“We tend to think of ignorance, or avijja, in very abstract terms—not knowing the four noble truths, not knowing dependent co‐arising, not knowing the Deathless—but you can’t chip away at those forms of ignorance until you’ve chipped away at the more blatant, immediate ones: the mind’s habit of disassociating, of leaving gaps in its inner conversation. Say you decide to do something unskillful. If you had a sense of the Buddha watching over your shoulder all the time, it would be harder to do it, so you erect a barrier in the mind as if there were no Buddha in the world, never had been a Buddha, no arahant disciples. Then all kinds of unskillful actions are possible in the world remaining in your mind. But those walls can’t stay forever. They have to come down. And then you expend a lot of energy into putting them back up again. ~ We develop alertness in the meditation for the purpose of drilling through those walls, tearing them down, letting them collapse. Then, when they’re down and we can really see, we use equanimity to gauge for ourselves where we actually have been skillful and where we haven’t. That way we can learn from our mistakes. As the Buddha once said, “One of the signs of wisdom is in seeing your own foolishness.” At least that’s the beginning of your quest for knowledge, your quest to overcome ignorance. And the foolishness here is not that you don’t know a particular Buddhist teaching; it’s simply that you aren’t sensitive to what you’re doing or to the results of what you’re doing. We have the power to shape our experience and yet for the most part we use it in ways that cause unnecessary suffering. This, according to the Buddha, is the biggest danger in our lives: not what other people may do to us, but what we can do through our actions to ourselves…” ❀❀❀ Thanissaro Bhikkhu The Walls of Ignorance January 29, 2004 dhammatalks.org/Archive/Writings/Meditations2.pdf
Posted on: Wed, 01 Oct 2014 21:21:38 +0000
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