Old New

"So even for the most 'modern' people, including the intelligentsia who theoretically should know better, any sustained focus on the conditioned, conventional nature of their own perceptions remains taboo. They proceed through life guiding their actions by whatever standards their community has taught them to accept as their own. In a pluralistic society, without a single, unanimously accepted set of values, they can flatter themselves all the more that they have freely chosen what they believe on the basis of their experience of reality. No one cares to notice how circumscribed is the range of options upon which this 'free choice' operates. People are sure that they have 'made up their own minds' (about what to believe and how to act) on the basis of the facts.
But from the Buddhist point of view, it is precisely the sense of certainty, this insistence that one's own conventional notions of reality are reality (and the parallel fiction that they are one's own), is the linchpin of delusion. This may be why, when they are exposed to Buddhist ideas on this subject, the defenders of conventional thinking in all cultures, from classical India to medieval China to the modern West, have found Buddhism so irritating, and so threatening."

-- J.C. Cleary
A Tune Beyond the Clouds


love always,
Samuel