The path of truth is uncertain, and we are unwilling to embrace it. We choose certainty, however temporary and illusory that may be. We would like to listen to a friend who keeps repeating that we will never die, rather than the doctor who says that not much time is available to us. These illusions become far more difficult to realise if they have the support of the masses. The one on the path of truth is generally alone because hardly anyone else shares that perspective. That's why it's a dangerous path, because in the name of truth, the mind often creates an illusion and stays in that self-illusory world. Whether we live in an illusion created by society or in a self-illusory world, both are essentially the drive of an insecure mind to be certain and to control the future. That's why, unless we embrace insecurity, we can never be aware of the truth. We can't get a sense of the ground reality from our AC rooms. For that purpose, we have to come out and meet people, be in nature, see life's vulnerabilities face-to-face, see our own reactions, and be our own critic. Unless we learn to see ourselves from a little distance, we will never be able to examine our own belief systems. There is no confusion in the mind of a virus, a bacterium, or an animal. Only humans get confused because they have the mental faculty to examine! Not to be sure and certain!
We wish to be certain about things. Certain about the future. Basically, we want to be happy and remain happy forever. With our limited understanding of the world, we make sense of happiness, set targets, and by the time we achieve them, the meaning of happiness has changed significantly. I recall that I once developed a hobby of collecting empty match boxes of different designs and set a target of collecting 100 different types. Wherever I went, my goal was to get that different type of matchbox. In fact, I remember purchasing a few matchboxes just to get that different type. I don't know what pleasure I derived from that. Today. I don't even remember where those match boxes have gone.
I am 100% sure that all of us have had our own such targets and objects of pleasure. We are also witnesses to the fact that most of these things no longer make us happy. Yet we feel that what we crave for today will make us happy. As if we have become blind to our own history. We were very sure that collecting matchboxes would make us very happy. We are very sure that the collection of letters of appreciation will make us happy today. If not the letters of appreciation, the good words spoken by the people about us will make us happy.
The problem is that we know too little about nature in general, and ourselves in particular. Yet, we just want to be sure, rather than enquiring. If you don't know God, believe in some image thereof. That's easy. If you don't believe in the meaning of life, just believe in some meaning, because searching for the meaning of life is quite difficult. How many of us challenge the meaning of life imprinted in our minds by society? That's utterly painful. Even a very ordinary enquiry would reveal that if we had been born into a family of a different religion, our thought process would have been entirely different, yet we would believe it to be superior. What a foolish thought process, yet most of us have the same one.
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