This is December 29 2024 so in just a few days, it will be 2025 and the start of any new year is associated with renewal and rebirth, a new Beginning. And one tangible way that we experience this is through the winter solstice, which happened just over a week ago. It's not that noticeable yet, but the days are now growing longer, little by little, and with it, there's the promise of more daylight.
Light is often viewed as a symbol of wisdom, clarity, purity.
And the word enlightenment comes from the Latin prefix, meaning entering the light, entering the light, whereas darkness is associated with the opposite, with ignorance, delusion, as in being in the dark.
And whereas we might think of ignorance as lacking knowledge the word delusion points to the condition of holding on to a False Belief. And in Zen, we understand it as the belief of a separate self. And this is delusion is one of the three poisons, the other being greed and anger, and to the extent that we give in to them, we're fueling our own suffering and others suffering. My suffering and your suffering is not too i
this morning, I'm going to read from an article that's titled The surprising allure of ignorance. It appeared as a guest essay in the New York Times earlier this month, on December 2, and it's by Mark Lilla, who's a humanities professor at Columbia University, and he's The author of a recently published book titled ignorance and bliss on wanting not to know, which this essay is based on. He begins by describing what humans have long experienced as a tension between wanting to know and not wanting to know. And his take on knowing is more in the conventional sense of intellectual understanding or having a wise point of view. But what he has to say also reflects on Zen practice, and I'll get into that later. Starting off, he says. So Aristotle taught that all human beings want to know our own experience teaches us that all human beings also want not to know, sometimes fiercely. So this has always been true, but there are certain historical periods when the denial of evident truths seems to be gaining the upper hand, as if some psychological virus were spreading by unknown means, the antidote suddenly powerless. This is one of those periods
when it comes to historical periods where ignorance and delusion reigned. One might readily think of the Middle Ages, which were also known as the Dark Ages. This was a period associated with political and religious conflict, a lack of scientific progress, lack of education, the spread of the plague witch hunts, which involve the persecution of mainly single women and widows for some reason, and also just human brutality in general. And Lilla is saying that we're in such a period now.
And yet, the notion that the Middle Ages were completely miserable dark times is an idea that many historians have come to now question there actually were technological advancements then, such as the invention of lamps and the heavy plow used for farming. Also there were achievements in literature and trade, and we understand that the Dark Ages, as they were called, pave the way for the Renaissance. So the words that we use to describe a situation determines where we direct our attention
where there is darkness, there's also light.
And it's interesting that Lilla cites Aristotle on the human desire to know. Aristotle is regarded as the founder of the scientific method, so he viewed truth as objective as it as it's in the sense that it's out there and waiting to be discovered. So one looks out at the world, makes observations, notices patterns, and forms conclusions on the basis of what is seen. So it's the kind of truth that is associated with hard evidence, and it contrasts with Subjective Truth, which is more based on an individual's personal standpoint or values or opinions, and we develop those through a lifetime of experience. So you could say, whereas an objective truth is true for everybody, a Subjective Truth is true for you, for oneself based on your experience. And this is where things can get really messy, because one person might say, climate change isn't real. It. The weather is great. After all, it's not a problem. Whereas somebody else might say, no, look at the evidence. We know it's real. We know it's a threat, based on evidence that's been collected around the world, and 2024 is on track for being the hottest year since global temperatures were recorded, breaking the record set by 2023 So these, these two senses of truth, can really get into tension with each other, and even if you put your trust in the scientific method, There's actually still a question of whether objective truth exists in the purest sense of it, because ultimately, everything is filtered through our senses.
When you put a stick in water, it appears to bend, but does it? There's this old Zen story about a deeply devout monk who went walking in the dark one evening and he stepped on something squishy. He could barely make out what it was that he stepped on, and yet he convinced himself that he had stepped on and killed a frog, a living being. And so as he went to bed that night, he couldn't stop thinking about it. He barely slept, regretting that he had taken a life. And when he when he woke up the next morning, he rushed back to the spot where it happened, only to discover that what he had stepped On was actually just an overripe eggplant, perhaps accidentally dropped by the cook as he was making his way from the garden to the kitchen.
