To Feel or not to Feel, That is the awareness

Namo Avalokiteshvaraye

Awareness does not always equal happiness. As Buddhists we must first start out on our journey understanding that we are both simultaneously perfect and in some ways flawed. Now this is already a quasi assumption but it will bear out that the assumption is a useful one for embarking. We are, after all, sometimes happy, sometimes sad and moreover, others around us suffer as well. We are not completely content with the suffering and so spend our days trying to avoid it while trying to bring things and situations towards us that make us happy.

If we are on a spiritual path, it is probably because we must have made some observation that our happiness has been conditional and therefore unstable or unreliable and so we suffer the instability of our happiness. This shows that the type of happiness we think we have found is also flawed.

Our modern world as we know it, is a planet experiencing an unprecedented population explosion of a very specific aggressive species that seems to be taking over the planet at the expense of itself and most other species as well. Today, thanks to technology, people are bombarded with all kinds of information about what is happening in the far reaches of our world and sometimes even beyond. The information is by and large unfiltered and unprocessed. Some of the information maybe relatively accurate and much of it has in fact been weaponized. Being exposed to this quantity of information places a burden onto our systems to decide which information is relevant to us and then, which of it is true and somehow applicable to our lives or for those around us. This burden on our system to determine the validity of the inputs to our system is significant and increases for those of us who use various news platforms or even internet for shopping for our basic needs or for things we didn’t even know we needed. To make matters worse, computer algorithms designed to increase commercial gain, bring the most banal information and images into our view and bring our characters down at terminal velocity.

Our system is designed to take in sensory inputs of all kinds, process them and then translate it into several energetic decision categories such as act, don’t act but be aware, ignore it, and so on. Typically, in order to remain healthy and balanced as a human, we need the information to fall into one of those categories in order to feel like our system is functioning properly. We gauge ourselves by achieving certain milestones, which are based on a set of values and assumptions. Like any other machine, our system, our bodies, our speech and Minds and the hardware that supports those functions, become extremely taxed by this burden and often fatigued or even traumatized by it. Our continuums become saturated with information we cannot process and these undigested inputs build up inside us while undigested calories build up as plaque in our arteries. (we need to process information in order to complete the cycle of registration of reality and determining our basic function and for structuring meaning for our lives). Failing to accomplish this digestion properly, our verification of true awareness is diminished, and the function and accessibility of the element of space being obscured by outer, inner and secret causes, we find it difficult to breath. Our prana (basic breath and the impulses that travel along our nervous system) becomes disturbed and our speech becomes irresolute and ineffective. Communications become stressful as these efforts too seem to fail more often than succeed. This causes even further consternation as individuals find themselves once again, even less sure if they have made any correct assertions about the world in which we live.

We are frequently told that our job is to essentially fulfill ourselves with various pursuits and that happiness will easily be found when one has sufficient resources to obtain objects pleasing to our senses.

But alas, or fortunately, we are Buddhists. We have come to realize that the happiness realized through the coming together of sense objects and the senses, is at best a fleeting temporary occurrence and may or may not in fact be truly tied to or even related with happiness at all. Our questioning of this game is actually a first requirement for becoming a Buddhist and will help us on the path.

It does not take long for us to come to a midway conclusion that losing ourselves in worldly pursuits at the expense of our basic inquiry into the nature of reality, is a poor or frivolous trade off. This conclusion both leads us into meditation and provides the fuel we need to keep ourselves on the path towards less delusion.

So here we are, on our couches, perhaps after a day’s work, enjoying some of the temporary creature comforts we feel we have earned. We check our cell phones which are built on the bones of children who mine the lithium for the batteries that power it. We throw off our shoes, stripped from the hides of innocent harmless cows. We reach over to the bowl of milk chocolates made from the life blood stolen from the youth of those harvesting the cocoa. There is no escaping that suffering lurks everywhere even if we were all to become naked tent-dwelling, cat loving vegetarians. In fact even our cats when given their freedom, bring us home dead mice as an apparent gift to us or perhaps as proof of their partially vestigiated DNA habit to kill for a living. The suffering is all-pervasive and simply goes on and on. No political party can end it and no amount of resources thrown at a few individuals will end the suffering for those at the bottom of the food chain.

Now we come to the main point. We seem to have arrived at a time when two basic characteristics have become the main functioning markers of a category of human evolution. This can be summed up as compassion or empathy. Without compassion and some form of relative empathy, there is no way we can still use the word awareness. Hence the Sanskrit word for Buddha has its root in the word Budh or “to notice”. Buddha is one who is fully awakened and fully aware of everything in this universe and beyond. This of course includes being aware of the suffering of apparent sentient beings. I say apparent here because from a non-dual perspective, they only seem to arise as separate beings when in fact this conclusion is suspect.

We can easily notice that the main divisions we see today across the globe are between people who seem to feel to one extent or another, that protecting oneself or one’s limited local tribe, is of paramount importance over all other concerns. This group feels strongly that the notion of self-preservation easily justifies the elimination of any and all threats and so killing of others is deemed to be fitting within this view. The killing can be done by bombs and other weapons or by economic variances, it matters little. This view necessitates understanding who is within the tribe and who is outside the tribe. Identity among humans, is based on several factors obviously, such as race, ethnic group, language and geographical origin, clothing, ideologies and so forth. The need to differentiate oneself from others arises therefore, in order to complete the world view that to protect oneself at all costs regardless of the needs of others is essential and necessary. The second personality, has at its core, an understanding that there really is “no other”. Those of this personality type have crossed over to understand that the key factor in survival is not the identification and elimination of a fictitious other, but the recognition of the interdependence of all things and identification of the functionality of this interdependence.

I often point out that different species of monkeys have different reactions to seeing their own image in a mirror. Macaques for example, see their image and their expressions escalate in threat level until they run away from their image in fear. Male Gorillas see their own image and attack it immediately. Orangutans, (Jungle people in English), see their reflection and slowly reach out to touch it. Realizing it is their own reflection, they immediately and peacefully lose interest.

Today, this first basic character type seems to be personified by various types of rhetoric which extoll the methods to find and identify “the other” in order to hone their defense reactions, whereas the second type advocates caring for those vulnerable with less capacities. One wishes for less regulation for the individual and one accepts the need for organization of resources to achieve a goal of compassion for all.

But regardless of the bold and suspicious generalized stroke made here to paint one type as selfish folks and the other type as compassionate altruists, the basic point being made here is that if you feel deeply unsettled, or if you are having back to back bad days and are experiencing some underlying persistent depression, it is because you are in fact aware of what is really going on around us. One can say that you are a prince or princess that has left the palace never to return until reaching Buddhahood; the pinnacle of enlightenment for the benefit of all beings. One can also say that if you are not at all depressed about what is going on around you, that you are either not really paying attention or you are a sociopath.

As a Buddhist, making statements such as: “Just make yourself happy because happiness is in the mind” , or “If you meditate you will become happy” simply means your practice is shallow and your awareness has not yet fully bloomed. Because awareness inherently means more understanding, not less. Moreover, if someone has become satisfied simply by making themselves happy, then one has not really entered the Mahayana and therefore Enlightenment proper is actually quite far away.

In short, it is only by the development of great compassion that the issues of one’s own happiness and the fact of suffering of others can be rectified. The development of Great Compassion is in fact how the Buddha himself eventually reached complete and total Enlightenment. It stands to reason then, that if we are to call ourselves Buddhists, we should be doing our best to do the same.

OM MANI PADME HUM