Why Bad Things are Bad

In a previous post, I described how all the various aspects of our "normal" life, when investigated, are found to be united in a very deep way in which everything is really all right (in an affective sense, not in a moral sense). This sounds desirable because, if we could realize how all the things which distress us in our lives were really okay, we would be greatly relieved ("suffering and release from suffering"). It's hard, though, because our instinctive reaction to distressing things is not to investigate the distress, but to avoid it, to close off that part of ourselves because we believe it to be unbearable.

Until recently, this "knowledge" that everything's really okay had led me to a sort of "stiff upper lip" approach. Part of my reaction to my and others' distress has been to dismiss it because it's "not real", since it just needs to be seen in the right way to "make it go away". Of course, one needs to be at least partly or outwardly patient with it, since fighting it just makes it "more real" and stronger, but also present was this feeling that such patience was at best a stopgap measure, or in other words, impatience.

The problem is that, although distress itself may not be "real", its effects are as real as we believe it to be. Our reflexive reaction of closing down our awareness so we don't have to "deal with it" forecloses our ability to open to its true nature, in the context of which the apparent distress is not distressing. Thus, we have sympathy for someone in distress neither because we get caught up feeling the same things along with them, nor because it's a posture adopted for its efficacy, but because we see directly the violence it does to their connection to their true nature.