Hello and welcome.
Today we'll be talking about ignorance or avidya in Sanskrit.
It is said to be the cause of suffering and of desire.
Buddha said that an ignorant man ages like an ox.
His flesh may increase,
But not his understanding.
A fool who recognizes his own ignorance is thereby in fact a wise man.
But a fool who considers himself wise,
That is what one really calls a fool.
In our practice of meditation,
We are taking the light of awareness and dharma and shining out to the ignorance of our views,
Understandings,
And efforts.
Practice allows us to see through ignorance.
But what the heck are we actually seeing through?
In many ways,
We are seeing through our own projected ignorance.
We are taking the time,
The effort,
The study,
And the practice of meditation to slowly deconstruct our illusory conceptualizations and replace them with perceptions that mirror true reality,
Which is transient and non-dual,
Rather than our hopeful projection of a concrete and dualistic world that fits nicely into all of our mental boxes.
I like to think of an old Terence McKenna line,
When I talk about ignorance or think about it,
Where he said that the world isn't just stranger than we suppose,
But it is stranger than we can suppose.
In the stillness and devoted training of meditation and following the Buddha dharma,
Our mind and object merge into a oneness of realization and clarity,
Going beyond the confusion of the apparent world and slowly letting us see through ignorance even off the cushion.
This isn't to say that to cast out ignorance is to deny the world of its existence entirely.
This would make us fall into the extreme of nihilism,
Which is not what we want to do,
But that we must understand it on more than just a conventional level.
The world is as it is,
And it is impermanent,
No matter how convincing it may seem.
Before our silent meditation begins,
I'd like to tell a short story.
The Buddha was teaching a large group of monks and told them that they could become enlightened if they rid themselves of desire.
So they go off for some time and they eventually come back to the Buddha.
One monk steps forward and says,
Well,
We have tried that,
But continue to find ourselves desiring not to desire and seem to be caught in a loop.
So Buddha said,
Just remove the desire that you can.
Whether the story is true or not,
I actually don't know.
You could even say I'm speaking from a place of ignorance.
But the point I think it makes is that each of us have our own ignorances and our own misunderstandings,
Desires and hiccups that we need to work with or get over.
Don't face them all at once,
Though.
But just work with what you can.
Shine the light of awareness completely on one ignorance at a time so that it is totally exhausted and then move on to the next.
So let's sit with this for a while.
A bell will ring in about 10 minutes.
That will be the end of this sitting.
You may continue to sit,
However,
If you like.
But after the bell,
There will be a short line about this material.
Let us begin.
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