Awareness, happiness, and attachments

[cjsmith]

[Pieces of my side of a conversation elsewhere, stitched together here.]

There's a lot of happiness to be found when one is oblivious, but then when one begins to see things a bit more clearly, it can hurt like blazes. So is there a stage past that, where one sees more, and is okay again? I'm thinking there is, but I have only a few shards to go on.

Lots of people ignore bad stuff. (Deliberately overfocus on good stuff to drive the bad stuff out, or are in denial. (And maybe also unhappy, maybe not.)) I ignore a lot just to stay sane, and somehow I think I'm missing a piece there.

I want to see it all, be aware of it all, and be okay. Some few humans can. I cannot (yet). Perhaps I don't have enough lifetime left to get there; that's okay. I firmly believe that people can.

I'm thinking of a very few people: Dalai Lama, maybe. I read him as truly happy -- that is, he is content, serene, happy, but not due to ignoring shit. Not due to making up a sweetness-and-light "good outcome" that no one actually knows will happen. That's a dependent, weak happiness. His is not.

The more I think about all this, the more I start to surmise that the attachments we hurt ourselves with are ideas. "Other people should meet my needs even if I cannot articulate them." "People should be competent at what they do." "Life should be fair." I've got that last one and it is going to cause me pain until I jettison it. I am deeply attached to it.

I would guess that this is a teeny tiny step on a really long road. I have peeled one layer of a very large onion. I suspect there's more onion in there and I can do better.

Comments

[exponentialdk.livejournal.com]

At some point in the past, quite likely in the wake of what could be called a domestic social war, I feel like I made a major step in the direction you describe: several layers of the onion. I rather abruptly lost a lot of my inner turbulence, attaining a sort of peace that I hadn't known before.

But:

- is it less turbulence because there is less flow, or has it become more laminar?

- am I harder to upset because I just stopped caring?

I do feel like I've made a lot of progress, though I can't identify how. There are small things that I still get passionate about (e.g. the Right Way to do certain things at work), and I'm still passionate about most of the big things. Perhaps I've just become oblivious to most of the little things.

Good luck with your introspection. Hopefully you'll do better at guiding your development than I've been at riding along with mine.
:-)

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

is it less turbulence because there is less flow, or has it become more laminar?

And which answer would be more desirable? I'm not even sure I know.

I do feel like I've made a lot of progress, though I can't identify how. [...] Hopefully you'll do better at guiding your development than I've been at riding along with mine.

Yeah, I too have had that feeling. I've lost some of the turbulence I had in my early twenties. I don't know how. I think about it in the hopes of trying to duplicate it (continue it) deliberately. So far, I'm still just riding along, although spending a bit of energy cataloguing the scenery!