Simply The Way It Is

But still, what interests me is this question of why a particular culture asks particular questions. Why is it that we Americans, for instance, seem to expect things to be over so fast, and to be healed and back to normal after losses? Is it in our culture of safety and insurance?

It causes me to ask, really, what is the role of intellectual endeavor, of knowledge, of understanding -- is understanding like a magic spell that can make the past disappear? Are our various techniques for meditation, our philosophies, our belief systems, our technologies of the spirit and our intellectual methods, are all these things essentially supposed to be emotional cures, or drugs, to make us feel like we used to feel before whatever happened happened? What about tragic emotion? Why should we expect any act of the mind to overcome reality? Is that not the realm of spoon-benders and levitators?

I can say from experience that when something awful happens we generally feel bad about it for a long time. And of course we ponder it from every angle, and we seek relief from the feeling. We seek to get the feeling in perspective, which you have done. You would do well to continue looking at it from different angles, placing it in perspective. And you would do well to stop saying that these ways of looking at it did not really work. Of course they worked. They can't change history. But they can help you organize experience and keep it from overwhelming you.

I have a question in mind, and it really is about fate, about how we confront reality, and how reality changes us.

At some point in our lives, our own experiences affect us in ways that run counter to our habitual expectations and assumptions, and it is at that point that we either construct even larger delusions, or we give up and say yes, this is me, this is what happened to me, this is how I feel. It is at these moments that we have to encounter difficulty not as something to be cured but in a more elemental sense as simply the way it is.

This is a good thing. We stop trying to stamp out this reality, this knowledge of what happened, this feeling of loss, this unbalance, this void. We stop trying to make this thing tiny or kill it off. Instead we expand so we can carry it. When we do this we actually expand our capacity for experience.

Extracted from
http://salon.com/mwt/col/tenn/2007/10/18/stolen_laptop/