Most of the time, conventional reality monopolizes our attention with the stuff of everyday life the challenges of education, earning a living, relationships, family, and health. Conventional reality contains the complications of experience, memory, identity, and duality fashioned out of the meanings and stories we impose upon a pure and mysterious Field of Being. Our dramas, played out in the theater of gain and loss, desire and satisfaction, seem real and important to us. Conventional life involves the pursuit of satisfaction and fulfillment, wherein our happiness depends upon events unfolding in line with our desires, hopes, and expectations. If our pain takes the form of an acute illness, injury, or personal loss.
Every problem has a solution.
Only when we confront this stark realization do we begin to seek a way out. Most of us are motivated not by freedom, but by pain. Only when we are willing risk all that we think we know, to relinquish familiar truths that no longer serve, to look beyond consensus reality and venture into the unknown can we finally step out of the endless search for conventional solutions. Suffering generates a desire for spiritual growth, a yearning to transcend the conditional world. So we take a leap of faith that launches us on our search for a Teacher, Process, or Path to awakening.