I own a Hewlett Packard laptop that has the hp logo placed on the top cover. What I find it interesting with the logo is that whenever I place the laptop for use, the logo will be shown in the opposite direction, meaning it is no longer seen as hp but instead dy.
It is an obvious letter ‘dy’ if I did not have an inkling of the company hp. But due to the fixative idea of the meaning “hp” in the mind, whenever I see the logo placed the other way round, the mind interprets the letter hp as overturned rather than seeing it as dy. If a person is not familiar of the existence of HP he will be consistently seeing it as DY and hence his reality is such that his laptop is DY branded. This experience reconfirms in me how fixated the mind is – it is not flexible in discerning what is in the moment except what is in the past brought into the present. I am constantly being brought to the awareness that the mind is never in the state of seeing new except seeing old. Yes, the experience is new, but what it perceived is old, albeit unknowingly.
Here lies the dilemma of existence. When I am not awake to how the mind works, I am constantly in ignorance to the fact that what it perceives is constantly of the past. Awake and ignorance is just opposite sides of the coin. If I am not awake to this phenomenon, I am not aware ignorance is working out in me. In other words, wisdom and ignorance is not in my equation of life. I am totally oblivious to it. Probably my life will be in mediocrity, resigning to the fate that life is what is – or the question of such may not even arise at all.
But when such awakening enters into life, recognizing that there is an untapped truth going on in my space, the wisdom in me could not help but move towards the direction of finding out what is it that I have missed in life, or about life. This happened to me a few years ago and since then it was a slow but sure journey of finding out about the meaning of existence and why the need to exist. It is not a pleasant journey to deal with and neither is it entirely unpleasant. What is unpleasant is that when I am awake to the truth of what is actually occurring in this moment, rather than what I am experiencing in my thoughts at this moment, the fact of discomfort is no longer out there for me to direct at, except for me to face with minimal struggle and restraint and observe what is the underlying idea or ideas that have deceived me from taking on the truth. I trust a time will come where struggling with what is will get lesser, and probably diminish over time, as the wisdom that accompanies does its work of undoing what was once ignored.
For now the work in progress is acknowledging many more stuffs coming up in the mind that are false (“many” is just an understatement), and the interplay of ignorance and wisdom working on each issue. It has come to a point that there is in fact nothing much I can really do except to remember to be awake to what is without interfering with what the mind is offering at each moment, bearing in mind that wisdom takes the lead, and when or where it will arise is not my choice. My only job is to be awake to the now and surrender to what is. It can be a pretty lonely path and yet joyful when wisdom comes in unprecedented, letting realizations mature to new levels, allowing what was not understood before to be understood and realized. Hence another level of undoing is done.