After the Spell Breaks: When the Stories We Live By Begin to Lose Their Meaning

I used to call myself a 'romantic at heart' until I discovered how holding onto this ideal was making me sick. 

I got sick of the constant disappointment when my ideals never measured up with reality.

I saw how my inflated expectations and romanticized perceptions were giving me false hopes.

All this wishful thinking wasn’t helping me - it was hurting me - and yet I thought that if I gave up my colourful ideals, my life would be boring. 

I craved emotional highs that manifested as a need for idealized romantic scenarios to play themselves out. I mistook my own passion, intensity and jealousy as emotional vingettes within the larger frame of the melodrama . I accepted the pains of longing as the inevitable costs only a true romantic would be willing to pay for “true love”. 

And then the illusion broke.

Was this really what love was supposed to look and feel like?  

And then the other shoe dropped

I saw my views about love had been running through a program. I saw how pop-culture had set me up to believe that in these ideals.

Were these even my own ideals, or did I internalize them as a natural result of narratives I was most exposed to?

For the first time I started seeing the effect of taking on these ideals was having on me. Living through this ideological lens, the gap between reality and these glowing snapshots of what my life should look like was making life unbearable. But this intolerance wasn't actually a reflection of reality itself, but arose from the belief that a magical-perfect love is waiting for me out there, and the reality I was living was getting in the way.

It seemed that society sold me the idea that I was missing out on something - something far more enchanting than the dull and uneventful circumstances that my own life offered.

But was I really missing out, or was it simply time to get real? 

The Disenchantment Process

Our consumer culture thrives on keeping our desires alive. Every time we buy into something whether that be a subscription, a product or a concept, we think it will bring us satisfaction. Strangely, through observation we may notice that the opposite occurs. Instead of feeling content, our restlessness often increases and our cravings proliferate. Like the legend of the two wolves says, whatever wolf you feed will get stronger. The more we feed our impulsive desires, the more we learn to depend on things to take away our minor grievances and satisfy our hungers.

There comes a point when our ideals stop enchanting us. Personally, my first introduction into disenchantment as a concept became known to me through the buddhist teachings of the Four Noble Truths. What is great about these teachings is that you don't have to be a self-proclaimed buddhist to be able to observe the relationship between wanting things (craving) and suffering - which is precisely what these truths make clear. The universality of these observations is what makes them 'truths' in the first place.

And yet if you've been intoxicated by the happily-ever-after narrative, sobering can come as a rude shock. For me however, it came as a sort of relief because I realized how much my energy was being exhausted by continually investing in my illusions.

And to be clear, it's not that I gave up on the images of my mind. It's just that instead of habitually comparing how my life was measuring up against these images, I started questioning whether it was even true that I wanted these things. This was a radical shift in my perspective, that was supported by The Work of Byron Katie.

What's truly amazing is that prior to developing an appreciation for Buddhist worldview, and The Work of Byron Katie, I experienced an unshakable resistance to giving up the idealized images in my mind.

No one was going to convince me that these images that so often filled my mental space were not of utmost importance. Understandably, if one is asked to give up joy, pleasure or satisfaction (which is what my imaginings were bringing me), this would naturally cause a push back.

Fortunately, I came to discover an invaluable distinction that meant hardly any effort was required in "giving up" my desires. You could say the desires gave themselves up after I was able to widen my lens, witnessing other elements of my experience that shifted how I related to these objects of the mind.

Here's what I discovered: pleasure, happiness or any desirable state can never be "given up" precisely because these states do not inherently belong to a particular object. 

Where as a small child might have a clear preference to play with a pink or yellow ball, a dog treats the colour of the ball with impartiality.

Therefore, the colour of the ball does not make the object inherently more valuable. The one engaging with the ball determines its value for themselves.

My first introduction to this way of seeing came through Buddhist teachings on emptiness. Until then, I had never seriously questioned whether the importance I assigned to things actually belonged to the things themselves.

Was I making this object more meaningful than it actually was?

Even this question is flawed because it implies there still exists some measure of value belongs to the object when 100% of its value is imposed by the observer. As I began observing my own experience, it became increasingly difficult to ignore how meaning was being supplied by me rather than coming through the object.

This observation then began helping me to notice the draw backs of how meaning is assigned to things. Take this example:

You take your child to the town fair.

You play a shooting game which promises the prize of a pink elephant to whoever can hit the target.

The pink elephant means the world to your child.

You miss the target and therefore do not get to take home the pink elephant.

The child is devastated and spends the rest of the day sulking.

One week later you see an identical pink elephant in the shopping plaza.

You buy it and bring it home to your kid.

To your surprise, your kid shows zero interest.

In this example we see that objects have value depending on the conditions surrounding them. Apparently, the pink elephant was valuable only because it came from winning a game. Remove these details and the pink elephant is just like any other meaningless object. In one context the elephant means the world. In the next context, it means nothing.

Notice, that in these examples I have used a child a figure to help show how easily attached one can get to relatively minor details. Relative is the operative word here, and there is great value in assessing for oneself, what objects, ideas or stories are most meaningful and the conditions that support this view? Can as the value of the pink elephant was tied to winning, maybe the value of getting what you want it tied to becoming someone or acheiving something or any number of orientations you are yet to become aware of?

Through widening the lens, we see how our desires exist not in a vacuum, but in chain. If being cut off from one's source of happiness causes a decline in mood, your psyche deduces that happiness is a condition of the object, and not arising from a state of mind and the tendency to attribute value to certain objects.

The urge to become more conscious of one's tendency to invest mental and emotional energy into certain objects comes into play when the costs of our investments become visible. On a somatic level, not getting what we want or things not turning out how we expected to feels unpleasant.

This acute sensitivity and awareness to the unpleasantness of our experience, means we are more likely to put aside our need for the metaphorical pink elephant, and get on with our lives.

The Buddhist worldview and teachings on emptiness allowed me to develop this discernment so that I could start observing reality in such a way that reduced my experience of suffering rather than add to it.  

Instead of forcibly denying myself what I most wanted, I learnt to get curious about what was making this feel so important to me? Essentially, the internal pathways in my mind were changing tracks in such a way that allowed me to arrive at different understandings and through a different criteria for measuring my success.

Instead of success being measured by the fulfillment of my desires, success was measured by the quality of my experience, not just momentarily, but as a gradual stabilization of my emotions and my capacity to remain content when circumstances did not match up perfectly with my desires. This was is in part because my desires were not so clearly defined and rigid as before. I became more open to the idea that perhaps what I thought I wanted wasn't actually what I needed right now. The process of not getting what I wanted became a journey of discovery and curious exploration as to what might come to fill the space of my unrealized desires.

My mind was being reorganized in such a way that was allowing to be more at ease with whatever was arising, and simply notice what stories create tension and discord, and what ways of seeing release them.

To someone follows the unquestioned assumptions of their mind, loosening one's grip around how things should be can feel like an impossible task. And yet through widening our lens, our efforts are energized by wisdom.

Different pathways bring new perspectives

Let's imagine you have a craving for some candy and you decide to take a trip to the candy store.

In discovering that the road to the candy store is closed, you find an alternative route to the candy store through a hidden forest path.

Upon taking this forest path, you encounter fragrant flowers and a refreshing atmosphere that reminds you of the wonder, beauty and sweetness of such natural delights. By the time this path reaches the candy store, its artificial contents pales in comparison to what you have just experienced.

You notice that it takes no effort in refusing the candy - you've just tasted something sweeter and so that initial craving you once felt with such intensity, simply doesn't exist anymore. 

Through taking a different pathway, we arrive at the same place but with a completely different view of the meaning that it holds. In light of this, giving up our desires may be perceived to threaten our liberties when we don't see the degree by which our cravings control and dictate our thoughts, feelings and behaviours.

Romanticising one’s hardships, imbuing them with poetic meaning and artistic sensibilities is commonplace in contemporary society. By adorning our experience with such embellished views, inevitably the grip of melodramatic narratives tightens our capacity to experience the full spectrum other possible meanings to what is happening in our life.

Did I really lose the love of my life? Or did I get one step closer to discovering an essential new layer of myself that was being sheilded by my outward orientation towards another person?

In this case, one meaning has been replaced with another, and even though these are both constructions of the mind, there is a clear difference in how these views land differently in the body.

When experience is built entirely upon the fuel of fantasy or fixed beliefs around the ways things should be, reality can feel threatening. Given that no-thing has inherent meaning, it is up to us to observe the way in which we overlay reality with a story and whether this story brings us into a greater experience of peace and ease, or angst. Perhaps success is not marked by the fulfilment of one’s desires, but by one’s capacity to be free from the pains of wanting things to be any other way than they are.

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