Shedding Confusion

The world humans are born into is a
confused world…it’s nature is confusion.
Humans are born with a blank slate, onto
which is written their experience.
But what’s doing the writing is not unbiased…
we learn from our parents,
teachers, environment. Those aspects are
biased towards confusion. As
a result, we grow up as confused beings.

The mechanism that creates our confused
world has three aspects: passion,
aggression, and ignorance. We build our
world by grasping what we want,
rejecting what we don’t want, and ignoring
everything else. This mechanism,
while somewhat efficient at survival, is not
interested in anything else. Because
our minds are not trained in anything but this
instinctive reactiveness, our lives
are lived at it’s mercy.

But there is something more. There is the
“I don’t know” component to our
experience. This “I don’t know” is experienced
when we try to learn anything,
but it is deeper than that. There is a fundamental
“I don’t know” that haunts us
our whole lives.

As we build the edifice of our lives,
the fundamental “I don’t know”,
sometimes expressed as “what is reality?”
is put in a closet of that edifice
and the edifice is built around it. Because
the edifice seems so real, the
fundamental “I don’t know” is hidden.
The world that is built around “I don’t
know” overwhelms it, but it never disappears.

The more solid the edifice seems, the less
concern there is about the “I don’t
know.” in the closet. If “I don’t know” rears
it’s head in experience, we either
quickly throw it into the closet, or, we try to
paint it with belief, concept, and
hang it on the wall of the edifice as an enhancement.
When our life reaches it’s
conclusion and the edifice we’ve built inevitably
crumbles, what we’re left
with is “I don’t know.”

This “I don’t know” is the key that unlocks real
reality, the unconfused world.
To use that key, we have to look into the “I don’t
know” itself. The means to do that is the practice of
meditation. Through the practice of mediation and the
cultivation of awareness, the fundamental “I don’t know’,
the question “What is reality?” answers itself. At that point,
confusion disappears.