Tag: Awareness

The end of another year in the Christian cycle. Advent starts tomorrow and we begin to look forward. Cycles in nature and in our lives.

Seeing beginnings and endings – the arising and passing away of all conditioned forms – is a vital step in developing the understanding that nothing exists apart from interdependent, cause-and-effect relationships. To see the beginnings and endings is also, in my experience, a great support in difficult times. 

Early on, as I began to trust in the fiber of my being that nothing lasts, I became less afraid of pain. The fact that everything has an end comforted me. “One way or another,” I would say to myself, “this too will pass.” I was glad I saw that. I didn’t think much, in those initial moments of insight, about how the pleasant things change as well as the difficult ones. I know that when I struggle with the pain of any loss, the struggle preoccupies my mind and leaves no room for hope. When I recognize the pain I feel as the legitimate result of loss, I am respectful of its presence and kind to myself. My mind always relaxes when it is kind, and around the edges of the truth of whatever has ended, I see displays of what might be beginning.

Sylvia Boorstein, How Endings Make Room for Beginnings

Think about going to the movies. Within seconds, we’re captured by the display on the screen. If it’s a happy movie, we laugh; if it’s a sad movie, we cry. If that’s all that we’re aware of, we don’t really have much choice.

However, if we were to take that same movie and project it on a screen in the middle of an open field in broad daylight, we would be much less likely to get captured. If there’s a big explosion or a love scene, perhaps we’ll pay attention for a little bit, but then our attention will get drawn elsewhere. We see dogs playing, we feel the grass beneath our feet, we hear a plane going overhead. Everything in the environment is so much more real, vast, and vivid than what’s on the movie screen that we don’t get so fascinated by it as easily. The movie is still there, but we’re not bound by it. Our attention is free to roam beyond the film’s storyline, because the context has become so much bigger than the dark theatre.

From this point of view, we can consider that freedom may not actually come from improving the story that’s playing on the screen. In fact, it might come from placing whatever that story is, in all of its complexity, in a larger environment of awareness. Perhaps we don’t have to improve the story we tell about ourselves, about life, in order to experience freedom.

Bruce Tift, Already Free