“You become happy by contact with reality. That’s what brings happiness, a moment-by-moment contact with reality. That’s where you’ll find God; that’s where you’ll find happiness. But most people are not ready to hear that.” – Anthony de Mello, Awareness
Right now, reality is the cold nose of a Great Dane. It intrudes; an apt metaphor. I’ve got my eyes closed; my body folded; my attention trying to focus like a spotlight, bleeding like a floodlight. And then the snout of an insistent canine.
This, too, is reality. Maybe more so than before, because of how it intrudes and of how unwanted it is. Reality is that which bumps back against us, like a Great Dane against your Downward-Facing Dog.
I have a talent for unreality. I can fabricate visions of the far future that never come to pass. I can conjure embarrassments from years past to injure me anew. I can envision how karate fights with masked intruders would play out on boring workdays and I can write out the clever retorts I was going to say if I were just a beat faster in all my encounters, the retroactive screenwriter of my life. All things considered, I spend more time in these imaginary worlds than in the real one. And although I frequently lose contact with reality by thinking myself exceptional, I suspect this talent for unreality is not a Logan Thing so much as it is a Human Thing.
Reality is hard to experience. Reality is ephemeral, it flows and passes over us like Herodotus’ River, everchanging. It is ever present, and it is only present. It is alive and indivisible[1].
On the other hand, I am a creature of past and future. I have a past which pulls on me with a gravity. I am a snowballing collection of experiences: tragedies and triumphs; lessons learned implicitly and explicitly, consciously and unconsciously. I have a future that. is understood through projects and goals: visions of higher or lesser pursuits and interests to devote my life toward. Our past provides the raw material from which we construct models of the future. And our visions toward the future and our previous concepts inform how we filter the near-infinite flood of available information reality presents to us on an ongoing basis.
And so, to make sense of a sensory overload, my brain creates my reality through a series of perceptive filters. Perhaps the most important is the emotional valence of the information. Our brain’s first job is to keep us alive, and so the first filter information passes through is simple: Good or Bad? Friend or Foe? Approach or Avoid? For Me, or Against Me? As de Mello puts it, God or Fear: “Some say that there are only two things in the world: God and fear; love and fear are the only two things. There’s only one evil in the world, fear. There’s only one good in the world, love.” (de Mello, Awareness). Do we love it, or do we fear it?
Of course, it’s not easy to make such a designation in our messy, complex universe. Which brings us to the next set of perceptual filters: our labels and our concepts. These are our rules of thumb, our knee-jerk reactions, our combined cultural wisdoms, our learned life lessons, our collective emotional and intellectual vocabularies. We accumulate these throughout our lives, Katamari Damacy-style, intentionally and carelessly, but unavoidably. We love our concepts, and we cling to them. We use them to make sense of and to navigate through an information-rich world and to efficiently use previous experiences to predict future probabilities. But when we live in a world of our own projected concepts, we live in a world of shadows and ghosts. What we gain in knowledge of the world, we lose in direct understanding and experience. Because while concepts are universal and abstract, reality is particular and concrete.
Our concepts stop us from seeing, prevent us from awareness. De Mello uses the example of nationality – knowing that someone is American or Indian surely communicates something about the nature of a person, but you miss so much more when you reduce to labels. And while everyone knows that people cannot be, should not be, simplified into lazy essentialisms based on nationality or race or creed, it can be harder to see how we naturally slip into these labels, concepts, or categories. We do it innately.
“The great Krishnamurti put it so well when he said, ‘The day you teach the child the name of the bird, the child will never see that bird again.’ How true! The first time the child sees that fluffy, alive, moving object, and you say to him, ‘Sparrow,’ then tomorrow when the child sees another fluffy, moving object similar to it he says, ‘Oh, sparrows. I’ve seen sparrows. I’m bored by sparrows.’” (de Mello, Awareness, 121)
I live in a neighborhood, rows of houses. I rarely see them, I mean, really see them. They may as well be the same repeating, cut-and-paste houses of my video game worlds for all the attention I pay them. And while I’d like to think that I’m at least more careful and attentive in my relationships with humans, and especially the people I am closest to, how different is it, really? Do I really experience people, or do I perceive them through various corrupt membranes of my self-interest, past experiences, and essentializing labels/concepts?
Direct contact with reality is hard. Reality is messy, overwhelming, confusing. Our concepts help us sort and categorize and efficiently navigate.
“It’s a great help to have similarities, so we can abstract, so that we can have a concept. It’s a great help, from the point of view of communication, education, science. But it’s also very misleading and a great hindrance to seeing this concrete individual. If all you experience is your concept, you’re not experiencing reality, because reality is concrete…reality is whole, but words and concepts fragment reality… Ideas actually fragment the vision, intuition, or experience of reality as a whole. This is what mystics are perpetually telling us. Words cannot give you reality. They only point, they only indicate. You use them as pointers to get to reality. But once you get there, your concepts are useless.” (de Mello, Awareness, 121-122)
So we live in a subjective mental world of concepts, beliefs, values that are used to filter information we receive from the external world. We understand our past as narrative and we project ourselves forward into the future. We’ve created a phantom world of categories which we then play with like so many shadow-puppets. If so much of our experience is un-real, where can we find the direct contact with reality, which de Mello promised us earlier was happiness, experience of God?
