“For me, context is the key – from that comes the understanding of everything.”
– Kenneth Noland
There’s no doubt about it, living in this world is a stressful business.
Things are coming at us 24/7. Challenging situations, relationship issues, money and career problems. In a complex and unpredictable world, it can be an uphill struggle to attain the simplest of goals. There’s often no end to the stress. Then we switch on the news and subject ourselves to the far greater stresses of the world at large!
Part of the problem is our tendency to focus completely on the content of our lives.
The Whirlpool of Change
Content is anything that’s external and observable by us.
This includes our bodies, thoughts, feelings, as well as our beliefs and opinions, our relationships, family, friends and enemies, our possessions, living environment, job, career, hobbies, as well as the things that we read, watch or hear, the society around us and our worldview.
Like everything in the world, all these things exist in a constant state of flux. Nothing remains the same from moment to moment.
The world of experience is a massive whirlpool of change. Some things change with startling rapidity. Others gradually alter or disintegrate over time. Time flows like a great river, always moving in the same direction. As it flows, people and circumstances move in and out of our lives.
When it comes to the content of our lives, nothing is secure and nothing is immune to change. Even our bodies are always changing. Over the months and years, wrinkles and grey hairs start appearing. This is a sobering reminder that there are three things we can’t avoid forever in life: ageing, illness, and death.
Life can and in time will take back everything you have.
That job you love? Redundancy or retirement will take that from you. The health you currently enjoy? Illness can snatch it away at any point. The body you’re so identified with? At some point, you must give that away too. Death is certain for all living beings.
The Perils of Object Dependency
Is it any wonder we’re so stressed?
There’s a huge misconception in our society about how to find happiness and peace.
You assume the key is to arrange the content of your life in a specific way, as dictated by your personal likes and dislikes; your wants and desires.
You think that if you can get life to match up to the way you want or think it should be, you’ll be happy.
You might hate me for what I’m about to say…
Very few self-help gurus have the guts or honesty (or maybe the wisdom) to tell you this.
The truth is nothing in the external world will bring complete and lasting happiness.
If you depend on life being a certain way to be happy, your life will be full of ups and downs. Depending on unpredictable factors for inner peace is a recipe for anxiety. As I said, everything is in constant flux. That’s the nature of phenomenal existence.
Seeking permanent happiness from that which is impermanent is insane.
Life is a zero sum game. Duality always comes into play. It’s impossible to have heat without cold, high without low, day without night, or success without failure. You must be willing to pay for whatever you seek in life, either before or after. Often it’s a hefty price, too. Even when you think you’ve got life sussed, life will send an “oh really?!” in the form of some challenge or another.
This universe wasn’t created to make you happy.
Life simply does what it does…because it does.
If you flow with it, responding to the needs of each situation by following dharma, you’ll be fine. If you continually fight against the tide, trying to impose your mind’s definition of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, ‘good’ and ‘bad’, life will eventually grind you down, chew you up and spit you back out. That much is guaranteed.
Life doesn’t always provide you with what you want, but it always provides you with what you need.
The Hidden Context
The key to a life of inner peace is to relax your constant focus on the content of your life; the objects of your life. Only then are you free to explore the context.
Every content requires a context. The words on a page, the content, need the context of the blank page. The same is true with us. The content of our lives — every perceivable object — is dependent upon the context. Most people are so fixated upon the content they have no idea that a context even exists at all. But it does. It has to.
The context of your life, that upon which all the content depends, is the vast expanse of your own awareness.
Without this baseline awareness, there would be nothing.
Without the subject, there could be no objects. You wouldn’t be able to perceive or do anything. The world wouldn’t exist for you, and neither would you.
Awareness is the most fundamental aspect of our existence. Yet most human beings pay it little attention. The average person is barely even aware of the fact they’re aware.
The mind is so extroverted by nature that it’s rare for us to glimpse this awareness. Instead, we keep feeding our senses and giving the mind continual stimulus. That’s why many people can’t even sit still in an empty room. They have to be reading magazines or fiddling with their phones. For some, the greatest challenge is to turn their attention inward for more than a second.
Awareness is Unchanging and Ever-Present
You can become aware of awareness during meditation. It can also happen when something happens to still the mind, such as a sudden shock, or ephiphany.
But, whether you’re aware of it or not, this awareness is always there. Experience and thought can affect the mind, but it can never affect or change awareness in any way.
This awareness is the same awareness that was there when you were a baby. It’s the same awareness that looked out of your eyes when you were five years old, fifteen years old, or fifty years old.
It’s the context in which your entire life unfolds. Like space, it pervades, transcends and outlasts all the forms that appear in it.
By bringing your attention to this underlying context, you immediately transcend the surface-level content.
Why do you think people have meditated for thousands upon thousands of years?
Meditation provides a window to move beyond the extroversions of the mind. It allows you to rest in the pure awareness that is your essential nature.
Awareness is your essential nature because while all else changes, awareness does not. While all else is time-bound and comes and goes, awareness is beyond time and ever-present.
Everything else, including your body and the content of your mind, are objects in awareness. Anything objectifiable cannot be the Self. As it happens, the only unobjectionable factor is awareness. The subject can never be the object.
The Broader Context
In a world of constant change, awareness is the one changeless factor.
Vedanta describes the Self as ‘sat chit ananda’, which means ‘existence, consciousness, bliss’.
Spending time resting in this space of awareness brings great peace. It also brings freedom from our immense attachment to the objects of our lives. This frees up considerable energy and reduces stress like nothing else.
It helps you to see life, yourself and your problems in a broader context. It takes away the absolute importance you’ve granted to the outer things of your life. You realize that objects have only relative importance. Everything is relative to awareness and awareness is always free.
Fixating only upon the turbulent, ever-changing world of content is always a bad idea. It’s little wonder that we get stressed, fearful and unhappy. This world is never going to be perfect. The good and the bad will continue their dance throughout eternity. But, by taking time each day to acknowledge the context of life; the vast, all-pervading awareness that remains untouched by anything time-bound, you begin to experience far greater freedom, peace and ease.
This is not something that comes easily to most people. Modern society hard-wires our already extroverted minds into demanding constant stimulus and input.
Until you learn to master your mind and get back in the driving seat, there can be no inner peace. You remain an unwitting victim of the mind’s endless conditioning and programming. There’s no way out of the loop of existential suffering until you first learn to take back the reins.
Learning to differentiate the content and the context of your life — the objects appearing before you and the awareness in which they appear — is a crucial first step.
When combined with the karma yoga mindset and an understanding of dharma and the gunas, your life will begin to change. Stress melts away, tensions ease and your mind will become peaceful, clear and pure.
That alone turns life from a struggle of endurance to a game of wonder and enjoyment.
It also lays the foundation for moksha, which means ‘liberation’ in Sanskrit. In Western terms, this is called ‘enlightenment’.
