Ignorance…
Greeting dear friends & fellow navigators, & welcome to my world this week. There is a famous story often used by ancient mystics as a teaching tool for their disciples. 1 You may have read it, the story tells of a villager returning home at dusk when he suddenly sees a snake on the road in front of him, blocking his path. He immediately panics & staggers back.
Fearing the snake might be deadly, he begins to worry & try thinking of a way to get past it. “What do I do?” he asks himself. “Should I try to kill the snake? Should I try to scare it away? Could I try & run past it?” He stands there, scared, thinking about his problem & unable to move forward.
What he fails to realize however, is the dangerous snake he is so afraid of is just a lifeless rope lying on the road, left there by a passing traveller.
The point of the story is to illustrate how our own ignorance creates our suffering, & something called: The Dark Veil of Ignorance. How often do we jump straight into trying to fix a perceived problem without ever questioning the assumptions to underlie it?
What if I am wrong about this? What if I am misperceiving the situation? What if I am missing a key piece of information? What if I am not seeing the bigger picture?
Perhaps this is why Albert Einstein had famously said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
No matter how much time the villager spends trying to think up a solution to his apparent problem, he will fail to solve it because the problem does not exist in the manner, he thinks it does. The snake he is so afraid of is not real & his problem is illusory, as are many of our own problems. We project our own fears & insecurities onto a wholly neutral reality & perceive our life to be mired in problems not existing.
We then proceed to imagine solutions to these imagined problems. Before we know it, we get so immersed in a dark cloud of negative thoughts we fail to see the reality underneath. It is tempting to believe our compulsive thinking about a problem, grants us a better understanding of it & helps us to resolve it. But what good is an understanding based on a flawed premise to begin with?
Trying to come up with an imaginary solution for an illusory problem will only perpetuate the illusion of the problem. Or, as author spiritual teacher, Hale Dwoskin, put it, “The only reason we want to understand our problems is because we are planning to have them again.”
The village chap & his story is finally resolved when he musters up enough courage to get closer to the ‘snake’ & shine the light of his lamp at it. It is at this moment he discovers it to be a rope. He is relieved to realize he had nothing to be afraid of all along.
The rope is a symbol for reality in its natural state, completely non-threatening, while the snake symbolizes our inner fear, projected onto reality, imbuing it with meaning. As soon as the light of awareness is shone into the darkness, it vanishes all at once, just as the snake ceased to be a snake the moment the villager saw it to be a rope. Reality has not changed, only his understanding of it did.
Is it any wonder meditation & mindfulness are staple practices taught today. They aim at quieting the very mechanism creating most of our problems in life, the thinking mind misperceives reality.
It is therefore important to leave space in our mind for self-inquiry, to question our own thinking, just in case it turns out we are trying to solve a problem which does not exist. What if the problem keeping you up at night is not what it appears to be? What if the metaphorical snake blocking your path is just an inanimate rope?
Just few observations again dear friends & provide an opinion in my world. Thank you for stopping by, I appreciate your being here. If my journey encourages you also, all is well with my soul. Looking forward to next week; this is Kenn Butler in Paradise, Nelson with best wishes.
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