To Ask and Live Big Questions

    “Am I living my life, or not showing up at all?
Is my journey diminished by fear, and by my collusion with that fear?
In the presence of intimidation do I learn from time to time to stand up, and risk being who I am regardless of the cost, regardless of the voices calling me back to a fugitive life?
Where do I need to stand up now? Show up now?
Do I remember to love and serve those around me?
Do I learn that I, too, am equipped for this journey, provided the same tools, same resilience, and same tenacity that pulled my ancestors through?” James Hollis

    “Doubt is a profound and effective spiritual motivator. Without doubt, no truism is transcended, no new knowledge found, no expansion of the imagination possible. Doubt is unsettling to the ego and those who are drawn to ideologies that promise the dispelling of doubt by preferring certainties will never grow.” James Hollis

    Below, an excerpt from a recent James Hollis interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7z_PCrQYoM
    "My latest book - 'Living with Borrowed Dust: Reflections on Life, Love, and Other Grievances' 2025 - is really addressing two things.
    First, the word ‘philosophic’ is not a term people use very often, but it means loving what is true or loving wisdom quite literally. We should start worrying about that when we’re children I think. I did as a child. I remember asking large questions about life – Why am I here? Who’s the other? What’s this all about? What happens if I die? Etc. And the big questions persist. And I think addressing them at the different stages of our understanding, having sort of been forged in the fire of life experience so to speak, we owe ourselves an ongoing dialogue with those questions. As Socrates said, ‘An unexamined life is not worth living’ because a reflexive life [in which we merely react unconsciously, on autopilot] is living someone else’s life. It’s living to pressures etc.

    Secondly, this particular book comes out of the fires of some real health crises. I mention at the beginning of the book that I’d had two cancers and then, possibly as a sequela of the cancer surgery, radiation and so forth, my spine started dissolving, so I was in excruciating pain and I had two major spinal surgeries and live with chronic pain. There was a real question about two years ago whether I was going to live or not. So that gets your attention also.
    And I’m grateful that I’m still here, grateful to be in conversation with you. So there’s not a single motivation. … Ultimately, I think this work [our soul's calling] provides two things. It’s not so much the answers, which I would have thought was the goal of life when I was young, it’s that the good questions get you an interesting life and that’s one of the things that I think is unexamined. The good life meaning not material abundance nor even good health, because I didn’t have it during that time. It’s more that your life really takes on a sharp edge that matters to you. And secondly, it gives you a larger life - it means you’re growing, you’re developing. ‘We are the sum of our questions.’ And also to suggest some tools in there about how we can go about addressing what is wanting expression in the world through us, which is a different questions than what dominates the first half of life, which is what does the world, my parents, my school teacher, the partner, the society, want from me. Now the question is, what is the soul wanting of me. And that’s a different agenda altogether.
    If happiness were a thing, then we’d have to say, let’s all go on a search for it. Is it buried in South Dakota? Let’s move there and look. It’s like that diamond mine in Arkansas. Probably only one person in a 100,000 finds a diamond, but they do have diamonds there you know. So maybe happiness is something objective, and we can find it and so forth.
    But we all know happiness is not [an object, a thing]. Happiness is contextual. It depends on what’s happening, the circumstances, and of course it’s of short duration. And even to be in a state of constant happiness would mean I’d probably be oblivious to the needs of people around me, to the needs and suffering of people, and injustices around me. So I think happiness occurs when we are in right relationship with our own souls. In other words, I would never as a young person have thought that I would become a psychoanalyst. To sit and listen with people about their life suffering, hour after hour, hardly makes one happy. And yet I’m happy to be invited into a conversation of that depth. I’m honored to be part of their journey. My work makes me happy, but it’s not about happiness. It’s about meaning. What is it that really touches you in a deep way that you know is real for you. And that’s such a subjective experience that we can’t transfer that to another person.
    So I would say I’m a person carrying a great deal of sorrow about the losses and injustices of life. I am a person who carries anger about those who are abusive and wield power mindlessly. But I’m also full of happiness too. We’re not a single thing. We’re complex beings. And the way happiness has pervaded as if it’s a commodity is truly delusional. I’ve known people for example get unhappy watching Facebook, or some other social medium, because they think all their friends have achieved that state of happiness – their children adore them, their grandchildren worship them, etc, etc, and they’re unhappy about being unhappy. Rather than say, ‘Is my life engaged? Is it addressing something that really matters? And why have I deferred accountability for the well-being of my soul to other peoples’ descriptions out there?’

