292. Intuitive Sense

When you hear someone speak, you don’t just understand their words, you feel them too. Beyond the semantic content that is processed cognitively, there is also an emotional payload that arrives just as immediately as any rational meaning.

Sometimes the feeling of the words arrives in advance of the meaning. This is often what happens when someone tells you horrible news. The words you’re hearing feel awful and the intensity of the feeling impedes your ability to understand. This is when we might say that the meaning takes time to “sink in”, as though some part of you were a sponge that has not yet fully absorbed the liquid of meaning.

291. Reaching The Other

When someone is overwhelmed by anxiety, they can become difficult to reach. Such a person is completely in the grip of attachment and thus in a place of enormous suffering. To attempt to escape from their suffering, they will do anything they possibly can.

One thing they will try is to adopt beliefs that make them feel safe from the objects of their anxiety. To an outsider not under their spell, these beliefs look like delusions. Strictly speaking, any belief is a delusion if it is taken to be absolutely true, as it simply cannot possess that degree of certainty. We tend not to notice most of our delusions because we share them with the people around us. It’s because we share them that it’s also easy for us to talk to each other.

290. The Paradox Of Compassion

To act from compassion, I need to be engaged with everything that is happening, both in me and out in the world, but without being attached to any of it. I need to be connected to everything but also separate from it. It is in this paradoxical state that I must live.

As I experience the world, I automatically form desires, aversions, and beliefs. These intentions are neither good nor bad in themselves, but if I become attached to them, I will start to suffer. I will suffer because my attention is constrained to achieving my intended ideals and this prevents me from meeting my needs and the needs of the people around me.

289. To Be Surpassed

For every historical artwork that is still revered and loved, there are countless others that now receive little attention or are seen only as minor stepping stones to something that came after. While these impressive works once garnered much appreciation and applause, they are now basically forgotten.

Realizing this, we might worry that a similar fate will befall our own greatest achievements. If even the most significant masterpieces are likely to be relegated to the dustbin of history, what point could there possibly be to our own creative efforts?

288. Something More

I’m feeling spiritless as I stand at the window, looking out at the world. There are people walking on the sidewalk down below. Many are alone, like me, but moving briskly towards destinations unknown. Others are in pairs or small groups, some talking and some not. The faster ones are passing the slower, sometimes even stepping off the sidewalk and into the street to complete the maneuver.

I pick out one person from the mass. He’s walking with a leisurely stride. What’s his story? I decide that he lives in the neighbourhood, in a building just like this one. I decide that he has a one-bedroom apartment that he shares with two cats and zero humans. I decide that he has just been at the library where he was perusing books on eighteenth-century philosophers. Obviously this is only a fantasy.

287. Beyond Hypocrisy

It can be frustrating to see someone do something opposite to their earlier actions or stated beliefs. We want the people around us to be consistent. We want to be able to understand their motives and beliefs. We want their actions to be predictable and orderly.

We expect people to be rational and their actions to follow a consistent set of principles. When we discover something that contradicts those principles, we criticize their behaviour. We expect the other to be responsive to our critique, for we feel they ought to value consistency just as we do.

286. The Experiencing Subject

We measure and evaluate and judge. We distinguish and classify and categorize. We hypothesize and test and infer. By doing these things repeatedly, we construct a perfectly objective world that we can perfectly understand and perfectly control.

We use our understanding and our control to make ourselves happy. We see lack in our lives, and we focus on it like a problem to be solved. We reason that by increasing whatever is lacking, we will improve our well-being, and when nothing is lacking we will finally be happy. Then all of our desires will be satisfied, our aversions vanquished, and our beliefs confirmed.

285. Real And Virtual

We call the world where our bodies exist the “real” world. This is the world of structure and society that has mostly been given to us, and which we have learned to understand in order to live productively. It is also the world where we have obligations and roles to fulfill. Often we focus so intently on this world that we cannot even begin to imagine any alternative to it.

284. Falling Short

Even if I always do everything I possibly can to help others, there will still be those who won’t receive the compassion they need from me. Despite continuous effort to see what I must do and then do it, my actions can still fall short. This happens because my awareness is imperfect. Where my awareness is lacking, I’m unable to see the most compassionate course of action.

Even with an unshakable devotion to seeing clearly, I still won’t achieve perfect awareness. This is partly because the world around me is complex and varied, which means there are more kinds of experience than the ones I’ve already had or seen. It’s also because there is more to myself than I can fully grasp, and uncovering all of my hidden desires, aversions, and beliefs is itself an endless task. I can try to expand my awareness by allowing my attention to be open and free to explore everything I encounter, but my progress towards perfect awareness will always be partial.