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Awareness, happiness, and attachments
[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.
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.
no subject
Yes.
A lot of things are like that. It's like, you start out with beginner's luck, & then when you figure things out a bit more whatever you're doing starts to suck; but then if you push through that, you end up better than where you started.
And it's important to do that, because the happiness that comes from innocence is so fragile. Start noticing things and it's gone. The happiness that comes from having worked through loss of innocence is a lot more sturdy.
But you have to keep doing it over & over because it happens for every different aspect of life.
no subject
Yeah. That. Oddly enough, I'm not even sure I can "do it over & over" on command; I mostly notice that I *have* done it in the past and that it's been worthwhile.