431. The Voice That Speaks
The voice that is desired is not the voice that speaks. The voice that is desired confirms our self-knowledge and conforms to our existing understanding of the world. The voice that speaks ignores our expectations and counters our beliefs with difficult truths. The voice that is desired takes us on a pleasing journey along worn and familiar paths. The voice that speaks drags us through the mud and deposits us in some unknown place. The voice that is desired comforts us as a parent comforts a child. The voice that speaks disturbs us and says what must be said. The voice that is desired confirms our innocence and misfortune. The voice that speaks implicates us in wrongs we have unknowingly committed. The voice that is desired showers us in praise and approval. The voice that speaks questions our efforts and doubts even our most cherished values. The voice that is desired tells us that our choices were certainly the right ones. The voice that speaks reminds us of uncertainty and demands that we make an effort to understand what is truly good. The voice that is desired offers us a guarantee of our personal salvation. The voice that speaks tells us we are far from being saved because our actions regularly fall short. The voice that is desired shows us the truth gently and grants us respite when it becomes too much to accept. The voice that speaks offers no escape, only the unmitigated truth, always and without end. The voice that is desired allows us to remain as we are and requests only that we enjoy its satisfying words. The voice that speaks is itself an endless demand for us to see our reality and to grow into more. The voice that speaks is not the voice that is desired.
432. Helping Others
Someone has asked you to help meet one of their needs, and you feel like you should do it. Perhaps you feel this way because you have a desire to make them happy, or you want to avoid their anger at failing to help, or simply because you believe you should help when you can. If you are attached to any of these intentions, you will feel motivated to do what has been asked of you.
Your helpful actions will be compassionate ones, since they help to meet someone’s need. This is true even though you are not motivated by an awareness of need. In this way, many of the things you do throughout life are compassionate, even if you do not recognize them as such.
At the same time, since you are taking action because of attachment to an intention, you might feel annoyed, frustrated, or even resentful at having to help. Perhaps you wanted to do something else, and now you feel forced to undertake this demanding task out of obligation. This can happen even when the person you are helping is someone you care about deeply. You might then feel guilty over having these feelings, which are actually forms of suffering produced by attachment.
If, on the other hand, you could see that your help was necessary in order to meet an important need, then your motivation would not come from obligation but from awareness. When you see need and the necessity of meeting it, there is no resentment or frustration. You freely choose to offer your help because the necessity of compassion overwhelms any other considerations.
Acting from awareness, you might perform the very same actions as you would acting from attachment, but you will do so with a sense of purpose. For now you can see the immense value created by meeting the need of another person. Not only will you no longer produce additional suffering for yourself, you might also discover that there is an unexpected joy in doing what you have been asked to do.
433. Fighting With Words
His spirits were as low as ever. It had been another day of failure. Another day of effort that amounted to nothing. Another day of being crushed by the written word and the shrinking likelihood of its fruitful deployment. He was trying to write and he was getting nowhere.
He started the day full of hope, full of aspiration, full of the possibility of success. He began writing almost as soon as he got up, working from a vague plan he’d thought up the night before. But right away there was a problem. The sentences he composed did not satisfy him. Worse, they seemed slightly off in a way he could not place. It was as though there was something missing, some aspect that was not being properly captured by the language.
His frustration with the problem grew until he was unable to continue. He couldn’t accept the sentences he already had, so what was the point of adding to their number? Still, he could not allow himself to give up. Giving up would only condemn him to the interminable void. He had to press forward.
But forward was impossible with the words he already had. He would have to start over and approach the thing from a different angle. But what angle? And more importantly, what was the thing he was trying to approach? He pondered this question for some time before finally realizing it was irrelevant. He would start from where he could start.
Again he took up the blank page. Putting down the first word felt risky, as though the promise of the page were somehow diminished. Then an almost cynical laugh emerged from him. He knew this feeling all too well. He was not so much of a novice that a blank page could scare him. He started to write, in a new voice, one more confident than his earlier attempt.
It was only much later that he realized everything had gone wrong. He read over his work and he was furious. The text was so vapid that the paper had to be sent straight to the recycling so that it could be put to better use. Little did he know this was only the beginning. His struggles with language were about to get much, much worse.
434. Suffering Is Loss
All suffering is a kind of loss. I want to escape from suffering, so I try to control my attention and actions towards that goal. But in doing so, I lose the opportunity to reach the more joyful life that I could be living. That this loss occurs only because I’m attached to my own intentions is a tragedy.
I don’t need to suffer, but I do because I’m not well-accustomed to existing as the kind of being that I am. I reflect on my experiences and I automatically judge them to be good or bad, which means I form intentions about the world around me. This entirely ordinary human capability causes me to be sucked into attachment. And the result of attachment is always suffering and the loss of joy. This loss is not valuable. I do not gain anything by suffering more. I’ve already suffered enough to understand suffering, provided I’m willing to examine it.
The problem is not simply that I’m distracted by persistent feelings of suffering — grief, anger, stress, anxiety, regret, and so on — but that I allow myself to react to these feelings. I try to escape from suffering, which only produces further attachment and further suffering. Escaping from suffering is not feasible because new attachments will always continue to form.
My only hope is to eliminate suffering at its source. To do so, I need to discover how to release myself from attachment in each and every moment of my life. This is no easy task. It requires enormous attention to the very personal attachments I’ve formed throughout my life and to the very real suffering they regularly produce for me.
I must allow my attention to freely and openly investigate these things, to sit with them long enough for them to become clear, and this can be painful. But it is only when I am fully aware of the relationship between my attachments and my suffering that I will understand that attachment is not only unnecessary but intolerable. And then I will finally bring an end to the tragedy of suffering and allow joy into every corner of my life.
435. Final Interpretation
An unprecedented artwork can be difficult to place. Encountering it for the first time, we give it a tentative interpretation, which offers some context and structure to what we are seeing. This provides us with some stability, which allows us to look closer and discover details and complexities we hadn’t noticed before. Often these complicate our initial interpretation, challenging us to consider the artwork in a different light.
Our inclination then might be to posit several interpretations, trying them on one by one to see what fits. Sometimes we will land on one that feels more substantial than the others, and feel assured that we have grasped the meaning of the work. But on other occasions, the artwork will resist any interpretation we give it. Here, our desire for a final and perfect interpretation is thwarted.
We might then turn to the artist, to see if we can glean something from them that would allow us to put more weight on one interpretation or another. We might even ask them what they believe they have created. The artist, however, might be hesitant to respond, knowing that any interpretation they supply would be given too much weight, thus reducing the possibilities of the work itself.
If the artist does comment on their work, they might offer multiple interpretations without placing any one above the others. In some cases, the artist might even declare that they do not know what the work means. Perhaps they created it only by following their intuitions and they genuinely do not know. Or perhaps the artist is still learning from the work, still discovering new ways to see and understand it.
Any final interpretation of an artwork would require perfect awareness, for only then would we be able to see all of the possibilities it contains. But perfect awareness is not something a human being is likely to achieve, for there is always more of both world and self to see. It follows that every artwork still contains some possibility not yet seen in it. Whatever meaning we assign to it is always tentative, always subject to revision, and always less than the artwork itself.