Sharing an article typed from my book: The Book of Awakening by Mark Nepo.
Every short story within this book is from his own experiences and awakenings.
WRONG VIEW
The mind composed of ignorance or wrong view
suffers from spiritual disease; it sees falsely.
Seeing falsely causes it to think falsely, speak
falsely, and act falsely. You will see immediately
that everyone, without exception, has the spiritual disease.
----- A ja h n B u d d h a d a s a
In Pali, the ancient source language of Buddhism and Hinduism, the
word for mental illness means "wrong view." We must be careful not to
interpret this righteously, as in, if you see things differently than I,
you are wrong. The wisdom here lies in the revelation that our
wellness of mind hinges on how clear and true we remain to the pulse of
life itself.
At heart, our mental health comes out of the sacred relationship
between our deepest Self and the very source of life. The moment we
distort, limit, or rationalize things away from what they truly are, we
start to experience the spiritual disease than Ajahn Buddhadasa speaks
of.
This Buddhist teacher from Thailand reminds us that these passages of
imbalance and blurry thinking are unavoidable. They cannot be
circumvented, the way you might drive around a pothole. No, these
distortions can only be minimized and repaired. So we must accept that
by being human, we will distort the gift of life, and thus we must
commit to learning how to refresh our relationship with what is sacred.
Quite often, to uphold a "wrong view," we build and maintain "a wrong
way." For example, when younger and sorely in need of approval and
love, I hurt so much inside that I assumed that life was somewhere "over
there," not where I was. Once believing this, I put all my energy into
getting over there. But after a hard journey, I was blocked. The
people over there wouldn't let me in. Now I had to figure out who was
the gatekeeper and what were his rules, and now there was the doing of
all these tasks to satisfy the gatekeeper, so I might be let in.
It took me years to realize that no matter the pain, life is always
where we are. Nothing is being withheld. All that misguided effort was
built on wrong view. As Buddhadasa says, "Everyone, without exception,
has the spiritual disease" while underneath, the undistorted life is
softly waiting. Given this, we each must make a ritual not of seeing
rightly, but completely.
EXERCISE
* Sit quietly and bring to mind someone's approval you seek.
* If you can, meditate on why this feels so important to you.
* What is it you need that you think their approval will provide?
* Rather than devise ways to get this approval, try to understand where
the need in you comes from.
N a m a s t e ~
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