Our labels draw an arbitrary path for us based on randomly clustered and loosely related but viscerally personal reactions to the world.
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No matter who you are - your life experience, the big or little things that bother you, the good or bad hand you've been dealt - the experience of suffering is the same, and it always has this fundamental cause.
We feel that profound discontent when reality doesn't match our preconceived notions of happiness.
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Each step is a beginning and end, and whether we get to that final feature in time is secondary to the sensory wonder of every inch deeper into the forest. There's no arrival, no revelation, nothing to awaken to beyond being here, now.
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How we were, how we are, and how we'll be. This essay explores the anthropology of our unhappiness in the modern world, and creates a link between philosophizing about our own existence, and pragmatically living better lives.
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In Being and Time, Martin Heidegger points to the blind spots of consciousness-privileged philosophies: they do not inspect the lived experience of being – their perspective is only a single, cross-sectional, theoretical angle of Being. Consciousness, says Heidegger, is an auxiliary feature of our understanding of ourselves, rather than the bedrock of that understanding. I agree with his conclusion that consciousness is not fundamental to our understanding of self because consciousness is the animating force of humans as a movement of the universe, from the perspective of here and now. Consciousness is the process, the method, and the vehicle that brings phenomenal experience to the Being. It is a quality of being in spacetime, just as being brittle is quality of sedimentary rock. Consciousness is not itself phenomenal experience. And since we are fundamentally Beings experiencing phenomenologically, we cannot be consciousness (the means of being aware) – “we” must be awareness.
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