“Finding Harmony”, etc. (356-360)
356. Finding Harmony
A human being is always multiple. You have many needs and you cannot meet all of them at once. There are things you need from the world, which causes you to form intentions. Your desires, aversions, and beliefs are the intentions you form in response to the tension between your needs and the seemingly indifferent world. But your intentions are not always compatible with each other. They can make demands on you that are completely at odds. Powerful tensions also arise between them, fracturing you into parts.
You are controlled by one desire and then by another, distracted by one aversion and then by another, motivated by one belief and then by another. Sometimes one part dominates all the others. You become fully attached to it, and your attention stays locked on its needs, its priorities, its goals. You try to construct a self around this particular attachment (or collection of aligned attachments) and you make it your entire identity. But in doing so, you neglect your other parts. The result is that you suffer feelings of regret, grief, anxiety, stress, and frustration as the needs of your other parts go unfulfilled.
If you can see this attachment and its connection to your suffering, then you gain a chance to bring harmony to your parts. You do this by allowing all of your parts to exist without becoming attached to any of them. Instead of forming your identity around a particular part, you allow it to emerge freely from your actions. You then become capable of seeing the unified needs that have given rise to your intentions, instead of focusing on the separate goals of your individual parts.
When you can see your needs fully and clearly, you can also see what you must do to meet them. This is the action of compassion, which treats all of your parts as they need to be treated. You will still have desires, aversions, and beliefs, but your relationship with them will no longer be one of attachment. Instead you will act to meet needs, and in doing so, your parts will come together to form a harmonious unity, free of suffering and full of joy.
357. You Could Not Mean It
You’re saying there is a serious problem. You’re saying we cannot allow this to stand. You’re saying we have to respond with immediate action. I tell you that I agree: there is a real problem, and we need to do something about it. I show you what I think is needed and what it will require from us. I formulate a plan of action and you agree that this is what we should do.
But when the time comes for us to act, I cannot find you anywhere. You said we needed to take action, but now you’ve slipped away, leaving me to manage on my own. You said “we” but you did not mean it. You realized what you’d have to do and you decided it was too much. You learned that fixing the problem will require real effort and sacrifice and you didn’t want to take that on. You offered only words and no actions.
I might call you lazy for being unwilling to try. I might call you insincere for failing to follow through on your commitment. I might call you a coward for lacking the courage to act. I might call you a traitor for betraying me and everyone else who is helping. I might call you all of these things, but it wouldn’t do anything to fix you.
The problem is that you cannot see that it’s necessary for you to take action. You think it’s only optional — something you might eventually choose to do, one day. You’re blind to the reality of our situation. You cannot see that without your action, we will not succeed. You cannot see that by failing to act, you are making the problem worse for all of us.
You said “we” but you could not mean it. You couldn’t mean it because you didn’t feel that your own action was necessary and needed. I can reprimand you all I’d like and still you’ll do nothing. The only thing that might work is to help you see the truth of your own words. We must act and we must act immediately. But we can only do so when you realize that this means you must act, together with me.
358. Helpful Illusions
I feel amazing because I am amazing. He speaks this little phrase to himself when he is lacking energy, or when there is something he knows he has to do but his body is offering only resistance and hesitation.
Does he actually feel amazing afterwards? Hardly. Such a simple phrase is unable to lift his spirit so high. Is he, in fact, amazing? This too is doubtful. He thinks of himself as capable and aware, but there’s nothing all that special about him. The effectiveness of the phrase clearly has little to do with reality. But it still does something. By uttering the words, they become, in a way, true for him, even if this is not the kind of truth that can be tested or verified.
The words make him feel like he has some control over the world, like he can somehow shape it with language. He knows any such control is probably an illusion, so he doesn’t push his luck by speaking other phrases that might elevate him further but that also might cause the whole ghastly construction to come tumbling down. Because it would not merely collapse, it would crush him. Of this, there can be little doubt. So he sticks with what he knows, which is his one special phrase.
He doesn’t understand how, but the phrase helps him get past whatever obstacles are blocking his path. Usually these are things like fear or anxiety, feelings telling him it’s better not to act or at least better to stay where it’s warm and comfortable. Sometimes the blockage is definitely regret and at other times he thinks it might be something like despair. As in, not only have his past actions been bad (regret), there’s also little hope of fixing things (despair).
All these little sufferings nag at him, destroying his already questionable ability to take action, sometimes on even the most basic tasks, like tidying the house. But his phrase helps him smash through his feelings and anything else that stands in his way. Once he gets free, he almost always discovers he has more energy than he thought. And sometimes, he might even feel a little amazing too.
359. Unappreciated Acts
I have a strong intuition that there is something I must do. To leave it undone feels not just inappropriate but wrong. The action I feel I must take is not for me but for another person. Acting from awareness, I offer them something in a genuine attempt to help.
But for whatever reason, my offer is not well received. Instead of responding with gratitude, the recipient is upset. I consider again what I’ve done, but I cannot see any wrong in my actions. I believe that my offer was compassionate and it ought to have been accepted. Instead of allowing that I’ve made a mistake, I choose to blame the other.
Jumping to blame is a sign that something has gone wrong. A truly compassionate act will always be accepted. It is by definition something that helps to meet the needs of the other person. Of course, it’s possible that I’ve seen a need that the other hasn’t yet seen, but compassion must take this into account. My own awareness needs to include an awareness of the other’s awareness. Every act of compassion must be tailored to the person it is for or it will not be able to meet any need or provide any help.
The problem is that my awareness is more deficient than I believe it to be. I do not want to acknowledge any such lack. I thought I was adequately aware and thus my actions would be compassionate ones. But this is a further indicator that I’m not nearly as free of attachment as I think I am. In particular, I’m attached to the belief that my awareness is strong enough to show me the compassionate course of action in every situation.
This attachment is extremely dangerous, for it leads to the self-righteous belief that I’m always doing good and it’s only the actions of others that are wrong. From here, it’s a short journey to adopting the destructive cynicism that will cause me to stop offering my supposedly good actions to those who are not adequately grateful for them.
360. The World Of Metaphor
The world of experience is the world of metaphor. Limited always to our perceptions of the world, we never make contact with the thing-in-itself, which would provide our understanding with a more solid foundation. We are instead forced to relate perceptions to other perceptions, and we do this through metaphor.
We use basic metaphors like induction and causality to formulate more complex metaphors that we call rules of logic. These metaphors furnish us with the general structure of language, which we then use to construct our entire system of knowledge. But at no time do we ever achieve a direct linkage with bare reality or escape from metaphor, which means all of our understanding of the world depends on it. Furthermore, because we can only understand ourselves through experience, the self is also metaphorical, insofar as it is a substantive entity at all.
A poem is a way of using metaphor to express something. And because our understanding of both the world and the self rests on metaphor, poems go directly to the heart of our experience. By communicating in the most direct way possible for a human being, poems are capable of revealing truths we would not otherwise be able to reach. They do this by leveraging the metaphors we use most — those of ordinary language — to reveal facets of experience that have previously gone unnoticed.
Poems show us something about the kind of beings we are and the possibilities available to us. By revealing something about the self, they also reveal something about the world — the world that could not exist other than as a continuous extension of that self. Poetry then, in addition to being a mechanism for creating delight, also reveals the nature of our reality, and our experience of this revelation is what we call a poem’s beauty and truth.