271. Good And Bad

The world of our experience is not uniform but filled with differences. We perceive many of these differences and take note of them. This looks more round than that. This feels smoother than that. This sounds higher pitched than that. This tastes sweeter than that. This smells more floral than that. We are obsessed with differences, and we form categories to group similar objects together based on the differences we perceive.

As we categorize, we also cannot help wonder which categories are better than others. We like what is beautiful, useful, or a source of pleasure. We impose our judgments on the objects we encounter and we produce a ranking of categories. Some things are simply better for us than others, so we prefer those things over the others. In this way, our obsession with differences is also an obsession with hierarchy.

We project our judgments of what is best onto the world and perpetuate them through the norms and systems we create together with others. Often we do not see this process happening because it seems natural to us that we should shape the world to be how we want it to be. But in doing so, we also risk greatly limiting ourselves.

As we categorize and rank the objects of our experience, we learn to ignore everything we value least and we stop ourselves from becoming fully aware of those things. We end up seeing only the part of the world we like, which makes it impossible for us to see even that very clearly.

To be capable of seeing the good we must also see the bad, not merely as part of the category “bad” and therefore as something separate from us, but in its entire nature and connection to everything else, including us. It is by seeing the interdependence of all things more clearly that we begin to develop a more accurate picture not just of the world but also of ourselves.

Many of the things we do not like or label “bad” are not out in the world but inside us — things like our pains, our worries, our sufferings. We must allow our attention to reach these entities too, to uncover all of the parts of the self and all of the parts of the world around us.