Oakville Zen Meditation
Ignorance Part 2 What does that mean?
Ignorance with desire/attachment/clinging (I want), dislike/hatred (I don’t want) is one of the so-called 3 poisons causing suffering. There is a difference between ignorance in the common sense of the word and its Zen Buddhist meaning
In the Zen meaning, rather than a general lack of knowledge, ignorance means our illusions, delusions, misunderstandings, and unawareness of the factual concrete realities of Self, and life in general. In othe wods, ignorance is not knowing genuine realities.
Ignorance is created by our permanent mind-made, fictional daydreaming state involving self, others, and life in general. It is our default thinking mode, composing the majority of our 80 to 120 thousand thoughts/day as defined by fMRI..
Last week we talked about our false sense of Self; today I am speaking about our Mind-made fake news.
2 Our mind-made fake news:
Fake and deceptive news are the 24/7 reality of our Internet world. But the fictional world is not new. Being also mind-made, it exists since humans have been on this planet for the last 100,000 years or so.. Our mind is the most powerful “make it up” fake news media ever created. We are continually living in a sort of dream world made of various space-times, events and people. Zen describes us as “daysleep walkers”
Here are only a few examples of mind-made “unreal reality”. or mental illusion and delusion.
We believe wrongly that:
We are an independent, unique, separate, self-sustained self-entity as said in the previous talk.
We are pretty well controlling our life, and are indispensable….really!
Our thoughts and judgments are the truth. Some of them are, most of them are just ego-centered wishful thinking acquired from education, reading, experiences, beliefs, and media.
Unfortunately, our ideas, opinions, and judgments are mostly finalized by our emotional mind rather than from evidence-based, pragmatic, and rational thinking.
That almost everything is permanent. No, everything is transient, including our sources of attachment. …..Really!
That past and future exist ( they do on paper) .Only the present time exists and is real.
That accumulation of goods means the accumulation of happiness or “ the more the better”
That permanent happiness is possible when coming from the outside world.
We don’t have to surf the Internet to read about fake news and virtual reality.
Just watch your thoughts and emotions on a regular basis and ask yourself these 2 questions:
“ How do my current thoughts reflect genuine concrete realities of life or are they just serial blips issued from my mind-made fictional daydreaming world?
“ Does this thought have / will have a positive or detrimental impact on my serenity”, and on others.?
