It’s what we know already that often prevents us from learning. –Claude Bernard
I became consciously and intentionally interested in ‘self-transformation’ during my eighteen months in a monastery (September, 1962-December, 1963). During this intense experience I began to learn and understand that the basis for any approach to self-transformation is an ever-increasing awareness of reality and the shedding of illusions (this endeavor is indeed a life-long endeavor). I began to learn the power of illusions. Illusions contaminate even the most wonder-full sounding teaching and the end product is poison.
I am not referring to potential and actual errors in the teaching. For example the Buddha’s teachings are not contaminated because one does not believe in some of them. Nor, for example, is the bible’s text contaminated because it does not fit with science’s view about the length we humans have inhabited the earth.
On the other hand, there are intrinsic untruths and deceptions that do, indeed, contaminate teaching and learning. For example, when a modern-day prophet declares that great results can be achieved without effort or that craving fame and power and wealth can go together with ego-less-ness or that methods of mass suggestion are compatible with freedom and independence.
Today, more than ever before in human history, to be naïve and easily deceived is impermissible when we experience that prevailing untruths lead us down a road to catastrophe. These untruths cause one to become blind – blind to real dangers and real destructive possibilities. We forget, or do not understand nor accept that as human beings we are living paradoxes of good and evil (or if you like, virtue and vice or light and darkness – these tend to ‘soften’ the truth that we are paradoxes of ‘good and evil’ – remember, we cannot stand too much awareness).
For some, the river of denial is a safe haven. The faith of these folks is not strong enough to believe in the unlimited possibilities of the human race without shutting their eyes to the ugliness and viciousness of individuals and groups. Sadly, as long as they do so, their attempts to achieve an optimism of well-being must fail; sadly, any intense disappointment will convince them that they were wrong or will drive them into a deep depression – if not despair – because they do not know then what or who to believe.
Faith in life, in others, indeed, in one’s self must be rooted in the garden of reality. We, each of us, must develop and engage our capacity to see evil where it is, to see destructiveness, and selfishness (think: ego-centrism) when they are obvious (think: the many attack adds rolling over us these days like a tsunami) but more importantly when they are clothed in subtle disguises and rampant rationalizations (think: attack adds again).
Indeed, faith, hope and love must be woven together with a passion for seeing reality in all of its nakedness so that the observer might well label this weaving together as ‘cynicism.’ Well, actually, it is cynical if we mean by it the refusal to be taken in by the sweet and plausible lies that cover so much of what we are exposed to.
This type of ‘cynicism’ is not what we think of when we accuse another of being cynical. This type of ‘cynicism’ is rooted in being uncompromisingly critical – this requires us to develop our critical thinking skills. This type of cynicism is rooted in a refusal to play the game of ‘deception.’ Because we humans have not developed our critical thinking skills we are – over and over and over again – easily deceived. We have not learned from history nor from our own experience.
The mystic Meister Eckhart reminds us that ‘he does not deceive but he is also not deceived.’ Indeed, neither Eckhart, nor the Buddha, nor the Prophets, nor Jesus, nor Muhammad, nor Spinoza were ‘softies’ (now there is an understatement). On the contrary, they were hardheaded realists and most of them were persecuted and maligned not because they preached virtue but because they spoke truth – especially truth to power. They knew the emperor and the emperor’s followers were, indeed, naked. They also knew that the truth does indeed set us free – and, it can also lead to the killing of the truth-tellers and truth-reminders.
It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go we have come to our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. –Wendell Berry