Thoreau said that most human beings "live lives of quiet desperation."
What to do when we're feeling desperate, fearful and despairing?
There are the usual answers to this. Go see a therapist, take a prozac, heal your mind, go shopping, snap out of it, become more successful, or do whatever it is we usually do to console ourselves.
But while everything has its place, none of those things or others will fundamentally alter the suffering or loneliness or dissatisfaction that we feel inside, because none of them get at the cause.
And what is the cause? The fundamental cause of our suffering is mistaken identity. We take ourselves to be something that we're not: We take ourselves to be a separate entity, a personal somebody, and we're not.
As long as we think that we're a separate "I-ness" making its way in the world, suffering is inevitable. It absolutely comes with the territory. Even if we get everything we want and achieve what might be called sensorial happiness, it still will be suffused with a subtle suffering—and sometimes not so subtle.
It has to be so because the fundamental situation is not being addressed. In the endless task of "improving" our psyche or our circumstances, we're moving furniture around in a room but we're not opening the door and stepping outside.
To see who we are, we first have to see who or what we're not. What we usually take ourselves to be is the contents of our mind, and the memories and projections of that into the past and the future.
We completely identify with whatever thoughts and feelings and desires and fears are passing through consciousness, and then wonder why no matter how many problems we solve more keep cropping up.
Our situation is like someone who has gone to sleep and is having a dream. And in this dream a number of problems have occurred, which we then do all manner of things to solve. Yet no matter what we do the elementary disjointedness continues, ameliorated here and there by various types of pleasures.
And we continue seeking for a lasting happiness—but within the dream.
If we're fortunate, we eventually begin to see that no amount of furniture-rearranging, no amount of problem-solving, no amount of "improvement" or "success" will alter this situation at its core. Only waking up from the dream will do that.
What does it mean to wake up from the dream? It means to see that the whole idea of a separate, personal somebody is a fiction, literally a story put together and solidified step-by-step by endless thinking and feeling and fearing and desiring around this personal "I," the self-concept.
When this concept—along with all other concepts—is seen to be empty, not intellectually but experientially, life goes on as before but a transformation in perception occurs.
An immediacy of perception occurs, unclouded by the normal attachment to and identification with the contents of the mind. Then just pure awareness is there: The rain on the street, the feeling of sitting, the taste of the orange, the awareness of a thought in the mind, the look in someone's eyes—all are perceived directly, without judgment or mentation.
Without the attachment to thought and the other contents of mind, this perception is experienced as and in an immense stillness, even though activity may be going on. And then a vast, incomprehensible intelligence lives through us, as us, and in and as everything else as well, and we see that it has always been so.
We see then that the only reality is the One, and that it has always been so. We see then that the only reality is Itself, the indivisible non-locatable, and that it has always been so. And we're overcome with wonder.
And our "problems" are still there—or not—but are acted upon from a different perception, one that doesn't see them as problems and that is not attached to a particular outcome.
How to get there? What to do? There is no way to "do" it, really, because all decisions by the personal "self" to "do" something only reinforce the sense of a separate doer.
Yet this can be said: Get very close to that urge inside us all that wants to know the truth. Who are you really? Find out for yourself, because no-one can do it for you and no-one can give it to you.
Look in silence at yourself, and keep on looking. Silence reveals everything, is everything. Who are you really? Find out.
—jim sloman, 2/25/01 for Feb 25
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