(Prologue: I’ve got first-hand experience that a real understanding of the laws of karma can substantially change our lives for the better. I created this weblog to share information and personal experience with others. May it be of benefit!)
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Ultimately, the good news is that we don’t exist in a permanent, solid, important way. The bad news is we act as if we do. This misunderstanding creates harm to ourselves and others.
[We must be very clear that only the self that is being grasped as intrinsically real needs to be negated. The self as a conventional phenomenon is not rejected. from book by HH Dalai Lama XIV]
When we look at a television that has been turned on, we see pictures. But the pictures aren’t solid or real, as they appear. They are made up of dots. So is ego, the “I,” “me.” It is made up of tendencies, habitual patterns, imprints, emotions etc. that, when we link them together, appear solid. We mistakenly think that this is who we are.
The self is not made of any substance at all: it is just a kaleidoscopid display of empty imagery, intangible, like a self in a dream……This sense of self is actually a transitory, discontinuous event, which in our confusion seems to be quite solid and continuous. (Contemplating Reality)
This post is about the first link (factor) out of the traditional twelve nidanas or 12links of interdependent origination (chapter 3),namely our ignorance of the nature of reality.
Ignorance does not mean stupidity here. It is vital to understand this first link because this is where ego is born. And our suffering and confusion with it. I use the word “ego” to describe a manufactured, constructed“self” vis-a-vis who we are in an unfabricated, primordial way.
This point is important. So I don’t hesitate to repeat it. We have manufactured cars, boats, houses, airplanes etc. etc. etc. We have also manufactured a “self.”
By the time I was 22, I could sum up how I felt by a line from a song by The Rolling Stones — “I think I’m on a losing streak.” I was walking along St. Clair Avenue West in Toronto when I realized that all the intellectual explanations I had created to explain why I was suffering so much were not helping. Then I came across the idea that we suffer because of how we, in our ignorance, have created a self that we think is real in a permanent, ongoing, solid way. It is important to say that this is not a nihilistic view. Read the rest of this entry »
