Seeing Things As They Really Are
There is something I would classify as a “western mindfulness” idea — but a pervasive, unconscious one, not something being promulgated from a particular place — of “seeing things as they really are,” that is going horribly, horribly wrong.
Any flavor of this map is susceptible to what i’m talking about:
Problems
Meditation
Mindful attention
Everything is actually fine
No more problems
There are at least two layers of problem here.
The deeper layer is that “things as they really are” cannot be “seen,” and that’s, like, a religious problem we can have an interminable conversation about another time.
The important layer is psychological. “Everything is actually fine.”
I think this shorthand starts as a reasonable observation that it’s easy to get into wound-up, narrow perspectives constrained by self-perpetuating stories about how personally bad it is, and one can skillfully release oneself into a “bigger picture” where it doesn’t look so bad.
But those “bigger picture” perspectives are anecdotes. They are instances of a single, isolated problem or related set of problems, which could be disentangled with a deep breath and turned out not to be so bad.
That’s not actually a good read on “things as they really are.”
When you develop the skills to look at mind on a CONTINUOUS basis without wandering off into the bushes, say, thinking about one of those isolated problems, is what you see “everything is actually fine”?
No. What you see is a monstrous phantasmagoria of indescribable intensity.
So what do people without enculturated frameworks for dealing with that kind of experience do? Freak out? Pretend it didn’t happen and suppress it? Egoically declare that they conquered it? Dismiss it as another illusion and say “everything is actually fine”?
Sound familiar?
The thing is, EVERYTHING actually IS fine, so the statement sounds good on paper. What an unprepared civilization doesn’t realize is that there’s a lot more EVERYTHING than they thought, especially as far as the “individual” is concerned.
And that individual is NOT FINE.
So if “seeing things as they really are” looks like THIS BEING, as currently constituted, getting out of trouble just by changing its point of view on the world, that is gonna go sideways.
one thing is fine ≠ everything is one ≠ everything is fine.
If, rather than “things,” one could start to wonder about seeing ONESELF as it really is, then we’d be getting somewhere, being as that’s the only “thing” we have access to.
But there’s seeing it, and then there’s DEALING with it. That involves your whole world, not just mind.
