351. Suffering From Seeing

The expansion of our awareness can sometimes cause our suffering to expand. We can now see more of our reality and we don’t like what we’re seeing. There are problems not only out in the world, but also inside of us — patterns of behaviour we don’t want to acknowledge and terrible feelings we don’t want to recognize. We feel far from where we want to be and this distance causes us great frustration.

Our suffering is compounded by the fact that we can’t see how to close the gap. We don’t know how to get to where we want to be and we have the nagging worry that life will always be less than we imagined it should be. Sometimes these desires and aversions come together to form the belief that there’s nothing we can do and we fall into despair. We feel like prisoners trapped in a meaningless existence where the best we can hope for is to escape into isolation and live out our days in relative peace.

But this new suffering is present only because our awareness stopped expanding at an arbitrary point. We learned about our problems and then we stopped investigating. The consequence is that our awareness is not yet broad enough to alter our relationship with the attachments that produce suffering. If our awareness were allowed to grow further, then our new suffering will not last long.

We have to keep going towards an even greater awareness. As we become more aware of the nature of our suffering, the gap between reality and our desired ideal will lose its significance. We will see that we can eliminate suffering through our own awareness and by sharing our awareness with others. We will see that we can meet our needs and the needs of others through compassionate action. And we will also see that we are capable of so much more than we ever thought possible.

To get to this better place, we must allow our awareness to keep growing even though this can temporarily bring us additional suffering. Only with an even broader awareness will we become capable of overcoming suffering and moving towards a more creative and joyful life.