Living Life As It Is: Chapter 1
Suffering & Ignorance
Suffering & Ignorance
All the wars, all the hatred, all the ignorance in the world come
out of being so invested in our opinions. ~ Pema Chodron
Are You Calling Me Ignorant?
In the introduction, I wrote about how people reacted to the changing circumstances of world and U.S. events in the last 10+ years. The Covid-19 pandemic seemed to be the pinnacle of the dizzying pace of uncertainty and became the focus of everyone’s fear, anger, and confusion. Everyone saw it very differently.
Some vigilantly watched every new report, with the hope that some little bit of news would make them feel better or, at least, make them feel more prepared and/or safer (that’s me). Others rejected the new reality and angrily tried to control things so everything would be the way it used to be, if only “those others” hadn’t done this or said that: Legislators, “other” religions or no religions, the medical and pharmaceutical establishment, the global cabal, and on and on. After all, if there is a murderous and threatening enemy as small as a virus, there must be something/someone bigger that created it and unleashed it on us.
And still others couldn’t or wouldn’t look at it at all, grasping at a life that was or that could be, but that isn’t life now. They held on to a world that is good and where everyone is happy and healthy. Imaginary? Maybe. Or maybe one that exists behind or beyond our linear, conceptually driven mind. Imaginary or real, unfortunately many were influenced to believe that if you act as if you are safe, you will be fine. No masks or vaccines needed.
All these reactions are a good example of the ignorance we talk about in Buddhism. Each of us is ignorant. Just different flavors of ignorance. Different ways of not seeing things AS they are. In his book, The Wise Heart: A Guide to the Universal Teachings of Buddhist Psychology, Jack Kornfield classifies the different flavors through three main personality types or the “three root temperaments” that correspond to the three poisons taught in Buddhism. They are grasping, aversion, and delusion. And, as Kornfield points out, we all have bits of each, but in each of us, one tends to be more prominent than the other.
I’m not sure if the ways I described how different people reacted to the pandemic match directly to Kornfield’s concept, but they do indicate the different karmic predispositions at the root of why people think and behave so differently in reacting to the same situation. As a point of clarification, when I use the word karmic, you can think of it as describing the mix of nature, nurture, and a wide range of causes and conditions that result in the way we think, believe, and behave at any given moment. It does not necessarily mean a predisposition carried over from a previous life.