The Link #26 - What is the core of human confusion?

What do we mean by ‘confusion’? What does it mean to say ‘I am confused’ or ‘I am in confusion’? However we put it, aren’t we using analogy, like ‘I am all at sea’ or ‘I am lost in a fog’? We tend to think that prosaic uses of language are more precise than poetic ones, but aren’t they, too, only approximations? Confusion may be a fact, but the word ‘confusion’ is merely a symbol, signifying what?

Have you ever looked at an early morning landscape shrouded in fog? The shapes of the trees are indistinct, the familiar landmarks obscured, the people and animals hidden. Yet there is a great beauty in such scenes, a dignity and simplicity, even though mist has descended. Looking out over gardens and houses, we feel that everything is shrunk in. But instead of restricting vision, the fog has expanded it, for it implies a wider and deeper field than the one usually seen; it suggests eternity.

In this way, I feel, confusion is a kind of blessing; it is not to be feared. On the contrary, without deep awareness of our essential confusion, human beings are terrible creatures, because then there is no doubt, no sensitivity, no care. When we realise that we are confused, we have to look, we have to listen, we have to think carefully, and we have to go slowly. When we are confused, we have to learn.

Now, whenever something is felt as real within the self – confusion, fear, loneliness, sadness – what is that? What is confusion without an idea of clarity? What is sadness without an idea of happiness? And other than ideas such as these, is there a self at all? There’s the physical body which is limited, temporary – but psychologically, what constitutes oneself apart from ideas? There is the self that is going to improve or dissipate; the self that is going to achieve success or find failure; the self that is going to become famous or be forgotten. Isn’t that all we are, a few ideas? And this idea, the idea that one is no more than one’s image about oneself, is terrifying. Probably it represents the core of all human confusion, because it cannot be properly comprehended.

let’s be terrified by the thought that there is nothing real within the self

An idea has no reality, no enduring substance. Why don’t we see this? Why don’t we see that where there are ideas, reality is not, truth is not, love is not? Our minds are filled with ideas of what love is, what death is, what life is, what fear is, what truth is, what confusion is. And our relationships – that unknown, that uniquely human problem – are founded on ideas. Why do we live like this? Why do we live a whole lifetime protecting nothing more than an idea? It’s a terrifying thought – in which case, I say, let’s be terrified by it. Let’s be terrified by the thought that there is nothing real within the self, that there are only ideas there. For that terror may be the way out of our confusion. That terror may be the end of ideation and, perhaps, the birth of a still and silent mind. When in the depths of winter at its coldest there is the blessing of a fall of snow, there is a silence that transforms the entire landscape.

In such silence, confusion is dispersed and there is a kind of grace, a certainty and clarity. This may sound a little odd, a little poetic, but it is so. When you see that your whole life is nothing more than an idea, then something tremendous happens that brings an end to all division and inequality.