Reflection: Mental Illness means Wrong View

“The mind composed of ignorance or wrong view suffers from spiritual disease; it’s sees falsely. Seeing falsely causes it to think falsely, speak falsely, and act falsely. You will see immediately that everyone, without exception, has the spiritual disease.”

-Ajahn Buddhadasa

In the ancient source language of Buddhism and Hinduism, the word for mental illness means “wrong view”. We must be careful not to interpret this righteously, as in, if you see things differently than I, you are wrong. The wisdom here lies in the revelation that our wellness of mind hinges on how clear and true we remain to the pulse of life itself.

At heart, our mental health comes out of the sacred Relationship between our deepest self and the very source of life. The moment we distort, limit, or rationalize things away from what they truly are, we start to experience the “spiritual disease”. Passages of imbalance and blurry thinking are unavoidable. These distortions can only be minimized and repaired. We must accept that being human, we will distort the gift of life, so we must commit to learning how to refresh our relationship with what is sacred.

Quite often we uphold the “wrong view”, we build and maintain a “wrong way”. Sometimes we hurt so much inside that we assume that life is somewhere “over there”, not where we are in the moment. When we believe this, we put all her energy into getting “over there” and find we are blocked. The gatekeeper won’t let us in? Who is the gate keeper? What are the rules?

It can take so long to realize that no matter the pain, life is always where we are. Nothing is being withheld. All that misguided effort was built on the wrong view. The un-distorted life is softly waiting, we each must make a ritual not of seeing rightly, but completely.

#Namaste #thebookofawakening #meditationeveryday