We will continue with our series on understanding our mind. We talked about virtuous minds over the last two sessions. Today, let’s get into delusions. There are six root delusions from which all of our delusions arise. They are desirous attachment, anger, deluded pride, ignorance, deluded doubt, and deluded view. Let’s look at all of them.
Desirous attachment is a mental factor that observes a contaminated object, considers as a cause of happiness, and desires it. It is not the same as desire. It is good to have desire. For example, a desire to attain liberation, or develop compassion. A desirous attachment on other side, remembers an object, finds it attractive, exaggerates it’s good qualities, and desires it. There is a difference between desirous attachment and love. Love is unconditional, it has not strings attached. It is a completely virtuous state of mind. Desirous attachment could be for past objects, present objects, and future objects. Say you remember a fond memory with a friend. Out of desirous attachment, we long to meet with them. This often comes out from nostalgia. Example of present object are, out of attachment, wishing for the pleasures we enjoy to last forever. Example of future object are, out of attachment, wishing to meet an attractive partner, or acquire wealth.
To remove desirous attachment, we need to meditate on renunciation and emptiness. These are long term solutions. Until we achieve that, way to remove desirous attachment is to contemplate faults of an object and applying appropriate opponent powers. Why is it important to remove desirous attachment? Because desirous attachment keeps us in samsara. Because of desirous attachment, we keep creating karma that in turn keeps us in samsara.
The next delusion is anger. Anger is a mental factor that observes a contaminated object, considers it undesirable, exaggerates its bad qualities, and wishes to harm it. Anger is divided into nine parts, anger directed towards someone that harmed us in the past, someone who is harming us now, someone who may harm us in the future, someone who harmed our friends in the past, someone who is harming our friends right now, someone who may harm our friends in the future, someone who helped our enemy in the past, someone who is helping our enemy now, and someone who may help our enemy in the future. We can permanently eradicate anger by realization of emptiness. Temporarily, we can abandon anger by meditating on peace and love.
The next delusion is deluded pride. It is a mental factor that exaggerates our own good qualities and develops arrogance. It is an inflated view of ourselves that arrives as a result of our own qualities such as our knowledge, our wealth, our beauty, our strength, our education, and so forth. Simply being aware of our qualities that may be better than others is not deluded pride. It may be just recognition of truth. Deluded pride arises when our mind is “puffed up” with an exaggeration of our own importance. The way to remove deluded pride is to recognize its faults. Two faults with deluded pride are it causes us to disrespect others and it prevents us from making progress. They say an evil person can be tamed by Dharma but a proud person cannot.
The next delusion is ignorance. It is a mental factor that is confused about the nature of an object and functions to induce wrong awareness or doubt. For example, if we mistake toy snake for a real snake, we have ignorance of the nature of the toy snake. The fundamental ignorance is the ignorance of the nature of the phenomena. It is the root of all samsara problems. We can also have ignorance of karma, and ignorance of emptiness. Antidote to ignorance is wisdom. We can develop wisdom by listening to Dharma, contemplating on them, and meditating on them.
The next delusion is deluded doubt. It is a two pointedness in mind that interferes with attainment of liberation and enlightenment. Essentially, it is a mind of uncertainty that cannot decide between two alternatives. It is uncertainty about Dharma topics that causes our faith to decline and disturbs our peace of mind. If we have doubt about Dharma topics, rather than have them linger in our mind, we should work to resolve those by reading books, asking questions to qualified teachers, and discussing with fellow students.
The last delusion is deluded view. It is view that functions to obstruct attainment of liberation. There are two types of views. Correct view, and incorrect view. Deluded views by definition are incorrect views.
Hope all this makes sense and you try to eliminate delusions from your lives.