    These are things people don’t think about very much. So I think that word ‘philosophical’ is an appropriate word. It’s not abstract. It has to do with how you conduct your life, what your values are, what matters most to you, and how you deal with a conflict in your life, and how you deal with contradictions. Those are the things that really define the human condition. It’s not going to make you happy, but from time to time, you’ll be flushed with happiness for a moment, and those moments are of course to be treasured. As long as we’ve construed happiness as our culture has, we’re all failures at it. So you have to have a better definition of happiness at a different level of expectation. 

    ... you touched on a memory about 25, 30 years ago, I woke up around 5 in the morning, and I had these sentences rolling out of the unconscious. And it was essentially, ‘We all like to imagine we could someday walk into a sunlit meadow free of all conflict & suffering.’ And it was the beginning of the book, ‘Swamplands of the Soul.’
    In that book, places like anxiety and loss and so forth, in every one of them, there is a task, the addressing of which moves us from victimage & passivity into an ongoing journey into an enlargement that comes from those terrible experiences. One of the gifts of loss, for example, is that it helps us really treasure the preciousness of this moment when we’re still connected, but also to tend to find the value of that which we lost – the loss of a child for example, as I’ve experienced, or the loss of people you love. Then you realize you honor that relationship because none of us is here forever. You honor that relationship by carrying on the values that rose out of that friendship or parenting experience and so forth.

    That’s what provides the richness of life, because sooner or later, no matter how thoughtfully we conduct our life, we’re going to find ourselves in some difficult places. And then we have to address these. Where is the resilience within you, and how do you honor that which was of such value to you? And that again, as I mentioned, moves you from this passive position of being a victim, to an active engagement. You take that in and you grow through it, and you render it meaningful in your life.”
    James Hollis PhD https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7z_PCrQYoM

"If I ventured in the slipstream
Between the viaducts of your dream
Where immobile steel rims crack
And the ditch in the back roads stop
Could you find me?
Would you kiss-a my eyes?
To lay me down
In silence easy
To be born again
To be born again"

Van Morrison "Astral Weeks"

Oneness, Peace, Contentment, Happiness

    Everyone at some level is aware that right now, no matter how well we're doing, by whatever measure - loved & respected by family & friends, smart, well-educated, successful, healthy, attractive, financially-secure - our life as we know it & that of our loved ones, can radically change in an instant. Our fragility is partially because for many, happiness depends entirely on how well we can control our environment. But, again at some level we know that we have put our environment & ourselves into crisis. So our anxiety & stress appears to be because we cannot reliably control the basic, universal facts of life: constant change, aging, sickness & death.
    Much of this is based on the simplistic materialist model of reality - a left-hemisphere-dominant perspective - which imagines life AS IF life was nothing more than accidentally-assembled machinery, meaninglessly churning away, then inevitably breaking down, end of story. As a result, a frightening proportion of humanity are electing brutal primitive leaders who are obviously deaf, dumb & blind to essential human values of love, compassion, honesty, truth, empathy, compassion, nurturing each other. http://www.johnlovas.com/2024/09/balance.html

    BUT WHAT IF our anxiety and pervasive sense of 'lack' or 'something missing' were caused not as much by our inability to adequately control life / fear of death, but MOSTLY by the gnawing disconnect between how most of us perceive the world ("relative reality" "consensual reality") and our innate intuitive memory of "Ultimate Reality" which cannot be seen, nor adequately described. And because Ultimate Reality is far more complex than the reductionist model, many are not able to or not ready to deal with it.
    Nevertheless, throughout history, from all traditions, from every corner of the globe, shamans, mystics, saints, philosophers, poets & other deeply spiritual seekers of Truth have continued to point us toward Ultimate Reality in the only possible way - by directly experiencing it.

