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"Our suffering is holy if we embrace it and look deeply into it. If we don’t, it isn’t holy at all, we just drown in the ocean of our suffering."
- Thich Nhat Hanh (The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching)
Means for distracting our minds are greater than they’ve ever been; in their availability, as well as their potency and "effectiveness," when what we're trying to effect is our experience of reality.
But this "down" time can easily stretch into the majority, as we are conditioning ourselves to not really be with ourselves. Soon many of our lines blur or disappear entirely, while also blurring our reality with whatever fictional reality is the flavor of the week. The slope here is very slippery. And when we're in the fall, we lose much more than just our footing.
Frankly, it's very easy today to lose ourselves, because we're not mindful enough to be aware of the detriments of such disregard.
Corporations and commercial interests capitalize greatly from our obscured identities. Therefore, we can't expect to be made aware if we keep consuming outside of us; this awareness can only come from within—an investment Wall Street doesn't capitalize from, so this wouldn't be advertised midway through your YouTube video stream.
We all know that streaming platforms are putting out new content at ever-increasing rates, because people are consuming at ever-increasing rates. I needn't provide metrics or "proof" for the obvious. And this correlation between content and consumption has and is causation. Caused by our cravings for distraction from our suffering, as well as causing us to suffer from dwelling too often in that distraction.
Our lack of mindfulness and awareness keeps us ignorant of this destructive cycle, permitting it to repeat, further compounding our suffering for however long we let it happen.
This ability to lose ourselves whenever or wherever we now choose is too frequently regarded as a gift when it should more accurately be referred to as our curse. Many believe a widespread "awakening" or gentle revolution is on the horizon. But this belief can only come from seeing our situation deeply, and helping to sound the alarm. Technology is not the only aspect of this revolution to our consciousness, but it's a major contributor distracting us from recognizing the necessity of such radical change.
Many have awakened to our collective suffering and its stemming from the disconnection we feel, and our unhealthy diets of numbing, avoidance, and distraction. If you are mindful and stretch your awareness a little deeper, it’s quite difficult not to see.
This awareness opens a door that, once opened, must be hard-pressed to close. At that point, the only way to do so would be to numb yourself (again) from seeing its aperture.
Awareness to the true nature and causes of our suffering is a doorway to compassionate insight, which is also the key to understanding and then overcoming so much of our unnecessary suffering. Maintaining this awareness is, as all other meaningful aspects of life are, a practice.
We can accept our unavoidable suffering as valid and necessary aspects of our lives. This is a concept fundamental to Buddhist psychology: That understanding suffering, true understanding and embrace of its many forms, is vital to our liberation from it.
But to do any of that, we must first awaken. Going through difficult times and getting to a point where "enough is enough" can inspire us to seek such awareness—causing us to investigate how we use our precious time, and whether that time is giving to us, or taking from us.
If a Hollywood screenwriter were writing the movie of our life, he would refer to this as our All Is Lost Moment in our hero's journey, where we feel painstakingly far from our objective.
At the end of each of our days, this all must be experiential. No words can convince us of this. Words can only plant the seeds for change. Only we can choose to water them or let them decompose.
And for there to be real change, we need to make it a practice to really feel all that is real. And to really feel those truths of reality, we need to numb ourselves less, there’s just no other way around it.
Mindfulness is very much the opposite of numbing; mindfulness is living.
None of this is complicated, but that doesn’t mean it is easy. It requires effort to change, to be mindful and look deeply at how we live our lives, and to truly create the lives we know we could live.
When we reach beneath the waters of our lives and sift through the mud and muck, we will undoubtedly find the immaculate lotus buds blooming within us all.
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