To recognize ignorance is the beginning of your journey “Home”. To be precise, it is the beginning, the middle and also the end of the entire journey towards freedom. What block us from total freedom is just the one and only thing – which in reality is not in existence, except our ignorance over it. Ignorance is just a definition of non-wisdom – the inability to reflect or see the block that we have created for ourselves. It is like focusing on the prison walls, lamenting the pain of being trap, unknowing that freedom is just a breath away; if only the person realized that the prison door was never locked in the first place.
And that is what ignorance does to us. It is ignorance that blocks us from realizing the Truth – not that the Truth has left or forsaken us but rather the Truth is always in its pristine present – awaiting us to realize. It is also ignorance that makes us repeat umpteen times the unnecessary lessons to finally learn from it. And it is ignorance that makes us go round and round a wild goose chase, making us bark at the wrong tree all the time. Isn’t it ignorance that makes us not realize the true nature of things as they truly are? The question is not about making ignorance the bad guy or seeing ignorance as wrong but the wiser question would be, what caused the arising of ignorance?
There is no true linear answer to that except a chicken and egg scenario. Either one cannot be called the beginning or end except that they are interdependent of each other. Anything that arises has to pass and because of the passing, arising has to begin again. Where there is no arising, passing is out of the question. Where there is no passing, arising could not exist at all. The question thus is neither about arising nor passing, but the understanding of the dynamics of this nature. Recognizing and fully realizing this dynamic through direct experience disentangles the entire web of these processes from perpetuating further.
Hence, the arising of ignorance is due to ignorance and the ceasing of ignorance is the presence of wisdom. And for wisdom to arise, there must be wisdom as its initiator. Wisdom can undo ignorance but not the other way around as ignorance is a temporal state of make believe arising from an unawakened state. It is like watching a movie, temporary suspending our reality for a moment so as to allow ourselves to enjoy the unreality of the movie as reality. It is a make believe, so to speak.
Thus to say that all of us have the Buddha nature or Christ consciousness within, is to an extent, true. What only separate the masters from us is that they are awakened and we, are still asleep in our own make believe dream. Thus it is interesting when Jesus mentioned that all are given, but few are chosen is to mean that all of us are given the ticket to Kingdom or Liberation, whichever fits your view, but few chose to listen to it. Few took the step to journey the path to awakening as the make believe reality seems too real to be forsaken. Isn’t that ignorance of the highest order?
Many move around on this shore, few choose to cross over the shore.