     In this tradition, Rupert Spira offers very clear, concise pointers to help us directly experience Ultimate Reality in his excellent 40-minute video (at the bottom of this page). His excellent talk (from the video) about how our Essential Nature is Happiness, is partially transcribed here : 

    “Could it be that the entire, what we call the universe, is an appearance within Awareness or Consciousness? After all, that is what our experience tells us.
    Could it be that each of our minds are like localizations of an infinite field of Consciousness, through the agency of which Consciousness knows itself as the world? Just as when we fall asleep at night we dream, we imagine an entire world within our own minds, and yet, we view that world from the perspective of a separate subject of experience within that world.
    Could it be that each of our minds are like dreams, in the mind of Infinite Consciousness? Or to use religious language, each of our minds are like dreams in the mind of God, through which infinite consciousness or God’s infinite being seems to divide itself into two parts: a subject that knows and an object that is known, just as we do at night when we dream.
    Our own mind divides itself into two parts: a dreamed world and a separate dreamed character, from whose point of view that world is known. In other words, the dreamed character – the character in the dream – is the agency through which our mind knows itself as the dreamed world.
    Could it be that each of our minds are like localizations through which Infinite Consciousness knows itself as the world? After all, that is in line with our experience. Is there anyone here who is currently experiencing anything other than the knowing or consciousness of your experience?

    … if we investigate like honest scientists, relying only on the evidence of experience, this knowing or consciousness is all that is ever experienced. And it is possible to explain the whole of reality on the basis of consciousness alone, without recourse to an abstract world made of matter, which nobody has ever, or could ever come in contact with.
    What are the implications of this possibility? It implies that whatever or whoever seems to be outside of ourselves, in other words all others, all objects and the world, although they may be outside of our limited, finite minds, they are not outside of the infinite field of consciousness, out of which our finite minds are made. In other words, the implications of this possibility is that everyone & everything is a modulation of a single infinite indivisible whole, seemingly separate from ourselves, seemingly made out of something other than ourselves, but in reality, an integral part of the same infinite, indivisible whole.
    In other words, although experience seems to comprise a multiplicity & diversity of objects & selves, if we look through that appearance, trusting only the evidence of experience, we find no separate objects, people, entities, selves or things. We find only our Self, not our personal (small) self – a collection of thoughts and feelings, but our Self, that true and only Self of infinite, indivisible, self-aware Being – referred to as God in the religious traditions; referred to as Consciousness in gatherings such as this; and referred to as “I” in common parlance. 

    I’m not speaking of some extraordinary experience to which only a few enlightened sages have access. Everybody knows the experience to which I am referring. The common name for it is love. When you feel you love someone, or are in love, do you not feel, to a greater or lesser extent, that you are one with that apparent other? (Oneness, Unitive Experience, Unitive Consciousness) Is that not precisely what the experience of love is – the dissolution of the sense of separation between yourself & the other. In other words, love is not a relationship. It is the collapse of relationship. It is the absence of self & other. In other words, it is the recognition of our shared being. It is the recognition of Reality.
    Why is it that everybody loves the experience of love above all else? It is because each of us, all apparently finite minds long, above all else, to be divested of their seeming separation. All the separate self truly longs for is to be divested of its sense of separation, it’s limitations.
    The experience of beauty is exactly the same experience but in relation to an object rather than to a person or an animal. When you feel the experience of beauty whilst walking in a landscape or listening to a piece of music, do you not feel to a greater or lesser extent that you merge with the music or the landscape? Is there anyone here who has not had that experience? Is there anyone here who on listening to a piece of music or walking in the landscape has not felt themselves dissolve into the music or the landscape, who has not felt the sense of separation between themselves and the object dissolve? Isn’t that why we love to walk in Nature or to listen to music?
    All the separate self truly longs for is to be divested of its sense of separation, to be relieved of the apparent limitations that seem to confine us to a cluster of thoughts, images, feelings, sensations & perceptions, and returns us, as it were, to our Origin, our Source, or our Essence. 

    In the non-dual traditions there are these two essential pathways.
First of all the inward-facing pathway through which we investigate what we call “I,” which culminates in the recognition that the “I” that we essentially are, the Awareness that we essentially are, is without limits & is inherently peaceful.
    And then there is the outward-facing pathway in which our entire experience is realigned with this new understanding in which we not only understand but feel that everyone & everything is a modulation of our own essential infinite self-aware Being.”
    Rupert Spira, “Your Nature is Happiness” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfQSbc42Uc4 - below

How We Look and What We See

     We have ALL EXPERIENCED the day-and-night, or heaven-and-hell difference between looking at anyone or anything - with loving, trusting eyes INSTEAD OF fearfully, competitively or aggressively.

“So long as one is
merely on the surface of things,
they are always
imperfect, unsatisfactory, incomplete.
Penetrate into the substance and
everything is perfect, complete, whole.”
Philip Kapleau

“There are only two ways to live your life.
One is as though nothing is a miracle.
The other is as though
everything is a miracle.”
Albert Einstein

 
    "Life only makes sense when you perceive it as mystery and it makes no sense to the conceptualizing mind.” Anthony de Mello SJ

    What takes us far too long to realize is that BEING in a loving, trusting state, is what allows us to perceive the Divine Nature of everyone, everything, life itself. Namaste! This - our True Self - is what all the shamans, mystics, saints, poets & other deeply spiritual people throughout history keep telling us to remember & live from, in 'languages' most understandable for their times, philosophies & cultures - hence the term "perennial philosophy" http://www.johnlovas.com/search?q=perennial

    “Many people have intimations of their true nature in childhood – the sense of a benevolent presence guiding their life, a radiance that shines forth from all things, or a current of love that unites us all. …
    But we lose touch with this luminosity as we age … we forget who we really are and succumb to the way others see us...
    By adulthood we've more or less forgotten who we truly are, and have passively absorbed the current cultural fad of being frozen in the armor of materialism, meaninglessness & cynicism. Not surprisingly, something in all of us 'continues to weep over the barrenness of modern life.'"
    Stephan Bodian. “Wake Up Now. A Guide to the Journey of Spiritual Awakening.” McGraw-Hill, 2008.

    Indeed, under conditions when we feel safe, relaxed, "at home" in our immediate surroundings, perhaps even feel generous, our eyes become relaxed, softly-focused, taking in a wide field of vision. We can feel peaceful, trusting, loving, open and connected not just to whom or what's directly in front of us, but our wider surroundings, perhaps everyone, everything, to life itself.

    However, too many, even in objectively safe situations, are always anxiously ready to deal with impending trauma assumed to be lurking just around the next corner. PTSD & its variants are a terrible drain on individuals & society, crying out for healing with expert professional help. 

    “IF you feel safe & loved, your brain is specialized in exploration, play, & cooperation;
     IF you feel frightened & unwanted, it is specialized in managing feelings of fear & abandonment."
     Bessel Van Der Kolk. “The Body Keeps the Score. Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma.” Penguin Books, 2015. 

    But well beyond even what's generally considered normal & well-adjusted ie "ordinary unhappiness," we CAN learn to recognize, & remember to embody our True Self and thereby ALWAYS feel safe, relaxed, peaceful, open, loving, connected, generous, "at home" INDEPENDENT of our objective circumstances.

    "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society" Krishnamurti 

        "The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness."
    David Foster Wallace 2005 Kenyon College Commencement Speech http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CrOL-ydFMI

    It's becoming increasingly clear that a key spiritual practice is what has long been called "self-inquiry" (also spelled "self enquiry"). Whenever we find ourselves unhappy, sad, down, ie suffering, we are called to ask ourselves, "WHO is suffering?"
    Initially we give our society's typical description of our identity: name, age, gender, address, education, job, hobbies, relationships etc. Gradually we realize that this is just summarizing our tiresome "story of me" and is nowhere near adequate!
    Our most basic, unchanging True Nature, is timeless, formless, loving, awareness - a mystery beyond description & labeling. Nevertheless, it's been referred to as Spirit, Source, Force, Soul etc.

    So, 1) repeatedly notice the unhappy / anxious / angry / fearful story & assumed identity we continuously tell ourselves in our heads, 2) examine these with curiosity, without judgment, and realize how these have NO stable reality, then 3) let them go, and repeatedly RETURN HOME to True Self which is LIBERATING!

“In this choiceless, never ending flow of life
There is an infinite array of choices.
One alone brings happiness -
To love what is.”
Dorothy Hunt

SUPERB, CONCISE 14-minute video:

Rupert Spira "How Do I Practice Self Enquiry?"

 

Curiosity, Acceptance & Nurturing

"May I develop complete acceptance and openness
to all situations, and emotions, and to all people.
May I experience everything nakedly, completely
without mental reservations and blockages.
May I never withdraw from life or centralize onto myself.
May my heart be laid bare & open to the fire of all that is."
Reginald A. Ray

 

    Our acceptance & openness needs to INCLUDE the MANY daily random accidents, screw-ups & irritants like stubbing our toe, dropping, spilling & breaking things, losing keys / wallets / phones, burning & ruining meals, crazy random digital errors, loooong 'holds' on the phone, near impossibility contacting health-care providers, trades people & most companies ... We REGULARLY encounter a LOT of situations that very easily annoy, frustrate, irritate & anger us, even if / after we feel we've successfully 'dealt with' (fully processed) the real biggies in our life ie past major traumas.

    But our acceptance & openness ALSO needs to INCLUDE ongoing inescapable major traumas like chronic pain, prolonged disability, incurable illness & death of loved ones, friends and our self! These can & do cause "shipwrecks" - at least one of which is pretty much guaranteed if you live beyond 60. Do see : https://mindfulnessforeveryone.blogspot.com/2013/07/361-beyond-stress-management-resilience.html

    Aversion to all that we fear / dislike / can't control is common & understandable, but is at best only a short-term band-aid. Clinging & chasing after things we like, think we need or must have is also common & understandable, but easily becomes obsessive eg addictions, and there are many "entrepreneurs" to feed our hunger to escape (see the 2023 miniseries "Painkiller" on Netflix). But it's a meaningless delusion to see our identity just a meat-machine that avoids undesirables & chases after desirables. "The one who dies with the most toys wins" is desperately simple-minded.

     Our ONLY WORTHWHILE OPTION is repeatedly remembering our true nature and repeatedly embodying it by BEING a NURTURING PRESENCE to others & the environment no matter how annoying, great or persistent the challenge. This is simply being natural, true to whom / what we are - like birds flying in the air and fish swimming in water. 

    We see great nurturing when parents really know their children and spend quality time with them by providing all that they require to optimally express their natural talents and mature into healthy, balanced, self-sufficient, caring, intelligent, pro-social adults. 

    Nurturing has NOTHING TO DO WITH stuffing them full of candies & fast food; indulging them with as much screen time as they want; throwing money at them to blow shopping online or at the mall; buying them all sorts of toys & clothes - there is no quality time here - just spoiling and creating helpless, hopeless, miserable perpetual infants. The worst fear of wealthy parents is their kids "growing up to be assholes." This fear easily becomes a reality if parents don't have the wisdom & energy to spend quality time with their kids.

    EVERY stage of life has its own challenges. During our youth, we try so hard to learn and become competent & competitive to get by in this fast-moving world. During our middle years, we try so hard to establish a career, a home life, have & raise kids, pay our bills, maybe even live a little, put a bit of money away for retirement ... During our later years, we're dumbfounded that life went by so fast; if we're fortunate enough, we can help raise grandchildren; again, if we're fortunate enough, we have the inclination to devote our time & energies on NURTURING our own & loved ones' spiritual maturation / evolution of consciousness, rather than wasting our time wallowing about our progressively declining physical & mental health.

