Saturday, October 29, 2011

Introducing Delusion to Reality


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.

Instead of trying to dispel delusion, first we can simply notice the times it arises, when we go on automatic. We can take an interest in lack of awareness. To do this we can look for the areas of our life that are most unconscious. We will notice how delusion comes hand in hand with distractedness, speed, and addiction. It is a challenge to our habits to pay attention to delusion. As we do so we begin to wake up.