Baseline Blindness

It is easy to become disgusted with the world.

What is suprising is the number of people that have good lives that are disgusted with the world. This is a result of what I call baseline blindness, or blindness to how good you do have it.

We may have to take a certain amount of guff from our bosses at work because they have an over-inflated self-importance, and we may have to work at jobs that we don't like in order to keep that paycheck coming. Ultimately, this is not a very high price to pay in order to have a roof over our head and a meal or two every day.

The problem is that over time we tend to think of this as the baseline of our lives when in fact it is nothing of the sort.

On any given day a sequence of events may suddenly unfold that results in our suddenly becoming aware of just how good we had it prior to that sequence of events.

One may become aware that ones life is about to end rather violently.

In that very brief period between realization and actualization, our consciousness of things will speed up is such a way that everything moves in slow motion except our thoughts, and we have time to think of all the precious things that we will never experience again, and that we never appreciated when we thought that they would always be there.

Hearing a friend's voice on the phone, the color of the sky, these are going to be hard to give up.

Suprisingly though, our self-important bosses and our unsatisfactory jobs are going to suddenly be treasures soon to be forfeit as well.

One purpose of meditation is to eliminate this baseline blindness so that everything we see and do has a subtle shade of newness and beauty about it. Another is to eliminate illusions such as eternal continuity from our minds.

A third is to develope mindfulness so that one is aware of events as they unfold and thereby provide oneself the maximum oportunity to avoid or effectively confront those things that may result in our sudden end.