Well, there’s an Advanced Answer and a Beginner’s Answer.
The Advanced Answer is: You find it everywhere and nowhere, stupid. It’s always already right there. You can find it in every moment, beautiful and ugly, momentous and quotidian. You can observe without identifying, you can separate the contents of your consciousness from the consciousness itself – refusing to equate the former with the latter. You can bring yourself presently towards whatever experience life brings to you, and to reject our tendency to follow the past of least resistance. You can open your eyes and see.
The Beginner’s Answer is: Pain and Suffering.
Pain is the most direct contact with reality – reality is that which bumps back, remember? Like the cold nose of an inquisitive dog unexpectedly intruding on your peace of mind.
Pain is definitional: it draws the boundaries of where we end and where the external world begins. Pain is concrete in a way that pleasure typically isn’t; people can doubt how good they feel, but pain has an insistent quality. You don’t doubt that the broken arm is your arm – the arm won’t let you.
As such, the experience of pain is one of our most powerful, direct exposures to reality. It is the place where you can pierce the veil most easily. You do it with awareness, by looking at, feeling, naming, sharing the pain. Digging into the character of the pain. You can come to see it as something apart from you – not something intrinsic to your experience, but just a cloud passing through the sky of your consciousness. You can see how transitory and fluid experience is.
I am not advocating that you put your hand on a hot stove or flagellate yourself bloody as a means to higher spiritual knowledge[2]. I am neither masochist nor ascetic. But you may have heard, life is suffering. You’re going to have pain anyways. Hate to break it to you. You may as well use it all and learn from it. Because the path to wisdom lies through pain.
In The Palliative Society, Byung-Chul Han has a short (dense?) chapter called “The Dialectics of Pain” – it captures the idea quite well.
“The mind is pain. It is only through pain that the mind reaches new insights, higher forms of knowledge and consciousness…. Without pain, it is impossible to produce that kind of knowledge which radically breaks with the past. Experience [Erfahrung] in an emphatic sense also presupposes the negativity of pain. Experience is a painful process of transformation that contains an element of suffering, or undergoing something… Radical change is brought about only by pain… Pain shakes up the habitual relations between meanings, and forces the mind into a radical change in perspective that shows everything in a new light. As opposed to pleasure, pain triggers processes of reflection. It gives the mind a ‘dialectical clarity par excellence’. It makes the mind more perceptive. It opens up a whole new way of seeing.” (Han, 38-41).
When we suffer, when we experience unwanted pain, when there are gaps between our expectations and our reality, we have the most opportunity for spiritual and moral growth. We can express compassion, gratitude, joy, in contrast to pain. We can learn and grow. And we can see that, even as we suffer, we are not our suffering. Like everything else, it has a purpose and a passing. You just need to watch it a while and see.
In martial arts, I sometimes tell my students, “Pain is your best teacher, it is just that nobody likes the class.” When you don’t move your head, and you get hit in the head, it hurts, and then you learn to move your head more in the future. Pain is a sure and fast way to learn lessons.
But back to the Advanced Answer. If you do things just right, then beyond that pain and fear comes love. Once you’ve got the hang of awareness, you’ll find that the same mindfulness you can bring to navigate pain can be brought to bear on all things. See the way broadly, and you’ll see it in everything.
Pain is where we can practice our awareness. Awareness allows us to separate the perceived essence of something from the concrete experience of something. Through this mindful attention to the thing-in-and-of-itself, we come to understand it. And understanding is a prerequisite for love[3].
The same tools we use to understand our pain, we can use to understand our joy. When I can mindfully experience the cold snout of an oversized dog – the “bad” thing --- I can also mindfully experience his warmth when he curls up near my feet – the “good” thing.
I put those “bad” and “good” labels in scare quotes for a reason: because at a certain point of spiritual practice and maturity, one is just as useful as the other. After all, both pain and joy are just facets of reality, only different parts of it.
And that, I think, is what de Mello was speaking of in the quote at the beginning. Direct, moment-to-moment contact with reality. You can find it everywhere. But you’re probably going to start with pain. Most people aren’t ready to hear that. Most people don’t want to look at their pain. De Mello says the first and hardest spiritual act is to see.
I thought that my dog interrupted my practice. Now I realize that his painfully cold, intrusive nose has been my best teacher. He brought me to reality; he brought me to God. He opened my eyes, so that I could see.
[1] This is a reference to Aesop Rock’s album Spirit World Field Guide, which is itself a spiritual experience.
[2] Obviously. I only advocate for these actions to reach higher planes of sexual ecstasy.
[3] If not the nature of love itself. For more on the “to be loved is to be understood and vice versa” hypothesis, see Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving.