There’s an expression that says you can’t see the forest for the trees. Quite simply it means that because you’re so close to a specific tree you don’t grasp the enormity of what’s going around you, you deal with that which is right before you. As beings we have that same situation.
We cannot see or understand, usually, the vast expanse of what we are because we are dealing with the immediacy of the circumstantial situations that we are involved in at the moment. These circumstantial situations we give such attention to, and such focus to, that we miss the larger picture of who and what we are and the larger picture of our existence within the circumstances beyond our immediate reach.
What’s that mean? That means that when I went to the dentist and they gave me Novocaine and they numbed my tongue and I bit into it, for the next three days all I could think about was my tongue. I really couldn’t do or focus on anything else. It means that if you are an alcoholic in need of your next drink, your entire world is reduced to a shot of alcohol. It means that an obsessive-compulsive person who doesn’t seem to get his teeth brushed just right, the whole world is reduced to brushing his teeth. He may do that for the next three hours.
It means that we have a tendency to become overwhelmed in the midst of minutiae and we make these tiny things in the world very, very big, very, very overwhelming and difficult to resolve. If we are in that mode of being overwhelmed, of being involved in trauma or of being involved in torpor. It means that essentially we have narrowed down our existence to that specific torpor or trauma and we can’t seem to escape from it.
