247. Beyond The Ordinary

You find yourself thinking more and more that life is just too difficult. You’re questioning your existence, your purpose in this world that seems to lack any substantial value. You’re wondering if there’s nothing more to life than this painful struggle that never seems to end.

You’re having these thoughts and feelings because you are suffering greatly. You’re suffering under the weight of something you cannot see. It has occluded your vision so perfectly that you cannot even guess what it might be.

Sometimes it’s that your desires are so strong and multiple that they’ve come to dominate everything you see and do. Sometimes it’s your aversions that capture you, causing you to go through life in a constant state of fear and worry. Sometimes it’s your beliefs that are shaping everything you see into something it isn’t, forcing you to live in a world of illusions. In every case, it’s your attachment to something that is degrading your experience of life.

In order to loosen an attachment, you first need to be able to see it. If you can see it, you can also see past it, towards the possibility of being free of it. But when the thing you must see has become part of your vision, any investigation of yourself will be hindered. Your ordinary experiences are already being moulded and modified by the very thing you cannot see.

To make any progress, you need to go beyond the ordinary. You need to expand the range of your experience by opening yourself to everything that is new. This, in turn, creates new opportunities for your desires, aversions, and beliefs to exist in the world, which gives you a chance to recognize them as objects separate from you.

But this approach will only work if you pay close attention to your experiences and to the thoughts and feelings they bring to the surface. Above all, you must be ruthlessly honest with yourself. Any attempt to lie about what you see in yourself will only guarantee that your attachments remain hidden, which means your suffering will continue without end.