Seeing Clearly
The Buddha’s hacks for 4 troublesome human misperceptions
With thanks to An Idea (by Ingenious Piece) who first published this story.
A common mistake is to think that developing mindfulness is about becoming more relaxed. Besides the fact that relaxation comes with concentration rather than mindfulness (a topic for another time) is the fact that genuine mindful awareness helps us be less delusional.
The Buddha taught that there are four “hallucinations of perception;” that is, four misperceptions that are baked into our human conditioning. He didn’t say this to criticize, the way we might hurl the word “delusional” at someone we disagree with. He pointed out these hallucinations to help us see through them, the way you can see more clearly if you are aware of the smudge on your eyeglasses. He sought to highlight with compassion that we have a difficult task in navigating reality with a faulty navigation system, and to motivate us to correct it.
Through no fault of its own, the untrained mind/body/heart system perceives in ways that are out of sync with reality, which adds layers of unnecessary suffering where there is already unavoidable stress or pain. This is true even when, and sometimes especially when, we know better intellectually. Because where we really live is not in what we know intellectually: It is in how we perceive experience…
