Too Many Western People Get This Lesson About Spiritual Awakening Horribly Wrong

Just scratch the surface, and you’ll misunderstand the depths

If Buddhist psychology indeed provides an accurate model of the inner human condition, it suggests a startling reality.

We are deluded from the beginning; our very perceptions are built on faulty, dualistic infrastructure.

This is a conclusion Western knowledge systems have, to some degree, realized. It’s why you need pages and pages of advanced mathematical proofs for simple arithmetic like 2 x 2. Because ‘the obvious’ is not good enough.

On the other hand, Indic knowledge systems approached this issue in the exact opposite manner. It realized that intuitive knowing, called direct proof (pratyaksha pramana in Sanskrit) needing no other validation is the truest way of infallibly accurate knowing.

It’s like how you know you’re breathing.

Obvious and incontrovertible, thus valid.

And since it can be developed to astronomical levels, until you reach the degree of a Buddha, the Buddha himself began his teaching with the practice of knowing whether you’re breathing in or out, short or long.

This simple practice developed continuously, subtly, and undistractedly results in awareness that is able to perceive much more than just breath.

This awareness (eventually) knows:

• When an emotion is about to bubble up from the unconscious and distract you.
• That your thoughts clouding awareness are temporary.
• That your body, mind, and personality are just changeable patterns, not “you” in the first place to get ensnared in.

Most importantly, it knows until knowing can cut delusion whenever it pops up from past habit. This is the path of purification. To irreversibly free oneself from all mental defects, by cutting their cause (unknowing).

But confidence is not a mental affliction.

Most people think awakening is about humbling oneself. Of hammering the ego to dust!

The word ‘ego’ does not appear in any Buddhist, Hindu, Jain, or Sikh contemplative text. It’s a Western conceptualization, in English, rooted in the zeitgeist of just one part of this world.

In Sanskrit, the term “I-maker” or aham-kara is used. This is the apprehension of an inherently existing independent “me” or “you” that’s magically cut off from every other strain of cause & effect in existence.

And that is what appropriates everything for itself — it is the delusive tendency for self-clinging, of viewing phenomena inherently (and then getting upset about it).

It’s not the healthy psychological infrastructure we refer to as an ego.

You don’t need to destroy that & then become dysfunctional in the world. You just have the realize the depth of its interconnectedness with everything else!

So commit to this.

It’s often said that ignorant people influence the world most. Humble, intelligent people remain the most quiet.

• The ignorant don’t know how much they don’t know. They’re just sure of what they’re doing.
• The knower knows how much they don’t know. So they’ve got little to say!

What you’ve got to do is attain the confidence of the former — without losing the quest of improving it, embodied by the latter.

To be sure of one’s convictions & act on them is not delusion.

It’s just fuel, the basic energy to act.

It’s only when this confidence is mixed with actual mental defilements, like clinging, jealousy, laziness, and ill-will that it becomes an issue.

The “spiritual people” exploring the improvement of human consciousness are some of the most valuable beings alive today.

And yes, just by reading these words out of curiosity, you’ve become one of them.

Because we can’t break free of the straightjacket of materialist science without more free thinkers.

We can’t borrow knowledge from wiser cultures and time periods without explorers of new possibilities.

In fact, you are essential to the future of our species. You deserve to find a niche in which to help this world, and you can’t get there without some serious confidence in yourself!

So take a cue from the ancients, and be sure that what you know is sure. Or at the least, can eventually be, if trusted and developed to perfection.