A Direct Experience of Reality
It occurs to me that one of the main goals of Zen Buddhism, to have a direct experience of reality, is the only way to live a life. Everything else is a third-person experience of a life. We don’t live lives directly. We live them by proxy.
Perhaps we do this in an effort to reduce the mental and emotional pain that almost every life entails. As the mind is a great master in the art of delayed gratification, it has the ability to spread out pain into the past and into the future. This relieves us of the burden of having to experience our pain all at once.
Of course, what seem like the past and the future to the mind are just ideas. One of the things the mind really does to mitigate pain is to use ideas as distractions away from other ideas. Notice that distracting yourself with a new idea does not solve the problem. It is a level of avoidance. Your consciousness will be lowered depending on how much energy you use to shield yourself from the process.
The other way the mind mitigates pain is by using a new idea as leverage against another idea. If my first interpretation of an experience is one of discomfort, then I can use another idea to justify tolerating the first idea. This justification will be effective to the extent that the rest of the mind’s logic is in agreement.
So, this sounds pretty useful, to be able to reduce my stress with ideas. But, it’s interesting to note that the original pain was just a perception. It in itself was just an idea. So, the mind uses ideas as buffers to protect itself against its own interpretations.
Note that this is a great way to ensure the persistence of both the perception of pain and the need for its alleviation, as one feeds the other.
Having a direct experience of your pain bypasses this dysfunctional duality. In the mind’s logic, experiencing uncomfortable sensations directly can only be uncomfortable. In truth, nothing mitigates pain like direct experience. It can cause pain to disappear, and can even be euphoric. Using your energy to attend to the truth in the moment, it seems, grants access to your latent powers.