Naturally, as with any chronic pain, we get used to it, we get so we hardly notice it, and we measure our days by our little escapes and successes, by the momentary pleasures we experience from any slight relief or distraction from our basic condition, one being pitted against an unrelenting, consuming, and infinite alien universe. And in a world of other beings suffering under the same core constriction of innermost being, we develop a mutual agreement not to draw attention to our shared chronic stress of alienation, but to reinforce each other in making do.
What the Buddha discovered was that our knowledge of our distinct, individual, irreducible identity was actually a misknowledge. The crushing vise gripping our heart was simply the result of an error. If the seemingly absolute self was mobilized to focus all its powers on the verification of its own existence, it could only come up with an eventually definitive failure to discover itself. No atomic self, no individual could be found to resist analysis by the ultimatereality- seeking analytic cognition. When the Buddha experienced this definitive failure to discover an intrinsic identity in the self, any real thing to correspond to the habitual sense of the absolute self, he experienced a total melt-down of his own personal heart-vise. The vise squeezed itself to the limit, as it were, and found itself squeezing against itself, with nothing sensitive in the middle, with nothing to hold on to. Like a pair of pliers with nothing in the grippers, infinite pressure could do no good, do no damage. When he experienced this space-like equipoised samadhi, the direct experience of selflessness or voidness, he felt an overwhelming relief. He felt free of fear from any other, totally free on the absolute level, on the level of his accustomed absolute intrinsic identity. And yet he was also free of any reified state of isolated freedom, and so relatively totally interconnected with the whole world. He felt no more loneliness and alienation, no more pitted against the world but a part of the world, a part of other beings and they a part of him. There was no more any opponent for him, he no longer lacked anything. What a monumental relief. As if an iron vice-grip that had been squeezing on his heart were suddenly removed. This is the happiness of enlightenment. No wonder every ordinary happiness, pleasure of senseexperience or mental pleasure, seemed paltry and insignificant next to the basic condition of the misknowing, a condition of being squeezed internally by the steel trap of the identity-habit.