This Direct Awareness

Here is an excerpt from one of my favorite books, Buddhism Plain and Simple by Steve Hagen, that I thought you all may enjoy.

"Many of us act as though we could find fulfillment if only we possessed enough money, enough security, enough respect, enough love, enough faith, enough education, enough power, enough peace, enough knowledge, enough… something.

There are others among us, however, who don’t (or can’t) buy into this. They sense that real security is impossible to attain. For they know that even if we could manage to accumulate all we desire, it will be inevitably taken from us by death. Our morality looms above us, as terrifying as it is certain. We seem utterly stumped. How can we possibly find peace under these conditions?

Not only do we feel imprisoned by our ignorance, we seem doomed to remain that way. As Yang Chu, the fourth century B.C.E. Chinese philosopher put it:

We move through the world in a narrow groove, preoccupied with the petty things we see and hear, brooding over our prejudices, passing by the joys of life without even knowing that we have missed anything. Never for a moment do we taste the heady wine of freedom. We are as truly imprisoned as if we lay at the bottom of a dungeon, heaped with chains.

What is the basic human problem that no apparent remedy will cure? What is our existence all about? How can we ever possibly comprehend the whole of it? And yet isn’t knowledge of the Whole --- knowledge that’s not relative, or dependent on changing conditions --- precisely what would be required to free us from the doubts and dilemmas that cause us so much pain and anxiety?

We long to be free from our confusion and discontent, not to have to live out our lives chained helplessly to uncertainty and fear. Yet we often do not realize that it’s precisely our confused state of mind that binds us.

There is a way to move beyond this ignorance, pessimism, and confusion, and to experience --- rather than comprehend --- Reality as a Whole. This experience is not based on any conception or belief; it is direct perception itself. It’s seeing before signs appear, before ideas sprout, before falling into thought.

It’s called enlightenment. It’s nothing more or less than seeing things they are rather than as we wish or believe them to be.

This liberation of mind --- this direct awareness of Reality as a Whole --- is fully accessible to anyone willing to attend to their actual experience."