Page 15 - Suffering

Though we may have happiness, glory, fame and status,
there is an innate feeling among us that one day we may
loose them and see the fear of suffering arising.
Here we see an element of attachment to conditional
feelings and wanting to have that lasting status quo –
putting terms, restrictions or rules into our mental belief
system.

On the most fundamental level, ignorance is not a lack of
information nor mere absence of knowledge but a “more
deep seated misconception of reality”, also called ‘positive
misconception’. It is sometimes termed as “unwisdom”. The
term includes not only ignorance out of darkness, but also
obscurity, misconceptions, mistaking illusion to be reality
or impermanent to be permanent or suffering to be bliss or
non-self to be self – incorrect knowledge included.

Bhikkhu Bodhi states that Avijja* is an important part of
the teachings on dependent arising about conditions that

sustain the wheel of birth and death.**
One such condition is the karmic formations that arise from
ignorance. In other words, ignorance obscures “perception
of the true nature of things just as a cataract obscures
perception of visible objects”, it is the non-knowledge of
one’s ‘past pre-natal lives’ and ‘post-mortem future lives’ and
of dependent arising.

To develop this freedom of release from suffering one must
practice the habits of ethical conduct through thought,
physical actions, speech and meditation to enable one to
move forward along the path of the eight habits.

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