This non-technical presentation explains:
The ordinary person lives his life in vain. He has no abiding sense of values, purpose, or direction to guide him in his progress through life. In truth, his mental vision is short in range, and unclear. But he does not realise this, as he has never had any personal experience of clear and far-sighted mental vision to compare against. This is because he has neglected developing the full potency of his mind.
Unable to see with long-term perspective, the ordinary person cannot distinguish between the truly beneficial and the ultimately worthless. He seeks satisfaction from what is only ephemeral, and is sorely hurt by what is only transient. He magnifies the importance of his little personal encounters, and from day to day, he is engrossed in involvements and agitations that are petty and insignificant, as he will eventually acknowledge in hindsight across the years.
Nevertheless, he insists to himself that his involvements are what life is all about. Constantly absorbed only with pursuing short-term survival and pleasure, he cannot rise above his situation to review how meaningless it is, and how it is steeped in unsatisfactoriness.
He drifts through life without any driving sense of urgency or of direction in life. Through the years, what little he does to improve himself is trivial or irrelevant, if seen in perspective against his true potential. Unfortunately, he lacks this perspective, and so he remains self-satisfied, content to drift without controlling his destiny, picking up and discarding worldly bits and pieces here and there, sceptical that there could be anything more to life than this. As far as he can see, this is what his personal reality consists of.
Ordinary reality is a very convincing perceptual phenomenon — an illusion so convincing that the ordinary mind cannot believe it is an illusion, and sees no point in testing it, or in probing deeper into how the perception comes about. This trusting acceptance of what is just a perception dulls the mind and discourages it from examining its own habits which keep it bound to merely mundane presumptions and expectations. It inhibits the mind from entering into a loftier level of self-review, wonder, exploration, and development. It hinders the mind from rising to attain a more revelatory perspective and eventual freedom. And that is why it is a self-perpetuating trap, a trap that confines the engrossed and involved ordinary mind within the lower levels of the ordinary.
This trap is so successful that the entrapped mind not only does not realise it is bound and tethered, but unsuspectingly and greedily continues to delight in the bait that keeps it addicted and confined. That bait is made up of everyday opportunities for unthinking personal engrossment and self-indulgence. The ordinary mind is in a pathetic state, self-satisfied and smug as it is, when reviewed against the context of its liberated potential in True Reality.
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