature of things.
Our "cocoon," one begins subjectively to realize, is right in front of our nose, whereas basic goodness recedes into the background like a Chinese landscape into distant mist. Cocoon is a part of our immediate here and now world. Cocoon embraces and attempts to hide everything that makes life threatening, painful, or deadly. At that same time it stands for everything that is completely familiar, everything that I automatically and unconsciously defend. What could be more immediate, more "mine" than my own smell? Walt Whitman made poetry out of the immediacy of that experience, "I love the smell of my own armpits" he wrote. Here is undisguised me-ness, without even the cover-up of Old Spice or Dial. Old Walt knew a thing or two about how we feel ourselves.
The cocoon, in all its forms, has some remote connection with the fear of death. The greatest loss of power, of course, is the loss of the self, which is also ultimate disorder. The desire to predict and control our world faces a myriad of small deaths. Disorder threatens us at every turn. We do not set out deliberately to create our cocoon. The basic model is present around us from early in our lives. Both at home and at school we learn to internalize the cultural attitudes that help us defend territory and also protect us from our own sensitivity and rawness. Much of the exploration of the Sixties, for example, had to do with re-connecting our minds and our bodies.
We had some insight into our cultural defenses in the Sixties when "sensitivity training" became popular. We began to realize that people were having difficulty opening up to others. More recently, the popular press and the movies have made sensitivity "fashionable" for males as an antidote to excessive aggression. The new ideal combines feminine sensitivity with masculine assertiveness. Carol Pearson (Twelve Archetypes) speaks of the androgynous monarch that combines "Caregiver and Warrior abilities." Nevertheless, despite these social developments, cocoon on the personal level is difficult to alter. As Wordsworth's said, it is "as deep as frost as deep almost as life." Unless we use the tool of meditation practice to look into its nooks and crannies, cocoon remains as an obstacle to perceiving the world as it is, free from our projections.
Cocoon and its protectiveness ward off fear of loss of self, that is, death, whether actual physical death or death of ego. The fear of death seldom comes to us as such, especially when we are young (which is why wars are fought with young people). However, to be "myself" means to encounter the world from the standpoint of certain fixed views, attitudes, and judgements. My world seems to be a flow of actual events, but it is more like a structure of beliefs. I live, so to speak, in my own movie. Further, my movie is a part of a larger movie created by my society, my family, my friends, and teachers. A Japanese student or business man experiences a very different movie from a North American. These customary views and attitudes are extremely important to my feeling of comfort. If they are attacked, I am moved to defend myself. To give up my view is tantamount to giving up myself, which is like dying.
Underneath our mental structures, we are very raw and vulnerable. For some, perhaps for most, this vulnerability is covered over and nearly inaccessible. The surface of the mind is organized with structures that are defended as territory. For others, rawness is so real everything that happens seems to threaten them. Cocoon as a defense of our rawness seems to differ from cocoon as a defense of territory. Such a person feels too exposed and reacts by trying to pull back. We sometimes have a sense of someone trying to reject the very experience he or she is describing.
Another reaction to our sense of vulnerability is the tendency to hide behind social conventions. In such cases, individuals are no longer talking about their "feelings," but saying what is expected from them, what in the past they have learned to say. The real "me" seems to be down inside somewhere, hidden from sight. Often an individual will clam up during group discussion, refusing every invitation to join, and then break down during the individual interview. Rawness may sometimes appear simply as "shyness." We feel vulnerable and the world feels stressful, so we withdraw.
Group discussions of "cocoon" can takes various shapes. Sometimes the concept seems to disappear into divergent questions that lead the discussion away from this vital topic. At other times, intense interest in "cocoon" emerges vibrantly in all subsequent discussions, dominating group and individual interchanges, monopolizing lunch or even tea-time. At such moments cocoon will seem especially individual and personal, beyond any descriptive terms one might coin. After all, the cocoon is "my" personal experience.
Cocoon also relates to how we react in the world. In our culture, defense of territory appears to be a common pattern for most men and for many women. In this sense, cocoon could be described in simple terms. It can be a way of hiding out in our life roles, our existence as doctor, accountant, teacher, factory worker, carpenter, housewife, feminist, liberal, conservative, or even astronaut. Because these roles are socially validated (with a little help from our friends) we take comfort in them. Life becomes a continual adjustment to how we conceptualize ourselves.
For the most part, when we begin meditation practice, we must deal with cocoon as our own personal way of constructing a universe. We are not talking here about some kind of neurotic hang-up, though that may be there as well. Rather, as I said above, our personal cocoon is the worldview we have constructed during our lifetime as a way of seeing. But worldview is not exclusively a personal kind of knowledge. It belongs to the society of which we are a part. So we must eventually realize that cocoon has another aspect that we encounter when we as individuals begin to work with others in social situations. We live in cultural systems that also function as cocoon. What is real is what we know, how we see the world, how we interpret things as a people. Culture is the deep structure of human experience that offers a way of experiencing the larger world with others. It differs from culture to culture and even to some degree with minority groups within a culture. Individualism, for example, is a dominant American cultural view that is internalized at a very deep level. Asians, when they first arrive, are clearly more family and community oriented.
Cocoon, then, is a kind of defense. As a defense, it blocks intuitive insight. All the levels of mindfulness/awareness practice are devoted to working with the cocoon, using the practice of meditation as a tool to unravel our defenses. We begin, slowly at first, to become aware of repeated patterns in our thoughts and our lives, patterns that we protect fiercely as if our life depended on them. The discovery of these patterns is often likened to the peeling of layers off an onion. We discover at each level the same neurosis in a new, often unrecognizable form. During this process we are compared by the teachings to infant warriors just beginning to emerge from the cradle, not yet ready to use weapons of the warrior.