Can't always trust what we perceive. We certainly can't trust thoughts. And when it comes to science, there are plenty of truths that were later proven to be wrong due to the intrusion of delusive thoughts, some with serious consequences for people's lives, such as the witch hunts of the Middle Ages, relate relatedly. In the 19th century, it was considered a scientific fact that women's brains were smaller and therefore inferior to men's and therefore they weren't capable of an education and only suited for domestic life. And a similar claim was made comparing the brains of white people to black people. So thoughts of self and other Us and Them do get in the way of discovering the truth. And the author of this essay, Mark Lilla is saying that there's even more to it than that. He's saying that we want to know. We even see knowledge as a noble pursuit, and at the same time, we really don't, we really don't want to know so much so that we can find ourselves rejecting that which is totally reasonable and rational. He says, increasing numbers of people today reject reasoning as a fool's game that. Only cloaks the machinations of power others think instead that they have a special access to truth that exempts them from questioning like a draft deferment, mesmerize crowds follow preposterous prophets, irrational. Rumors trigger fanatical acts and magical thinking crowds out common sense and expertise, and to top it off, we have elite prophets of ignorance, those learned despisers of learning, who idolize the people and encourage them to resist doubt and build ramparts around their fixed beliefs. So based on the timing of the publication of this essay. You know, it was in the aftermath of last month's election. It sounds like he's reflecting on the circulation of lies and misinformation conspiracy theories, but he's not assigning blame to any one side or any one political faction over another. His point is that delusive thoughts and ideas are something that each and every one of us is capable of falling for no matter our life experience or political leanings or education. He says it is always possible to find proximate historical causes of these upsurges in the irrational war, economic collapse, social change, but doing so can distract us from recognizing that the ultimate source lies deeper in ourselves and in the world itself, the world is a recalcitrant place. In other words, it's unmanageable, out of our control, and there are things about it we would prefer not to recognize. Some are uncomfortable truths about ourselves. Those are the hardest to accept. Others are truths about the reality around us that once revealed steal from us, beliefs and feelings that have somehow made our lives better easier to live, or at least to seem that way. The experience of disenchantment is as painful as it is common, and it is not surprising that a verse from the otherwise forgotten poem became a common proverb, ignorance is bliss. So another way to put it is that the truth hurts, especially if we're separating ourselves from it. I it separating ourselves from things as they are. We can even convince ourselves that it's foolish to seek the truth because it's only going to cause us discomfort and anxiety. It is much easier to distract ourselves. It's a lot more satisfying also to invent self serving narratives. Feels good, at least temporarily, but eventually we do come to realize that resorting to our old strategies doesn't address our underlying suffering, and this gets at why Zen practice is difficult. On the one hand, it's super easy. It's so simple, relax and keep returning your attention to your practice. Simple. If. But in the process of doing that, we notice the stuff of the mind. And chances are, we're not going to like necessarily what we notice. We're going to notice the things that we're attached to, the things that we grasp at, such as seeking praise or being the center of attention, we also notice the things that we try to avoid, like conflict or certain people that we find annoying, and we'll notice our reactivity, how Quickly we get angry when things don't go our way, we'll notice all the time we spend lingering in thoughts judgments of ourselves and others, all the comparisons that we make, all The melodramas that we dream up. And this is what makes practice hard in the midst of all of that stuff of the mind persisting.
Well, what's the alternative? Yes, Zazen is hard, but without it, then what? What happens if we don't do this inner work? You
work. Lilla goes on. He says, we can all. We can all find reasons why we and others avoid knowing particular things and many of those reasons are perfectly rational. A trapeze artists about to climb the pole would be unwise to consult the actuarial table, for those in her line of work, an actuarial table. Is a, you know, a graph of, or overview of the death rate in this case, of trapeze artists. And he says, Even the question, Do you love me? Should pass through several mental checkpoints before being uttered. So he's talking about choosing not to know. And there are situations where that's a good thing to do. Another example would be choosing how much and what kind of media you expose yourself to. There's a middle way between staying informed and actively stewing in negativity. And then and as Lilla goes on, he describes three attitudes that we tend to adopt about knowing and he makes it clear that everyone takes up these attitudes from time to time has again, nothing to do with one's level of education. And in the interest of time, I'm just going to summarize them. So one attitude of knowing is curiosity, as in having a desire to figure things out and understand why things are the way they are. The second attitude is being indifferent. So instead of being curious, you just carry on without wondering, without asking questions. And the third is outright antipathy toward learning or coming to know something, and he describes this attitude as fastening the inner doors tight to avoid gaining anything that might. Cast doubt on what you believe you already know. So it's a closed door walled off kind of attitude, and this was what he says about it. Why does this happen? Because seeking and having knowledge is not just a cognitive pursuit, it's also an emotional experience. The desire to know is exactly that a desire and and whenever our desires are satisfied or thwarted, our feelings are engaged. Given how rapidly everything changes in life today, doesn't it often feel better to rest on our intellectual and moral laurels. Why seek truth, if truth will require us to do the hard work of rethinking what we already know. Just as we can develop a love of truth that stirs us within, so too we can develop a hatred of truth that fills us with a passionate sense of purpose. There can be a clash of emotions with the desire to defend our ignorance standing as a powerful adversary to the desire to escape it.
