The venue hotel was located on the pastoral outskirt of London and looked really "Wuthering Heights" like. I was quite excited as I have been an enthusiastic reader of Emily Bronte.
Can you spot a ghost of Catherine?
15 people joined from all over the world and had workshop for 4 days.What I was impressed with was that they didn't use any powerpoint presentation, any desks and any agenda. Just sat in the circle in the room and discussed what we wanted to discuss as it went. And it turned out to be really a life-turning experience. Actually I saw more than a few people were crying in the middle of the session.
I have learned a lot of things through this program and wish to share these insights with you, but today I want to pick up just one issue.
This is called "Willful Blindness"
We often think that "Ignorance" should be a cause of errors, mistakes, failures, unhappiness...whatever we think as BAD.
But, when we look back into human history or the world at large or maybe our personal lives. Ignorance is rarely a route cause of these things. And instead, we find "Willful blindness" is it.
Willful blindness can be defined as intentional blind, which means to intentionally ignore signs which tell you something important...or maybe more than important ...fatal.
To discuss this issue, we watched TED video and this video really reminded me of one ZEN sentence. This is my favorite one.
遍界嘗て隠さず。
Henkai Katsute Kakusazu.
This means "Truth shows up here, there and everywhere in front of you".
ZEN monk is working of course to capture the truth through hard training. And it sometimes seems the truth is running away from a seeker or the world itself hides the truth from a seeker. But, If one thinks like this way, then it means the matter turns out to be attributed to the world or the truth, not to the seeker himself.
Naturally, it doesn't work.
This sentence tells us that if you don't see the truth, then the matter is always you. Because the truth always shows up in front of you. It means you have "Willful Blindness". And our effort to seek the truth is simply means to take off our shutter of our "Mind" eyes.
Like this, all those issues we have discussed made strange connections with those things i had learned through my life. I will post another one someday.
Bye.