Maya ~ The World of Illusion Created By Our Thoughts

As some of you know I have fallen in love with the writings of David Foster Wallace. I started some self reflection and need to reclaim myself, to feel less of a shell and more like the person people from my past say I am, deep inside of myself.

I will be blogging about a book I am reading called "The Cow In The Parking Lot ~ A Zen Approach to Overcoming Anger" by Leonard Scheff and Susan Edmiston. It will sound a lot like a book review at times, but there will also be my muddled view point of what I believe is the underlining theory and practice is. How to live a fuller life and not spread our suffering and anger onto others.

"Learning how to think rally means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience." ~David Foster Wallace, Commencement Address, 2005.

To me the first step in letting go of anger, disappointment, hurt, all that leads to suffering is to first reverse the way we have been inculcated by society.

I have labeled this blog Maya, the Buddhist word meaning the world of illusion created by our thoughts. Scheff points out that most of us create a scenario in our minds that is a mixture of our view of the world, our view of ourselves, our early conditioning, and the habitual ways we respond. He argues that if often times has very little to do with reality.

At first I struggled with this concept. Just because it this view point is a mixture of what makes an individual, how is it not reality? Did we not experience these events, is this not how and what we lived? Thus if it is our experience how is it not true? It was at this point I thought of my own muddled mind and how I struggle with what I am , what I do, how I feel about my existence. Of course I was brought back to the commencement address.

"Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence....Think about it; there is no experience you've had that you were not at the absolute center of...Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real."

It was through those thoughts of a writer whom carried out the sentence of death, that I realized our own reality is true to us but not true to the world. Society places upon us beginning with an extremely young age what it believes in that time period, what will make us happy, what success is. It sets us up to constantly work toward that thing that makes us happy, always looking forward. When we fail or are hurt we then begin to look in our past.

Thus this chain of events leads us to not live in the now, this living in the present is what truly will bring happiness.

Buddha, has a meaning, "awake" or "aware". It is through the very teachings of Buddhism that we are taught to live in our present, experiencing each moment fully, directly, with an open mind, without preconceived notions, assumptions, and limiting that experience with our judgments, and concepts of reality. We constantly confuse these limitations as knowledge and thus we prevent us from truly gaining knowledge.

"With naked awareness of what is before conceptual thought arises, we can escape our habitual reactions. By this method, we can also observe ourselves, our moods, our prejudices, and our habits. Change comes, not by struggling to change or by fighting or disciplining oneself, but by becoming aware of what we are feeling and how we habitually act." ~The Cow In The Parking Lot, pgs 21 & 22.

I believe it is this simple and yet complex act that will allow one to fully analyze, accept and begin to transform our mind, body, and actions. All that makes us who we are. If we are able to live in the now, enjoy the present, and to observe our actions and reactions without judgement and with an open mind, we will be able to see the "reality". We will be able to make the changes necessary to keep from being angry, from suffering.

All I truly want for my children, is for them to learn to be kind, open minded, and knowledgeable. I do not want them to keep their opinions or preconceived notions from accepting and understanding beliefs, lifestyles, or people because they do not necessarily agree with them.

It is this lack of "mindfulness" that causes so much hate in the world. So much intolerance, and it is easy to get swept into it.

"The real important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline,, and effort, and being able to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day."~David Foster Wallace