It is much like trying to untangle a ball of knotted thread.
It requires a willing patience to disentangle the thread of delusion. What makes it so difficult? Our desires to want something better, something more or less, a something that suits our wishes, hopes and even our fears.
We want what we want when we want it!
Delusion resides in the mind as deception and false belief about the material objects of the world. Material objects, things, people all are subject to change. We know this on some level but we discard it and decide to go for the gusto of whatever object, thing or person we want.
We fail to realize all the things, objects and people are all subject to change. We ourselves are subject to change. Change is the nature of the world, the environment, and the vastness of nature itself.
Our tendency, that often becomes a habit, dismisses the actual condition of this changing environment. We think we will be able to stop change. We are looking at the dreams of delusion in our mind. We think we can make things stable - forgetting that all things including ourselves, changes.
The ultimate change on the material level is death of the body and mind. But even this ultimate change is overlooked, underestimated and comes to us as a surprise. When a beloved thing, object, person dies we are thrown into a hall of mirrors as though for the first time we are confused by the maze of reflections of loss.
The delusion of not realizing change is ever-present and causes even more confusion. At first we experience loss as a deception leading us to mutter, “how could this be, why me, why did this happen?”
We may lose a job, we may lose a friend, we may lose our health, our savings, our strength, our children, our home, and all that we own.
Even when we run after stuff, we fail to see the deceptions and false beliefs beforehand. We fail to acknowledge the dead bag of material stuff we have previously strapped on our back.
When we realize the bag of dead beliefs are dead-ended a narrow path appears. The path is a Way to adjust, recover if and only if we realize the bag of dead beliefs is our delusion.
But we continue on, we decide to go after something else, another thing, another object. Once again we are trapped by our desires, our likes & dislikes, our new phantom belief that will satisfy this time.
Where and when do we set down this bag of dead babies?
There is Help All Around Us.
When the pain and pleasure of the material world no longer taunts us, we are given a chance to decide to take a backward step away from the attachment and aversion to the impermanent, material world.
Our first step is to recognize change as the everpresent energy of this material world.
We are given what is needed to wake us up to this universal phenomena of change, we have an opportunity to make a choice.
We study our attachments not as treasures to gather and keep but as burdens and weights that inhibit our strength to let them go.
We remember that change, known as impermanence, is the basis of this physical world.
Accepting the reality of change, we are able to let go of the attactments and aversions that bind us to the worldly ways.
How do we do this?
We restrain our sense doors until we know, within ourselves, that this world is a passing show of getting and having stuff. We know that stuff, not one iota of stuff, goes with us when the body & mind change, die and disappear.
Begin immediately. Study the Threads.
Don’t give up. Keep going.
OM
🙏
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