Delusion: "an
idiosyncratic belief or impression maintained despite being contradicted by
reality."
A key purpose of mindfulness practice is training our own minds to pay
attention to the way things really are. It’s kind of crazy to go through life
arguing with reality. The quotes below are from Jack Kornfield’s book, The Wise Heart.
Without
seeing clearly, we take the surface illusion of things to be reality. Delusion
underlies all the other unhealthy states.
When we
awaken from delusion, our life is transformed. This is not easy,
because…delusion is hard to see. “It’s like riding a horse,” said Ajahn Chah,
“and asking, ‘Where’s the horse?’
”
We live in a
culture of chronic inattention fed by the frenzied pace of modern life. Our
schools and workplaces push us to multitask, and our fragmented attention
becomes cursory, shallow. Surrounded by stimulation, we become bored and
restless, prone to addictions of all kinds…. What is commonly accepted by
Western psychology as “normal” can actually mean we are functioning at a
significant level of delusion.
Without
mindfulness, the deluded [normal?] mind habitually grasps pleasant experiences
and rejects unpleasant ones. Harder to see, delusion ignores neutral experience.
When things are neutral, we get bored and spaced out because we are so
culturally conditioned to seek high levels of stimulation. So we miss the
aliveness behind the neutral experiences that make up much of our day. And yet
when our attention grows, what seems neutral or dull becomes full with an
unseen richness.
