So in these weeks we've been exploring our connection and relationship with the natural world.
And from the Buddhist perspective the harm that we're seeing in our natural world is a direct result from greed,
Hatred and delusion that reside in our own hearts.
And these are the root causes that need to be addressed to end the destructive impacts humans have on our environment.
So last week we looked at greed and greed refers to our selfishness,
Our misplaced desire and grasping for happiness outside of ourselves.
And hatred refers to our anger,
Our aversion towards unpleasant people and circumstances,
Our own uncomfortable feelings.
And delusion,
Today's topic,
Refers to our dullness or confusion,
Our misperception or the wrong views that we have about reality.
And these three are deeply conditioned in our personalities.
Our behavior is habitually influenced by them.
And as we've talked about they're operating collectively,
Institutionally.
So last week we explored institutional greed,
Looking at our financial system,
The endless growth model,
And institutional ill will or aversion that looks like racism and military,
Like the military industrial complex.
So let's explore delusion.
And I'd like to start this exploration by quoting the Zen master Dogen.
He was a very important Zen teacher in Japan in about the 1200s.
And in one of his famous writings,
He wrote that,
Buddhas are enlightened about delusion and foolish people are deluded about enlightenment.
It's not uncommon for people who are new to practice and idealistic to have a lot of interest in enlightenment.
Like it's the goal.
Like when I get enlightened,
Then I'll live happily ever after.
But what I've noticed in myself and in others is as people mature in practice,
Many people get less and less interested in the topic of enlightenment and find themselves more content to just be who they are and deal with the delusions,
Deal with the attachments as they come up and start to understand the nature of those.
That seems to support them more than becoming free than focusing on the ideal of enlightenment.
So delusion,
The Pali word for delusion is moha.
And it translates as ignorance,
Dullness,
Useless.
I think sometimes we call it confusion.
Basically,
It's the inability to see clearly what's going on.
And it's also the most,
It's considered the most difficult to understand because the logic of the idea is that if you're deluded,
How can you see the delusion,
Right?
That somehow it doesn't quite work together.
But it is possible to see delusion.
And that actually has a lot to do with the strength of mindfulness.
So delusion in a simple form is the misunderstanding around what brings us happiness.
The delusion is that somehow,
You know,
Getting and having what we want,
Being kind of greedy,
Getting the wanting mind is going to make us happy.
The delusion is that other things out there are going to do it for us.
And there's also some confusion and some projection onto our experiences of who we are.
We have these ideas of who we are,
Who we're supposed to be,
The shoulds,
You know,
The interpretations of what should be and what shouldn't be.
We have projections about others.
And so this type of delusion has to do with prejudice and biases that we have all the judgments that we have of others.
And they get solidified as who we are.
Our projections,
Our views,
Our ideas,
This is who I am.
Delusion.
So each of us kind of live in a inside of like a bubble of delusion,
Our own individual bubbles.
And it,
They distort our perception and our expectations.
And the institutions largely determine how we collectively understand the world and ourselves.
So in the institutional view,
The media is most responsible for molding our collective sense of self.
The media has become our group nervous system.
And I think that we're all aware to some extent that for an effective democracy,
It requires an independent and active press to kind of expose the abuses and question political dialogue.
But the majority of major media has abandoned all but the pretense of objectivity,
Right?
So since there are these profit-making institutions whose bottom line is advertising revenue,
The main concern has to do with maximizing profits.
It's not in the interest of the media corporation to question the grip of consumerism.
You know,
I don't think I've ever seen a major like network series about a family that decides to downsize and live more simply so that they have more time to be together.
Like,
Have you seen that?
I haven't seen that.
You know,
Thanks to clever advertising,
My son has learned to crave expensive bicycles and skis without even wondering how they're made,
The labor that goes into them,
The resources that they extract.
I can buy strawberries in December and consume bags of almonds without knowing about the social conditions of the farmers who grow those commodities.
And really without any awareness of what's happening to the biosphere,
You know,
The water that's used,
The fossil fuels to get those products to me,
The toll on the environment for my pleasure.
So the role of the media is kind of to close those possibilities,
To confine public awareness,
So to narrow the limits of our questioning.
And it's important to understand that we're not simply being manipulated by a clever group of people who benefit from the manipulation.
We're being manipulated in a self-deluded way by a group of people who think that they're benefiting from this as well.
So they've become victims of their own propaganda.
I think there's an Austrian writer and journalist,
Karl Krauss,
Who put it beautifully,
This kind of collective media delusion.
He wrote,
How do wars begin?
Politicians tell lies to journalists,
Then believe what they read in the newspaper.
It's like that.
So institutional delusion includes collective fantasies,
Like we need to consume,
Like we need to perpetuate economic growth and collectively repress or deny global climate change.
So I bring these collective behaviors to our attention,
Not to be a downer,
But if we remain unaware of our own sense of duality,
You know,
That too is a dangerous delusion.
You know,
We're all practicing together.
We're waking up together.
So we have these social constructs,
These institutional fires,
And they inform our perspective and our frames of reference.
They inform how we understand and experience our world.
And by looking at them,
We're better equipped to change them and be in conversation around them.
So to wake up is to,
In part,
Wake up to these institutionalized greed,
Institutionalized ill will and delusion that we have in life.
And they have their own life.
You know,
It's become the life of our culture.
And the importance of spiritual practice,
Our commitment to nonviolence,
The understanding that to end our own dissatisfaction really requires us to address the dissatisfaction of everyone else as well,
Because we're not separate from each other.
So my suggestion to remember that is to go outside.
Like David shared,
His gratitude,
Sit under a tree or by some moving water and reflect on all the ways you're not separate from this natural environment.
Or if you're waiting in line,
You know,
At the grocery store or the DMV,
Like reflect on all the ways you're not separate from the people around you.
My life is tied to yours.
I would not be offering these teachings if you weren't logging on to receive them.
So to end,
I want to quote my friend and Dharma teacher Matthew Brenn Silver.
He often says,
I hope I've shared my wisdom,
But I can't help share my delusion too.
They're so close to seeing and not seeing.
So thank you for your kind attention and your practice this morning.