And this is really interesting from the vantage point of Zen practice, because he's saying that we can understand both the desire to know and and the desire not to know as satisfying a basic craving. When we acquire new information, it feels good, particularly if it's in sync with what we already know, but also when we avoid learning something new or distract ourselves from new information, that too feels really good, because we're in effect, steering clear of anything that will challenge our ego we don't like to be wrong or mistaken. What we like is that spike of dopamine that we get when our cravings are satisfied. So it's not actually about what is true or isn't true, but it's about clinging to self. It's all a trap of the ego.
Lilla then describes the tendency to treat our thoughts and opinions as if they're a prosthetic device, in other words, as if they're an extension of our body, part of the core of our being. And okay, so if you feel shame or anger when someone disagrees with you or tells you that your opinion is illness, ill informed in some way that causes you to feel annoyed or disturbed, that's a sign of attachment to thoughts and attachment to self.
He goes on, we willingly give up a shot at learning the truth about the world out of fear that it will expose truths about ourselves, especially our insufficient courage for self examination. We prefer the illusion of self reliance and embrace our ignorance for no other reason than it is ours. In other words, out of pride. It doesn't matter that reliance on false opinion. Is the worst sort of dependence. It doesn't matter that through stubbornness, we might pass up a chance at happiness. We prefer to go down with the ship rather than have our names scraped off its hull. Say that again, we prefer to go down with the ship rather than have our names scraped off its hull. So as we shake our heads at those charmed by charlatans and demagogues. Let us not exempt ourselves. We all want to know and we all want not to know. We accept truth, we resist truth, back and forth the mind shuttles playing badminton with itself, but it doesn't feel like a game. It feels as if our lives are at stake and they are i
by way of analogy, several days ago, I happened to watch a Video about the life cycle of Canadian lynx cats and snow shoe hairs. And it struck me how the phenomenon that Lilla is describing, this shuttling back and forth between basically duality is also revealed in the the natural world of predator and prey relationships, in this case, lynx cats and snow shoe hairs. Turns out that Lynx cats primarily feed on snowshoe hares, which are a type of white rabbit, and so their populations are closely linked. So when Lynx populations are high, snowshoe hare populations decline. And when that happens, the LINX cats are probably like, this is great, while the hairs think this sucks, and it cycles back, because eventually the Lynx have no more food left. There's no more hairs to eat, and when that happens, the Lynx die off, and the rabbit population bounces back.
Every everything and everyone is intimately connected and also in flux. And this is the prajna wisdom that we we come to know, if you can call it that, through practice, not in our head, But in in our whole being, instead of positioning ourselves in opposition to change, we can come to realize that we ourselves are change. We flow with the cycle of things, just like the Lynx cats and the snowsu hairs.
There's this beautiful verse in the Mumonkan that I'm sure many of you have heard before, hundreds of flowers in spring, the moon in autumn, a cool breeze in summer, and snow in winter, if your mind is not clouded with unnecessary things, no. Season is too much for you. And this is what not knowing is in Zen. It's not about lacking anything, certainly not lacking knowledge or needing to obtain something, there's no special or secret knowledge waiting to be discovered with it's also beyond any ideas we might have about knowing and not knowing. It's beyond ideas, period. I
It's the intimacy, just the intimacy of being here, this moment, not our thoughts and opinions about it.
But this doesn't mean that we should then dismiss enlightenment as an experience that we're all capable of, perhaps telling yourself that, well, there's nothing to attain, nothing to know. It's all just this. So why put in the effort? Why do Zazen? Why go to seshin? Years ago, I recall even someone saying, I don't believe in enlightenment.
In the Shoya Roku book of koans, case 45 is about four phrases of the the Sutra of perfect enlightenment. And here's the fourth phrase, where there is no understanding. Don't think that's truth. Where there is no understanding. Don't think that's truth. Don't sell yourself short. You may not believe in enlightenment, but it doesn't change the truth of our true nature, that we equally share and that we're equally capable of realizing. And yet, still, if you think that you've attained something through practice, maybe even declaring yourself to be enlightened, which is another thing I heard someone say in a rather smug tone, as if there's something to be known, Something to get, then there's more work to do. I
not knowing is most intimate not knowing, and that's another line from the Shoya Roku and
and when it comes to the charlatans and their conspiracy theories, there are a lot of them in circulation out there, And they're nothing new. We've seen them before. They cover all sorts of topics, political assassinations, UFOs, airplane accidents, pandemics, vaccinations mass shootings and more.
But actually, I. There's one conspiracy theory, one crazy idea that's the most delusive of all, and that's the idea that there's a self, that there's this me, This I, that needs to be protected and preserved and