    “… for each & every one of us, we have circumstances in our lives that are chaotic, out of our control, outside of the box of what we think of as practice. And that is actually your deepest practice.
    The Buddha talked about this precious human birth. It’s precious for all of us, it has the most exquisite balance of dukkha (challenging situations) & easefulness. We’re not so overwhelmed by suffering that we’re lost and drowning, or we’re not so lost in the pleasure, either. It’s got this balance that keeps us needing to find a deeper happiness and having the resources to look.
    This birth the Buddha talked about as the precious human birth is rare and it’s precious. And it’s precious for all of us, even those of us who don’t have the conditions in our lives to go on many or any retreats.
    There’s something about practicing with the chaos of life, & the realities of our difficult, complicated relationships & situations that we’re faced with in day-to-day life that can move us very deeply and force us to feel things we might not otherwise feel. It also helps us see that it’s good to be alive and in the world and feel it and really land in this human experience fully and recognize it as a shared thing.” Cara Lai https://www.dharma.org/cara-lai-dharma-talk/

     Four wise teachers & authors immediately come to mind when I think of inspiring survivors of major trauma. I've quoted them all in my quickly searchable blogs:

    Amoda Maa : “Embodied Enlightenment. Living Your Awakening in Every Moment.” Reveal Press, 2017.

    Isira : "Buddha on the Dance Floor." ‎ Living Awareness, 2014.

    Gabor Matte : “The Myth of Normal. Trauma, Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture.” Alfred A. Knopf, 2022.

    James Finley : “The Healing Path. A Memoir and an Invitation.” Orbis, 2023.

 

    James Finley on the alchemy of transforming the lead of trauma into spiritual gold:
    “(After graduating from high school, I escaped from a lifetime of psychological & physical abuse by my alcoholic father by entering a monastery. But there) I was sexually abused by one of the monks – a priest, my confessor, who Merton thought very highly of - everyone thought very highly of this person. And I had a breakdown. I became extremely dissociative, paranoid.
    I worked (looking after the pigs at the monastery). … The boar walked out on the ice, and it fell through the ice of this little lake in the woods, and drowned. I felt as I was walking around, I felt I was unraveling, and that sanity was like thin ice over icy-cold black water, and it was cracking, and if I fell through, because of my trauma history, I might never find my way back again. So I left (the monastery). I didn’t tell the abbot what happened. I didn’t tell Thomas Merton what happened. I didn’t tell John Hughes, who was a psychiatrist. I just left.
    So here’s a lesson. How can we learn to be healed from all that hinders us from experiencing the steady strong currents of divinity that flow on & on in the bitter-sweet alchemy of our lives? The alchemy is just not how phases of happiness can unexpectedly become precipitously sad – it was frightening. Nor is it something so sad that can suddenly break wide open with liberation, like an unexpected gift, or love, or presence, or a child. It isn’t just the rhythm of darkness and light, or birth and death, or the rhythms of your life, the rhythms of my life. Rather, the alchemist of old were trying to turn lead into gold. And lead into gold is how do we turn the unrelenting, unforeseeableness of life, how can we learn to experience the steady strong currents of divinity that flow on and on and on so unexplainably, that brought me and brought all of you up to this very moment that I’m talking right now? How has this come to pass? And how can I learn to find my way to this groundedness that’s always there? And finding my way to it, how can I abide in it? And how can I learn to share it with others?

 
    So I’d like to end with a story. … This hermit heard a knock at his door, and when he opened it, it was a mother and a father with their little girl. And the parents apologized for intruding on his solitude, but said to the hermit, ‘As you can plainly see, an evil wizard has turned our daughter into a donkey. And we would like you to pray over her, so we can have our daughter back.’
    The hermit said, ‘I see. Come in, come in, come in.’ And he had them sit off to the side, and he asked the little girl if she was hungry and would like something to eat. She said she would like that. And so he was talking to her while he prepared a meal for both of them, and they sat down. And he asked her about herself – about things about her life and so on. 

    And as the parents were watching how lovingly he spoke to the little girl, and how attentive he was to her, they suddenly realized the evil wizard did not cast a spell on their daughter, turning their daughter into a donkey, the evil wizard cast a spell on them to believe that their daughter was a donkey. 

    And so when they left, they were so relieved and grateful, having their daughter back, and the little girl was so relieved because it’s very hard to be a little girl when your parents think you’re a donkey, especially if because you’re a child, and to avoid the confusion, you start believing it yourself. There’s like a shame-based, traumatized place within yourself, that you don’t know what to do about it. 

