Our Ignorance cannot be seen, touched, tasted, smelled, heard, or even thought.
But it can be felt.
It can be felt as insecurity, fear, hatred, jealousy, grandiosity, greed, cynical self-doubt, arrogance and narrow-mindedness.
Unhappiness, too.
Having become accustomed to its presence, we don’t find it to be acutely painful.
But make no mistake, our Ignorance is a negative force; harmful, retarding, and each moment it abides it moves us further from our truest, wisest, most harmonious potentials.
The sufferings of Ignorance seem to come from the outside, brought upon by other people and situations.
We blame our stress and anxiety, and the myriad of discontenting states of mind Siddhartha included in his mentions of ‘Dukkha’ on our jobs and bosses, spouses and partners, our parents and children, neighbors and acquaintances, the government, credit card companies and traffic jams.
(Really, just about anything we can point our finger at.)
Convenient scapegoats all. But again, make no mistake, our Dukkha comes not from the periphery, or from some fog descending from the skies above.
It arises from within, born of our Ignorance; completely self-created, self-perpetuated, self-maintaining.
And it will tell you anything – including fantastically personal rationalizations – to prevent you from escaping its clutches . . . and, especially, from wanting to be genuinely free.
***
While a stubborn, well-established adversary, Ignorance can be defeated.
It can be smashed to smithereens by the pure and natural quality we all carry in our mind, everywhere we go . . . for most of us buried deep.
We know this quality as Wisdom.
There is no secret code or magic formula one needs to get hold of this Wisdom, of attaining or gaining access to it . . . and then engaging in everyday life in partnership with it.
The path to our Wisdom is the Tibetan Buddhist core curriculum; we refer to it in its practical discipline as ‘DharmaPractics’.
It is non-sectarian, non-dogmatic, non-arbitrary and non-pedestrian.
We begin simply, with the force of will to commence.