“A Better Human”, etc. (386-390)
386. A Better Human
You’re bad at being human. There’s no point in denying it because it’s obviously true. Anyone with a brain can see you aren’t doing it right. The only reason they don’t call you out is because they’re just as bad at it.
Your problem is that you have too much power and you don’t know how to use it. You can see more than an animal is supposed to see. You can examine the past, the present, and the possible future and see how they’re connected. You can reflect on your past actions and plan your future actions.
These powerful abilities cause you to develop all sorts of intentions. There are things you want to possess, things you want to avoid, and a whole range of beliefs that you have about what is good and what is bad.
It’s your intentions that get the better of you. You easily become attached to them, so much so that you build your whole life around them. You allow them to manipulate you into doing harmful things. You produce enormous suffering for yourself and the people around you. You make pain that has no purpose except enabling you to reach your goals or confirm your beliefs. All of this is unnecessary and it hampers your ability to thrive.
Of course, this isn’t your fault. You didn’t ask for this power, you had it thrust upon you. But you have to work with the lot you’ve been given. You have to learn to live in a way that doesn’t produce so much pain and suffering.
That might sound complicated, but it isn’t. All you need to do is pay attention to what’s happening in and around you and you’ll figure it out. But as it turns out, you’re not so great at paying attention either. You let your attachments pull you away from the things you need to see. Instead of absorbing your experiences fully, you jump around from this to that, learning very little about what is needed and necessary.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. You can free yourself from all of this. You can create a life that is empty of suffering and full of joy. You have everything you need to see more clearly. It’s up to you to actually use it.
387. Experiencing Awareness
Awareness is the amalgam of everything we have seen in all of our experiences throughout life. In this way, awareness might be thought of as a kind of memory we have formed. But unlike the memories we can directly recall and explore, awareness only reaches us through intuitions that arise from it.
A past event that we have no ability to recall might still have influenced us in a way that causes a particular intuition to arise. Since we cannot see where this intuition comes from, we might become distrustful of our awareness. We expect to be fully conscious of our past experiences and the impact they have had on us. But we also know this isn’t always true. Countless things happen to us every day that we forget entirely, and our ability to recall the details of even the most important events fades with time.
We can be affected by our past experiences in ways we do not realize, which can cause unexpected intuitions to arise in the present moment. Awareness itself is a kind of metaphorical entity, something we have but cannot locate or delimit. It is nothing more or less than the unique combination of everything our attention has absorbed throughout life. This combination is never complete or finished for there is always more for us to see in both the self and the world.
Our intuitions are sometimes stronger in certain circumstances than in others because our awareness is broader and deeper in those areas. But even the faintest intuition can encourage us to investigate the experiences it might have arisen from. In doing so, we create a new experience of reflection that can further broaden our awareness. By having more and more experiences, our awareness will continue to expand, which means our intuitive sensitivity to ourselves and the world around us will become stronger and more refined.
388. Overheated
It’s half past five in the morning and he is awake. He has managed less than four hours of actual sleep. The heat in the room is already intense even though the sun hasn’t yet made it over the horizon. Hot energy is pulsing through his body, through his feet and hands, through all of his extremities.
He lies there knowing he cannot possibly sleep further. The heat demands action. It is telling his body to get up and do something. But he cannot figure out what. He is far from attentive and his mind is sluggish. He has not felt rested since before the heat wave began. He considers taking a shower, but then remembers there is no hope of cold water. It will be a lukewarm shower at best, which would cool him only slightly.
He imagines a swimming pool, or even better, a lake somewhere in the north, somewhere close to where he grew up. He remembers jumping into the lake in late spring, the frigid water enveloping him, the shock of genuine cold rapidly spreading through his body. That would be wonderful right now. A swim in cold water and then a long nap in the shade, two or three hours at least. Then he might feel alive again.
The heat demands action but he is not alive in it. He is only an automaton, moving and breathing but not really living. Living seems to require something more. Perhaps it is the coolness of reason that is missing. Everything happening here feels disconnected. His actions are impulsive and events are random. He feels like he’s losing his mind. It’s probably just the lack of sleep. He is hot but he is fine. For now, at least.
Still, he has never spent so much time in this kind of climate and he has doubts about how much longer he can take it. He feels a pressing desire to escape. He wants to get out of here. He needs to reach a place where he can feel alive once again.
389. Finding Reassurance
When I’m facing a particularly bad situation, I immediately start looking for signs of reassurance. I want to know that things are not as bad as they seem. I want to be able to see a way out of the difficulty. I want to know that there is a route back to the relatively comfortable existence I’m used to living.
But sometimes nothing like this is available. Even as I try to find something that might at least temporarily satisfy these wants, nothing provides me with any solid reassurance. What I instead discover is that the situation truly is bad and it’s likely to get worse. The realization that the comfort and certainty I desperately want are not only distant but receding almost always brings on the suffering of despair. I feel miserable because I’m trapped where I am.
Sometimes it’s not only my desire for reassurance that is frustrated but also my ability to meet my own needs. This can cause my despair to expand, but it also provides me with an important signal. If my basic needs are at risk of going unmet, I must allow my attention the freedom to attend to them. I have to release it from searching for reassurance and allow it to see what I must do to meet my needs.
Only when I’m free from my attachment to stability and comfort is there a real possibility for my suffering to be transformed. For then my actions become responses to the needs I see in myself and in others, and everything I do gains a new purpose. Instead of descending into a deepening despair that threatens to swallow me whole, I’m lifted up by an almost impossible joy as I begin to take action. It is this sense of purpose and joy that provides both the energy I need to press forward and the hope to reassure me, despite the daunting future I face.
390. Invincible Art
What is divine cannot be debased merely by talking about it. We would never imagine that the splendour of nature could be degraded by talking about its parts or how they function. We would never for a moment think that human beings are reduced by talking about their experiences or feelings. Even if we were to condemn nature or humanity with extreme vitriol, we would understand that we could deal no real damage to either.
At the same time, we have the tendency to believe that criticizing an artwork might cause it irreparable harm. As though mere words could hamper the work’s beauty and cause it to fall from grace. But anything like this is impossible. What is valuable in an artwork can no more be harmed by language than nature or humanity or the universe itself.
Even words fully intended to disparage can do no harm to an artwork. Language is entirely ineffective because art does not operate in the realm of language. This is surprisingly true even when the artwork in question uses language as its medium. Everything that is powerful in an artwork has its power because it is a metaphor for some aspect of our experience. It is a way of using image and sound and even language to reach into the depths of experience and show it to us in a new way.
To talk about an artwork is a lesser mode of communication than the artwork itself uses. For the impact and force of metaphor is always greater than language in its practical use. Metaphor can take us in the direction of truth itself, while practical language can take us only as far as truth’s conventional proxies.
The very best we can do with words is to create further metaphors that direct others towards the beauty of an artwork, and by doing so, craft another artwork in language. The worst we can do is to produce a lot of meaningless noise that is ignorant of this beauty, but that nonetheless draws attention to the artwork. Talking about an artwork is always something that helps it, insofar as it provokes us to see the work and look for its beauty for ourselves.