This morning’s meditation complete, the following wisdom is the choice for what will be carried in the back of the mind today, for later expressions and writings.
THE DEPENDENT ORIGINATION
1. Where is the source of human grief, lamentation, pain and agony? It is found in the fact that people are generally desirous.
They cling obstinately to lives of wealth and honor, comfort and pleasure, excitement and self indulgence, ignorant of the fact that the desire for these very things is the source of human suffering.
From its beginning, the world has been filled with a succession of calamities, over and above the unavoidable facts of illness, old age and death.
But if one carefully considers all the facts, one must be convinced that at the basis of all suffering lies the principle of craving desire. If avarice can be removed, human suffering will come to an end.
Ignorance is manifested in greed that fills the human mind.
It comes from the fact that men are unaware of the true reason for the succession of things.
From ignorance and greed there spring impure desires for things that are, in fact, unobtainable, but for which men restlessly and blindly search.
Because of ignorance and greed, people imagine discrimination where, in reality, there are no discriminations. Inherently, there is no discrimination of right and wrong in human behavior; but people, because of ignorance, imagine such distinctions and judge them as right or wrong.
Because of their ignorance, all people are always thinking wrong thoughts an always losing the right viewpoint and, clinging to their egos, they take wrong actions. As a result, they become attached to a delusive existence.
Making their deeds the field for their egos, using the working of discrimination of the mind as seed, beclouding the mind by ignorance, fertilizing it with the rain of craving desires, irrigating it by the willfulness of egotism, they add the conception of evil, and carry this incarnation of delusion about with them.
2. In reality, therefore, it is their own mind that causes the delusions of grief, lamentation, pain and agony.
This whole world of delusion is nothing but a shadow caused by the mind. And yet, it is also from this same mind that the world of Enlightenment appears.