Michael Damian

Enlightenment is intimacy with all things.

— Dogen

Psychological suffering is caused by a chronic lack of attention. Without attention we have little hope of gaining insight. For this reason our inner growth is often prodded slowly along by pain instead of inspiration. We traverse this default path of pain until we discover there is another—the way of attention, insight, and awakening.

Our lack of attention means a lack of intimacy with reality. This plays out in chronic habits of distraction, denial, and dissociation. These habits are our fundamental defenses against truth and reality, which we fearfully deploy because we do not realize that reality is benevolent. Psychologists have been documenting and describing just how complicated and extreme these defenses can become, creating everything from mild compulsions, depression, and anxiety, to full-blown addictions or personality disorders.

Entire lives are often given over to the futile and destructive logic of escape, which only solidifies the bars of our imaginary prison cell. In that cell we are tortured by equally imaginary, demonic guards and cellmates. Our habits of distancing from reality never solve our basic problem. They only warp our character and create all kinds of crises in our personal life or in society. All the while we do not realize we are doing this entirely to ourselves.

A frightened and addicted mind has trouble stopping to look and inquire. Its attention constantly moves outward away from the core of reality or self, occupying itself with illusory concerns and values. This habitual misplacement of attention is the root of all addictions.

The spiritual path is essentially a process of shifting our attention and becoming intimate with what is. It is the redirection of attention off of what is observably false or dissociated from reality and onto what is essential and life-giving. In a relative, temporal sense, “what is” may be the situation in front of us, the messy house, or the children who need our attention. In a deeper, absolute sense, “what is” means our true nature or the divine.

In any case, to become intimate with reality by paying attention is the beginning of real love. What you love you pay attention to, offering the energy of your focus and interest. Attention follows interest. When suffering grabs our attention we become interested in exploring its causes. By starting to pay attention we bring the energy of love to a formerly loveless, neglected self or situation.

When we withdraw our attention from mindless absorption and step back to observe, this movement immediately highlights our nature as the observing presence. Indeed, we are always observing, but it is usually through the dream-like haze of attaching to habits, assumptions, moods, and opinions. In that condition we feel awake and alive, but we might as well be asleep.

Imagine a security guard who spots a thief in action at midnight. The guard is wide awake, full of coffee, but he becomes so fascinated with the scene that he starts to identify with the thief’s goal. Without knowing it, he has even begun inwardly rooting for him to successfully pry the window open and make a clean get-away. Would you say the guard is awake or asleep?

Yes, the guard is observing the scene, but he is energetically and emotionally lost in what he is seeing. The real purpose of his standing watch has been hijacked by precisely that activity he was supposed to guard against.

Our relationship to our own mind is just like this. We are always present as the inner witness. Just like the security guard, no one can say we are not conscious or aware. The question is, just how awake is our awareness? Is it serving its true function? Are we able to discern between the causes of suffering and happiness?

To know what we are up against, we should acknowledge that there are degrees of unconsciousness. There is a kind of suffering in which we are numb even to the fact that we suffer. For example, someone who is always angry might not realize that anger is a form of suffering. They are identified with it and find it morbidly comforting. It affirms their identity or sense of power. But eventually something will happen to unequivocally inform them that anger is, in the ultimate analysis, a form of suffering caused by ignorance.

Suffering is not senseless. It has a certain intelligence in it that lets us know something is off. When our suffering finally convinces us to observe and question our mind in a consistent and purposeful way, then we have entered the path of fully illumining and mastering the mind. We have taken responsibility for our mind and our experience.

This recognition rides upon the ethic of intimacy and engagement rather than dissociation. The mind is not something to get rid of or escape from. Though we now experience our mind as mundane, heavy, and senseless in its chattering, we may find that our experience can change radically.

Depending on how we use it, the mind can obscure or reveal truth, and thereby create the experience of hell or heaven for us. In that sense, where we really live is in the quality of our state of mind. The factor that determines our overall quality of mind is insight.

Insight shapes the whole of our attitude, orientation, and experience of life. Insight clarifies and uplifts. It is the inner vision that penetrates the surface appearances of life, freeing our thought and energy from the toil of illusions. Spiritual vision is not the sight of outer things, though it does show them in their true light.

And it is impossible to develop spiritual insight without shifting our very identity. To even ask what is the truth of existence puts our own identity into question. We cannot say, “I want to know the truth about existence, but leave me out of it.” It does not work that way. If you want to know anything real about existence, then your whole being is on the table as the ante.

To see things as they are creates a shift in who we think we are. By seeking the truth, we awaken in or as the truth. It happens this way because truth, being total, cannot be found as an object, image, or opinion outside of you. It is known through direct identity or not at all.

To awaken in truth means to experience intimacy, or love. Love is the power that reveals truth and drives our search. You may have noticed that if you study something deeply—an animal, a face, a piece of music—you begin to love it. You become one with it. This felt sense of oneness is the highest expression of love. When you love like this you transcend the selfish distortions and ambitions that once tainted your study. A true study and mastery of anything both demands and evokes this real love.

In the study of existence, you realize your oneness with it. As the false divide between you and the world dissolves, the whole of existence is found to be good and worthy of love. Wholeness includes and illumines the parts, how they fit into the grand design, whereas fixating on the parts in isolation always blocks the vision of wholeness. Enlightened vision has nothing to do with rejecting relative things and relationships. But it does require stepping back from our narrow view to see the whole.

Stepping back to observe does not immediately reveal the whole picture, but widens the view. Vision has to start somewhere. We begin by seeing what is in front of us, what is appearing in our mind. As we learn to see, the passion for discovery grows. Vision opens the horizon of beauty in our heart. Then the time comes when we receive the total vision of the divinity of all things, in which the self is opened forever.

When the self is opened we experience true relationship. This is why enlightenment has been described as intimacy with all things. Intimacy implies the closeness of knowing. Does this mean that enlightenment will fill you up with knowledge about everything? Perhaps intimacy refers to a different order of knowing, which we may call love. Love is a condition of vivid comprehension in which we appreciate that reality is whole and benevolent. This comprehension, when it dawns upon our consciousness, is the supreme discovery, the unknown goal toward which all human desire is bent.

We all have a nostalgia for the intimacy of presence, for the sense of deeply knowing and being known. When we know or experience something, we feel one with it. We understand and envelope it. It is no longer a stranger to us.

In the deepest kind of knowing, all sense of separation is gone. There is an open, lucid awareness that manifests the joy of being. When we are joyful, we do not think to go and find God. In joy we feel light as a feather, and in that lightness we know God and all that is worth knowing. The spiritual search is essentially for this undivided, self-luminous condition.

We already have all that we need for this endeavor. In the spiritual search, as in all things, you need understanding, which orients the mind—and you need love, which means enthusiastic interest, attention, and devotion to the endeavor. These qualities are intrinsic to our being. We could say that all wisdom and love is already within you, but to actualize their full potential, we have to begin using these qualities in a more intentional manner.

The way of awakening is to lovingly work with your present understanding, knowing that love directs the work and already contains the goal. It is love in the form of conscious suffering and longing for happiness that drives you to seek greater understanding.

Each step in understanding then brings more love forward. If you lack understanding in any given moment, you are saved by your love, even if that love cries out in despair. Love ensures that revelation will eventually come like lightning, and love itself will be the light in it. So welcome the wind, the storm, and the rain as you inquire into the nature of your existence. They bring the lightning of self-knowledge. And in a flash you will behold a new heaven and earth, and know yourself as you have always been.

This article first appeared in Enneagram Monthly August 2015 . © Michael Damian. Do not reprint or share without permission.