    The deep healing that that little girl and her parents experienced in this story bears witness to the deep healing that I hope we are exploring together here today.”
    James Finley "Becoming a Healing Presence in a Traumatized World" : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eu97TxU7mW4&t=6s

 

 

Another glorious morning shines down on us ...

Steps Along the Way

If we closely observe ourselves, we'll notice an incessantly recurring sense of uneasiness, most readily noticed while sitting or lying down to rest. For no obvious reason, we quickly feel uncomfortable / unpleasant, and automatically shift our position to one that's more comfortable - but only for a very short while, then repeat, repeat & repeat. Besides such primarily physical bouts of dys-ease, we also notice similar recurring bouts of discomfort which we assume arises primarily from our thoughts or emotions. We assume that these are all due to external irritants eg problematic people, situations, places, etc, so we automatically try fixing or correcting these external irritants, to make ourselves comfortable 'once & for all.'

Our materialistic consumer society spends billions each year to ensure that we continue to 'shop till we drop.' Too many of us actually believe that, "The one who dies with the most toys wins."
          It can take lifetimes to fully recognize that we cannot control our external environment sufficiently to achieve continuous happiness. If we could, then surely addicts, people with OCD & the wealthy would be the happiest people in the world. But eventually, everyone becomes disenchanted with materialism - disappointed, bored & frustrated with experiencing, consuming, hoarding 'things.'  

Even those seeking awakening / enlightenment initially, & some for decades do so with striving acquisitiveness - using the exact same approach to seeking awakening as they used to achieve success in the material world eg business, sports, outdoor survival. BUT this egocentric, aggressive, adversarial, acquisitive left-hemisphere-dominant approach, which seems to work for some to accumulate things, actually blocks spiritual growth. This inappropriate approach to spiritual maturation - like using a sledgehammer to slice cake - is called 'spiritual materialism.'

A fascinating example of this is chronicled in Harley Rustad's biography of spiritual seeker, expert outdoor survivalist, world-traveler & blogger, Justin Alexander Shetler in, “Lost in the Valley of Death. A Story of Obsession and Danger in the Himalayas.” Justin seemed to understand the meaning of 'the finger pointing at the moon' analogy, “Religion is a very very attractive, alluring, sparkling arrow, and everybody gets focused on what kind of arrow or what it’s made of or what kinds of jewels are on it or what kinds of feathers – and no one’s looking where the arrow’s pointing, which is at truth.” He knew first-hand that, “Traveling is often exploring things that make you uncomfortable: physically, ethically, emotionally, metaphysically.” But he was seriously mistaken about continuous traveling (pejoratively referred to as 'geographic cure') & progressively more severe physical deprivation ('asceticism') being essential tools for awakening. Long ago, the Buddha showed that neither of these were helpful. 

But then it's human nature to stick to the skills one feels most competent at, and the temptation to use these more & more often, with ever-greater intensity - for every task! Over-reliance on a familiar tool is a well-known cognitive bias: "If the only tool you have is a hammer, it is tempting to treat everything as if it were a nail." Justin pushed travel & survival in nature to the breaking point. Many of us have to 'hit rock bottom', before we finally drop our favorite approach, & become willing to learn an entirely new, appropriate skill that actually works. With respect to awakening / enlightenment, it's about relaxing our grasping / clinging, & remembering to connect with our silent, still, eternal Self - which we can only experience when our ego is very quiet. 

"... maybe at the end of the trail, Justin found nothing; that the harder he tried, the more it felt like he was grasping at mist — chasing tendrils higher and higher into the mountains." wondered Harley Rustad in his Dec 13, 2018 Outside magazine article. 

Of course deep self-inquiry reveals that who we truly are - our Self - is no-thing, Noumenon - "knowable only without the use of ordinary sense perception; & cannot be experienced through the senses." Helen Hamilton. "Dissolving the Ego." Balboa Press, 2021

Spiritual maturation appears to be about noticing when we contract around some 'thing' (phenomenon) which feels stressful; we learn to relax our grip on 'things' (phenomena); & remember to return to our true nature - Self, Noumenon, peace, & appropriate perspective on phenomena.

 Helen Hamilton's EXCELLENT 60 min Summary: