Perhaps the most central tension one becomes vividly aware of upon embodying spiritual insight in one’s life is that between living amidst human beings who perpetually tell you who you’re supposed to be acting on the one hand, and understanding that this intra- and extracerebral psychodrama is completely dissociated from the Works—from everything that actually steers the course of reality—on the other.
Tacitly, every interaction you have within your social matrix tells you that you are responsible for everything in your life. What you consider to be successes trigger pleasant feelings, what you consider to be failures trigger unpleasant feelings—all because you have been reinforced to interpret the significance of events a certain way through becoming a member of your culture and society since your birth; all of it also being tied to your conception of your value as a human, as a persona. This clashes hard with the essential spiritual insight and feeling that everything is already taken care of by the fundamentally intelligent, purposive source and course of reality (which, in those moments of insight, you understand to be your actual self).
Interestingly, the resolution of this tension doesn’t require it to be resolved. It is resolved when one is fully okay with every little neurosis and friction point involved in human life, and consequently with the grand friction between your sense of individual agency and the apparent randomness of reality.1
So a liberated person or Zen master isn’t someone who lives a life without friction or inner tension; it’s someone who surfs the tension, dances with it, is okay with it—even when he isn’t. Much like a Talebian barbell strategy: the more one tolerates small neuroses and tensions, the more immune one becomes towards the big ones.2
Barefooted and naked of breast,
I mingle with the people of the world.
My clothes are ragged and dust-laden,
and I am ever blissful.
I use no magic to extend my life;
Now, before me, the dead trees
become alive.— the final verse of the Ten Oxherding Pictures, by Kuoan Shiyuan. via Buddhistdoor
Apparent because we forget that the coherence within our conceptual frameworks does not by necessity mirror the coherence of the totality of reality. Moreover, we observe the world by coating it in abstraction; and while abstraction helps us keep track of reality in a coherent way with each other, it veils the “detail-level implementations” of the myriad interdependent factors happening on all scales that influence the direction of the process of reality. Not that we could really become aware of it all even if we ceased to abstract, though; its scale always exceeds our cognitive faculties, even when we augment them with silicon. Luckily we can always have faith, and by it let our Heavenly Father clothe and feed us.
Indeed, one can even become antifragile towards them and use them to one’s benefit.