When one steps into the path of seeking the truth, one will inevitably be lead into the space of facing what is untrue, in a very paradoxical way – as if the table is being turnaround against what one begins with – seeking truth instead of seeing untruth. Whether the Truth is pointing towards each individual’s meaning of God, Enlightenment, Moksha, whatever – the fact is that all those meanings gradually become meaningless, when the untruth is seen surfaced in the mind. Not that all those glorious words are non-existence or meaningless, but rather one starts to realize that the meaning one has put upon those words are merely errors that one has taken in, in other words, wrong ideas or views of what it is, to start off with. Views are like colour glasses that mistake us from seeing things as they really are – the cloud of delusion that separate us from what is real.
The blatant truth each of us has to face in the spiritual journey is the fact that what is true to us, at any given moment of time, is untrue. Even if it is a realization of sort, the next level of realization would have shown us that what we realized before was incomplete. The game intensifies as one gets closer to the gate, so to speak, of where one is supposed to arrive at. Not too long ago my wise teacher reminded me not to put conclusion to what I realized, though that realization can be immensely liberating, challenging the old views that I had. True liberation comes when the realization is complete, to mean the wisdom that we acquired is all encompassing, enabling us to see things from different angle in a very flexible way instead of defining anything in wrong or right. For where there is right view at each given moment, it is impossible to see wrongness in others – what one see are patterns of conditioning that brought the experience into fold.
The Buddha was perfect to point out the fact that it is because of our ignorance to views running in the mind system that suffering has to ensue. Suffering is merely effect of wrong views that we have bought into. To fix suffering is to miss the point of what the spiritual journey is all about. Views are the problem. But to see views as the root problem is too, missing the point. Wrong views exist because of ignorance of what things are. Here one gets a little closer to truth – the forces of ignorance running in the system blinds one from seeing what is true and what is untrue, recognizing what are right views and wrong views. To be able to recognize the force of ignorance is wisdom at work, the opposing force that slowly, but surely undoes all the suffering that one has unwillingly done.
In this context, it will not be incorrect to say that where there is no seemingly suffering in our lives; where we think or feel we are free to do what we like to do, after crossing all the hurdles of what we were before, there are potentially possibilities of wrong views running in the system that we are not aware of. By focussing on the experience we miss the point of the views that make us believe who we are, a facade created by ignorance to blind us from seeing what is true. At this point of my journey I will be wary of the so-called freedom that I am getting, reminding myself that everything experienced coming through the senses are not consistent to what it really is – they are merely derivative of views.
It is true that wisdom leads to freedom, but not freedom in the context of experience, except in realization. The moment we are attached to freedom, as an experience, there lies at that moment the triumph of the force of ignorance. Freedom is not out there in the world. Neither is freedom found in the mind. Freedom is where there is realization that in the midst of bondage there is freedom – that in the midst of ignorance, wisdom is already watching the game ignorance is playing – seeing truth in the untruth. It is this little freedom of realization that leads to Freedom, not the freedom to be who we are! How easily the truth is missed! Because there is no freedom in who we are as ‘who we are’ does not exist but are merely effects of what is already in the mind, again run by views and conditionings, so to speak. Hence it is important to continuously be vigilant, as in not forgetting, as in remembering that every moment is a constant albeit subtle tug-of-war between ignorance and wisdom; until such…
Whoever knows the world, discovers a corpse.
And whoever discovers a corpse cannot be contained by the world.— Yeshua