“Suffering From Seeing”, etc. (351-355)
351. Suffering From Seeing
The expansion of our awareness can sometimes cause our suffering to expand. We can now see more of our reality and we don’t like what we’re seeing. There are problems not only out in the world, but also inside of us — patterns of behaviour we don’t want to acknowledge and terrible feelings we don’t want to recognize. We feel far from where we want to be and this distance causes us great frustration.
Our suffering is compounded by the fact that we can’t see how to close the gap. We don’t know how to get to where we want to be and we have the nagging worry that life will always be less than we imagined it should be. Sometimes these desires and aversions come together to form the belief that there’s nothing we can do and we fall into despair. We feel like prisoners trapped in a meaningless existence where the best we can hope for is to escape into isolation and live out our days in relative peace.
But this new suffering is present only because our awareness stopped expanding at an arbitrary point. We learned about our problems and then we stopped investigating. The consequence is that our awareness is not yet broad enough to alter our relationship with the attachments that produce suffering. If our awareness were allowed to grow further, then our new suffering will not last long.
We have to keep going towards an even greater awareness. As we become more aware of the nature of our suffering, the gap between reality and our desired ideal will lose its significance. We will see that we can eliminate suffering through our own awareness and by sharing our awareness with others. We will see that we can meet our needs and the needs of others through compassionate action. And we will also see that we are capable of so much more than we ever thought possible.
To get to this better place, we must allow our awareness to keep growing even though this can temporarily bring us additional suffering. Only with an even broader awareness will we become capable of overcoming suffering and moving towards a more creative and joyful life.
352. Compulsive Desires
A desire can sometimes feel automatic and compulsive, as though there were no possible alternative to its satisfaction. In such a case, it feels absolutely necessary to get what we want.
Sometimes this means we are actually describing a need instead of an intention. When we are hungry, we want to eat the food that is in front of us, but this want is nothing more than an intuitive response to the need for nourishment. Such a desire is not an intention because it arises in the moment and can be satisfied in the moment, whereas an intention is about the future.
An intention always involves some kind of goal or ideal state we are trying to reach, maintain, avoid, or confirm. It is the future-oriented nature of our intentions that causes us to become attached to them. Intentions give us specific, definite goals to strive towards and we crave this certainty. Sometimes our desires feel automatic or compulsive because we become attached to them almost as quickly as they form.
Every intention has a judgment at its core. For a desire, we want its object because we judge it to be valuable in some way. We could always judge differently, which means every intention could be reversed: we could choose to hate what we presently want, and vice versa. Our judgments often happen so quickly that they lack conscious consideration. Many of our desires arise spontaneously from judgments that follow immediately from our preexisting beliefs or values.
When an intentional desire feels compulsive or seems to lack alternatives, we are almost certainly attached to it. Our inability to see that there are other options indicates that our awareness of this desire is deficient, which means that we cannot see how attachment to it will produce suffering. But all is not lost, for once we have noticed an attachment, we can begin to see how it operates, and by paying attention to it, we can eventually develop the awareness necessary to break free.
353. Dreaming Of Reality
Her dreams are becoming more real. At first she thought nothing of this, because she expected it would stop after a while and everything would go back to normal. But the end never came. If anything, her dreams have become even more troubling. The things she sees in them are no longer mere figments of imagination — they seem to carry a weight closer to reality itself.
This is especially true when it comes to people. In the past, the human beings she would dream up always had a certain falseness to them. It was as if they were only facsimiles of people, or canvases on which she would impose her own shape and colour. But now she can imagine someone with a form and a manner almost indistinguishable from those of a real person.
Of course, she knows they aren’t actually real. She’s not crazy. She knows the world she imagines is not the world she lives in with this body, the body she often wishes wasn’t hers. She knows the pain she feels in this body is not the same as the pain she feels in her dreams, like when she imagines she is loved by someone and then discovers she isn’t.
How is it possible that she can have such intense feelings for someone who exists nowhere but in her mind? The people she imagines have no correlates to actual people. They do not look or act like anyone she knows. And how is it possible that these imaginary people seem to act beyond her own will, including in ways she doesn’t want to experience? Her imagined world is now no less outside of her control than the physical one, which further adds to its realness.
She now lives equally in these two different worlds. She experiences joy in reality and in her imagination. Is one kind of joy worth less than the other? She isn’t sure, because the feeling is too similar for the experience to differ greatly. If there is a difference it would have to be expressed in terms of something like “depth”, but even this seems doubtful.
At the heart of her worries lies a question she cannot bring herself to consider fully: is it somehow possible that her existence in dreams is just as real as her existence in this body?
354. Awareness, A Metaphor
Awareness is created through attention. Each and every experience I have contributes to the expansion of my awareness, as long as my attention remains sufficiently open and free to explore it fully. Awareness is nothing other than what is gained from attentive experience of both self and world.
I experience my awareness through intuitions that arise naturally throughout my life. These intuitions show me what is needed and necessary for me to do. In this way, awareness can be thought of as an understanding of how to act. Since my awareness includes the need for my attention to remain open and free, many of these intuitions are signals that I need to release my attention from a particular focus that has caused it to become stuck.
Since awareness comes from attentive experience and arises through intuition, it is not a locatable object in me or in the world. It is not something I can delimit with language and it is often not something I can wilfully access. Awareness is instead a kind of idealized entity, a metaphor for the way attentive experience affects me throughout life. While it can be deeply felt, it is also always intangible and metaphorical.
Compassion, however, is not like this at all. Compassion is the action I take to meet needs, including the need to eliminate suffering and reduce unnecessary pain. Compassion arises from awareness, as it happens in response to intuitions of need, but compassion is not in any way metaphorical. It is tangible action taken to meet the needs of real living beings — beings just like me.
Compassion exists substantively in the world and it is located in the real actions that I take because of the intuitions provided by awareness. That these essential actions arise from nothing but an elusive and metaphorical awareness is one of the many paradoxes of human experience.
355. Chasing Meaning
After reading a strange text, we can be left wondering what it means. It seems to be saying something important, but we aren’t sure what. We wonder if perhaps we’ve missed something and this has prevented us from reaching the whole meaning.
We want to go back and reread, we want to seek out context, we want to get more information. We want to do these things so that we can find the point of the text. Knowing the point feels like the most important thing. But our anxiety over not having a clear meaning can easily mislead us. It can pull us away from what we need to see and drag our attention back into the text, forcing us to analyze every last detail as we grasp for definite knowledge.
We don’t need to force ourselves to get something out of everything we read. Reading is just like every other experience we have: we might see some meaning in it or we might not. Unless we’re overcome by paranoia, we don’t usually concern ourselves with the meaning of every little thing that happens to us.
What we do need is to allow ourselves to sit with our experiences, including our experiences of reading texts. We have to allow ourselves to reflect without being pulled away by attachments to precision or clarity. By sitting with our experiences, we gain something we cannot measure or explain, but which also broadens our awareness of the world and ourselves.
To allow ourselves to reflect fully, we need to allow our attention the freedom to linger and wander, to return to past experiences and to leave them, as needed. It is always attention that helps us see more of what is happening in and around us, and when our attention is the most open and free, we have the greatest chance to see the most in every experience.