Suli Qyre

Almost ten years ago, I started @philosophybits as a completely unserious collection of popular philosophy quotations. Since then, it has grown to become, if not more serious, then at least a more sincere reflection of my philosophical interests.

I've also created other quotation projects here over the years, the most notable being @quotespile and @thirdity. Thank you to everyone who has followed my projects! I hope to keep supplying them with new quotes for as long as I have interesting material to share.

About a year ago, I started writing a new original project called Fragmentarium and I'm now slowly publishing that work on my website.

Fragmentarium is a collection of fragments exploring the complexities of human experience. I'm hoping to add five new fragments each week, provided that my long process of writing and editing continues to go well.

I'd greatly appreciate your support, which you can give by following me here, by subscribing to the free weekly newsletter, and, most of all, by reading my work.

If you do this, you will feel yourself mentally squirming in an attempt to get away from these thoughts. Notice this feeling and examine it carefully. It's terrible to look at these things. You want to escape. You want to do anything other than think about this. Perhaps the feeling is so strong that you're also physically squirming. Pay attention to this feeling too and consider its nature.

You are suffering under the force of attachment. You are actively experiencing how a particular intention to which you are attached can pull your attention away. In this case, the intention is your aversion to thinking about horrible things. You want to make the bad thoughts go away, by whatever means necessary.

I'm trying to hold myself to my decision, and I'm frustrated by my inability to take control. I desperately want to prevent the habit from continuing. I feel like I should be able to do this just by imposing control over my actions. But this doesn't work because my habit is already a form of control.

I haven't noticed this because I've associated control with conscious choice, but not every instance of control follows from choice. Attempts at control are often reactions to the many kinds of suffering that arise from attachment. It's because I'm suffering that my actions are repeating in this narrow and specific direction. My bad habit arose as a reaction to anxiety: it is the action I take to try to control that anxiety.

But allowing for the fact that the person in the story is not you, you might be willing to accept that they could respond quite differently than you would. You would let go of the discrepancy and continue reading. You know that since this is a work of fiction, you shouldn't expect absolute realism from everything you find in it.

Even if the implausibilities continued to stack up, you might press on, accepting that the world of the story is just different from the world you live in. Despite these seemingly obvious falsehoods, there is something else in the story that feels valuable to you.

You could start today but you don't. You could at least figure out what your first step might be, but you don't even do that. Yes, yes, you have all these concerns that you can't ignore. About how you don't have time. About how you need to focus on other things. About how it'll never work anyway. Somehow you have time to think of excuses but none to actually do something.

I need to see you do. I need to see you take an actual step. At least one. Don't give me reasons. I don't want to hear any more flimsy reasons. I don't want reasons. I don't want words. I don't want anything to do with language. Language can't fix anything. I need action.

But we need not surrender to despair. We can instead recognize that our awareness is still relatively narrow, which means the compassion we can muster is also relatively small. It's not that we don't want to be more compassionate, but rather that we first must see what is necessary and needed in order to be able to take more meaningful action.

Often our compassion will be so small that the only place we can meet need is in ourselves. This is far from a bad thing. The more compassion we receive (including from ourselves) the more we will be able to develop our awareness. With greater awareness, we'll be able to see more and do more. Then our compassion will spill outside ourselves and towards the needs of others.

We see so much complexity in the world around us that we naturally begin to think our lives must also be complicated. We identify particular problems that plague us and we narrow our attention in an attempt to solve them. We believe that by solving all of these little problems, we will eventually arrive at a better life. We can imagine this better life and we desperately want to get there. But we are easily distracted because we become attached not only to our desires and aversions but also to the vast network of beliefs that allow us to be functional members of our society.

But for whatever reason, my offer is not well received. Instead of responding with gratitude, the recipient is upset. I consider again what I've done, but I cannot see any wrong in my actions. I believe that my offer was compassionate and it ought to have been accepted. Instead of allowing that I've made a mistake, I choose to blame the other.

Jumping to blame is a sign that something has gone wrong. A truly compassionate act will always be accepted. It is by definition something that helps to meet the needs of the other person. Of course, it's possible that I've seen a need that the other hasn't yet seen, but compassion must take this into account.

Does he actually feel amazing afterwards? Hardly. Such a simple phrase is unable to lift his spirit so high. Is he, in fact, amazing? This too is doubtful. He thinks of himself as capable and aware, but there's nothing all that special about him. The effectiveness of the phrase clearly has little to do with reality. But it still does something. By uttering the words, they become, in a way, true for him, even if this is not the kind of truth that can be tested or verified.

But when the time comes for us to act, I cannot find you anywhere. You said we needed to take action, but now you've slipped away, leaving me to manage on my own. You said “we” but you did not mean it. You realized what you'd have to do and you decided it was too much. You learned that fixing the problem will require real effort and sacrifice and you didn't want to take that on. You offered only words and no actions.

You are controlled by one desire and then by another, distracted by one aversion and then by another, motivated by one belief and then by another. Sometimes one part dominates all the others. You become fully attached to it, and your attention stays locked on its needs, its priorities, its goals. You try to construct a self around this particular attachment (or collection of aligned attachments) and you make it your entire identity. But in doing so, you neglect your other parts. The result is that you suffer feelings of regret, grief, anxiety, stress, and frustration as the needs of your other parts go unfulfilled.

We want to go back and reread, we want to seek out context, we want to get more information. We want to do these things so that we can find the point of the text. Knowing the point feels like the most important thing. But our anxiety over not having a clear meaning can easily mislead us. It can pull us away from what we need to see and drag our attention back into the text, forcing us to analyze every last detail as we grasp for definite knowledge.

We don't need to force ourselves to get something out of everything we read. Reading is just like every other experience we have: we might see some meaning in it or we might not. Unless we're overcome by paranoia, we don't usually concern ourselves with the meaning of every little thing that happens to us.

Since awareness comes from attentive experience and arises through intuition, it is not a locatable object in me or in the world. It is not something I can delimit with language and it is often not something I can wilfully access. Awareness is instead a kind of idealized entity, a metaphor for the way attentive experience affects me throughout life. While it can be deeply felt, it is also always intangible and metaphorical.

This is especially true when it comes to people. In the past, the human beings she would dream up always had a certain falseness to them. It was as if they were only facsimiles of people, or canvases on which she would impose her own shape and colour. But now she can imagine someone with a form and a manner almost indistinguishable from those of a real person.

Of course, she knows they aren't actually real. She's not crazy. She knows the world she imagines is not the world she lives in with this body, the body she often wishes wasn't hers. She knows the pain she feels in this body is not the same as the pain she feels in her dreams, like when she imagines she is loved by someone and then discovers she isn't.

Sometimes this means we are actually describing a need instead of an intention. When we are hungry, we want to eat the food that is in front of us, but this want is nothing more than an intuitive response to the need for nourishment. Such a desire is not an intention because it arises in the moment and can be satisfied in the moment, whereas an intention is about the future.

An intention always involves some kind of goal or ideal state we are trying to reach, maintain, avoid, or confirm. It is the future-oriented nature of our intentions that causes us to become attached to them. Intentions give us specific, definite goals to strive towards and we crave this certainty. Sometimes our desires feel automatic or compulsive because we become attached to them almost as quickly as they form.

Our suffering is compounded by the fact that we can't see how to close the gap. We don't know how to get to where we want to be and we have the nagging worry that life will always be less than we imagined it should be. Sometimes these desires and aversions come together to form the belief that there's nothing we can do and we fall into despair. We feel like prisoners trapped in a meaningless existence where the best we can hope for is to escape into isolation and live out our days in relative peace.