Looking where it’s not

Where is it?

“The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name. The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth. The named is the mother of ten thousand things. Ever desireless, one can see the mystery. Ever desiring, one can see the manifestations.”

Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching

A question to the Buddha: “What is that smoothers the world? What makes the world so hard to see? What would you say pollutes the world and threatens it the most.”

The Buddha’s Answer: “It is ignorance which smoothers,” the Buddha replied, “and it’s heedlessness and greed which make the world invisible. The hunger of desire pollutes the world, and the great source of fear is the pain of suffering.”
Nipata Sutra

These two points to a central and valuable truth: Desire affects our ability to see clearly. Lao Tzu says that we see the mystery of our being beyond names. In a state of desire, we see manifestations of what can be named. In other words, we see what we want to see, not what’s there. The Buddha said that desire pollutes the world, and ignorance smoothers it. After that, we are lead to greed and heedlessness (e.g., attributes of the ego), which renders the world invisible.

Obviously, the world referred to by Gautama is not the world the average person sees. They see a world manifested from the desire of the ego. We see what we imagine will deliver the object of desire—fulfillment. But suppose, just for the sake of being contrary, that the unseen world is already full, but because we misdiagnose the disease (dis-ease=dukkha), we think it is not full. Now we’re faced with an impossible dilemma: Trying to fill what is already full.

This is a profound paradox that illustrates the driving force beneath the problems we are confronted with every day. We think we are fundamentally incomplete and all the while we are complete. What can be insane than that? It is like a person searching everywhere for the nose on their own face. Without a mirror, we just look right past our own noses. Without finding our worth within, we go looking far and wide, while all the time, what we seek is already in our hands. No, desire means we think we are not already full, yet we are.