8: Obscurations of Self & Reality
For naïve [unrealized] individuals, reality being obscured, unreality appears everywhere; but for the bodhisattvas, having cleared away (unreality), reality appears everywhere
– Maitreya Buddha, Mahayanasutralamkara, 19:53
It is completely ordinary for a person to lack any degree of self-reflection. Although it appears mundane, it is an extraordinary event to spend some time in self-reflection about the day, or life in general.
Nevertheless, the information obtained by such effort is usually found to be somewhat superficial, and moreover, unsatisfactory. Often, simple self-reflection leads to false reasoning and wrong ideas.
What is real, and what is true? What is just our fantasy? So many choices in life, and who knows what they are really doing with it? This causes some to become quite depressed or anxious about scenario of life they find themselves in.
Everyone would like to have more clarity and insight about these things. Yet, it is difficult, because when one searches, one finds different opinions, different theories, different impulses to act, all within the same mind of the investigator.
Proper meditation is the solution to all of this, which is why it is a part of any real spiritual tradition. Meditation is the method to extract information using consciousness which is not obscured.
The reader must know the difference between simple, subjective self-reflection, and objective self-reflection within meditation.
Objective self-reflection is a function between the unobscured consciousness and the Being.
Rooted in the ego, subjective self-reflection is caught in the two great mires.
The two great mires of the mind are emotional and conceptual obscurations.
Emotional obscurations, or simply afflictions, are subjective habitual emotional patterns which can be pleasant, neutral, or unpleasant.
Afflictions are related to the processes of false identifications and fascination of the ego.
When something is apprehended as ‘self’ which is not actually ‘self’, this constitutes a false identification.
As a prelude to meditation, afflictions must be subdued with skillful methods of relaxed concentration.
Through the steps to meditation, the afflictions are subdued, but this does not mean they have been eliminated.
Unobscured consciousness is only possible when the ego is completely dormant.
Cognitive obscurations are much more profound than afflictions. Cognitive or conceptual obscurations are unconscious patterns which habitually process, in a subjective way, the reality of the world in accordance with the idiosyncrasies of one’s own fundamental ignorance.
Cognitive obscurations can only be overcome by experiential insight of the voidness of reality, by elaborating superior existential vehicles, and exhausting karmic debts.
Cognizance within the voidness of reality constitutes the illumination of the void. Prior to this, darkness reigns over the void.
Emotional obscurations relate to the ignorance of ‘self.’
Cognitive obscurations relate to the ignorance of ‘reality.’
The voidness of Being is your real nature.
