Ignorance

Ignorance is the root of all misery

Human life is a story of the alternating patterns of duality, of happiness and suffering, joy and misery, ups and downs. There is not a single life without this admixture, without this pair of opposites. This is the law of life. Though the Atman is identical to the Brahman who is ever-radiant and blissful, the Jiva (individual) suffers because he is entrapped by the limiting adjuncts (upadhis) of body and mind. The infinite seems to be entrapped by the finite body and mind. Misery is not natural to the Jiva. It comes to experience a state of misery because of its association with a body.

•  So the cause of misery is a body

•  The body (birth) is due to karma (previous actions)

•  Karma arises from attachment and hate, by preference to certain objects and aversion to some.

•  Attachment and hate arise from Egocentricity (sense of 'I' and 'Mine')

•  Egocentricity comes from indiscrimination or lack of discernment.

•  Indiscrimination, from ignorance of your true nature, that you are one with the Brahman



The cessation of suffering

The root cause of all suffering and Karma is ignorance. The only way to go beyond this is to bring the light of knowledge. The first step in this direction is to change one's attitude, to retrace one's steps along the same path that we have come. In other words, the only solution is to go back to our cosmic roots, to become one with the Cosmic Consciousness. That is liberation; that is moksha, salvation, whatever you call it. This birth affords us a chance to exhaust our karmic debts, so that we may be free. Jyotisha is the light that reveals this great truth to us so that we may be free. A sincere study of Jyotisha can be a great spiritual education; a Sadhana in itself, for it partly reveals the eternal mysteries of the cosmos to us. It leads us to the unknown through the known. It guides us out through the intricate labyrinth that life is, with its myriad pairs of duality. It shows us the way and ultimately sets us free, by taking us back to our cosmic roots.

There is great joy in the knowledge of Jyotisha, provided one is truly grounded in Yoga Vedanta. Jyotisha is a pratyaksha sastra, a practical science, the eye of the Veda. A jyotishi has access to one of the best languages of Nature. Whether we perceive ourselves as helpless victims or witnesses or insignificant specks or rejoice in this grand play, depends on our world view. While the existentialist astrologer has this frustration of being a helpless observer, the jyotishi who is firmly grounded in Yoga Vedanta views it differently. ' Seeing' or 'experiencing' how jyotisha works, is like watching Prakriti (Nature) in Her grandeur. Everything feels like a play. It is inspiring to be part of this grand cosmic play, this play of Consciousness ('Chidvilasa')! Once you really experience astrology this way, life is no more a suffering. There is neither sin nor virtue in being part of this. Neither is knowledge burdensome. You rejoice in everything.

The True Void

Emptiness

Sunyata (Sanskrit) and Sunnata (Pali) translates as “emptiness” in English.   It is a basic concept in Buddhism and is stressed especially in some schools of Mahayana Buddhism, including Zen.

Emptiness teaches the lack of substantiality or independence of things, and stresses the idea of no independent origination, that the present state of all things is the result of a previous state.   Emptiness includes the teaching of impermanence; everything is always in a state of change.   In other words, everything, including every sentient being, is an ever-changing process.

The dharma of non-attachment relates to the concept of emptiness and impermanence, since if all things are impermanent and are always changing, what is there to be attached to?   Being free of attachments is the true state of emptiness.

The Buddha taught that this is like this, because that is like that . . . and that is like that, because this is like this; this is called dependent co-arising.”

“It is not the river that flows, the flow is the river; and there is no riverbed – the flow is therefore empty.”

“You can’t step into the same river twice.  Why?   Because you and the river are constantly changing.   The river does not stay the same and neither do you.”

“Where is the baby in your baby picture?”

His Holiness the Dalai Lama refers to sunyata as “the knowledge of the ultimate reality of all objects, material and phenomenal.”   Sunyata explains that everything is interrelated, interdependent and is without substance or soul.

Sunyata or emptiness does not mean that there is no existence of matter.   It does not mean that there is no existence of feelings, perceptions or ideas.   The five aggregates that comprise a sentient being, i.e. body, feelings, perceptions, mind formations or thought process, and consciousness, are impermanent, ever-changing and therefore empty.   Forms or material things are compounded, the result of something else, the effect of a cause, and are therefore impermanent and empty.

Each of us is made of stardust, and even the stars are the result of something else.  Can you imagine there being a beginning of anything and there being an ending?   Name something that was not the result of something else and the cause of something else.   How far back can we go in naming our ancestors?   The human brain has a difficult time coping with the idea that there either is a beginning and an end, or that there is not.

The reason for the Buddhist teaching of emptiness is to loosen all attachments to views, stories and assumptions, leaving the mind empty of all greed, anger, and delusion; therefore empty of suffering of stress, anxiety, frustration and unsatisfactoriness.


Buddhist sutras devote considerable space to the concept of reality, with each of two major doctrines — the Doctrine of Dependent Origination (pratitya-samutpada) and the Doctrine of Cause and Effect (karma and vipaka) — attempting to incorporate both the natural and the spiritual into its overall world view. While there is no prime force setting the universe in motion, no "First Cause", Buddhist teachings continue to explore the nature of the world and our place in it.

The Buddha promoted experience over theorizing. According to Karel Werner,

    Experience is ... the path most elaborated in early Buddhism. The doctrine on the other hand was kept low. The Buddha avoided doctrinal formulations concerning the final reality as much as possible in order to prevent his followers from resting content with minor achievements on the path in which the absence of the final experience could be substituted by conceptual understanding of the doctrine or by religious faith, a situation which sometimes occurs, in both varieties, in the context of Hindu systems of doctrine.[2]

The Mahayana developed those statements he did make into an extensive, diverse set of sometimes contrasting descriptions of reality "as it really is."[3]

The Theravada school teaches that there is no universal personal god. The world as we know it does not have its origin in a primordial being such as Brahman or the Abrahamic God. What we see is only a product of transitory factors of existence, which depend functionally upon each other. The Buddha is said to have said: "The world exists because of causal actions, all things are produced by causal actions and all beings are governed and bound by causal actions. They are fixed like the rolling wheel of a cart, fixed by the pin of its axle shaft." (Sutta-Nipata 654)[4]

The word 'illusion' is frequently associated with Buddhism and the nature of reality. Some interpretations of Buddhism teach that reality is a coin with two sides: impermanence or anicca and the "not-self characteristic" or anatta, referred to as "emptiness" in some Mahayana schools. Dzogchen, as the non-dual culmination of the Ancient School (a school with a few million followers out of a few hundred million Buddhists) of Mantrayana, resolves atman and anatman into the Mindstream Doctrine of Tapihritsa. The Buddha Shakyamuni is said to have taught the variously understood and interpreted concept of "not-self" in the Anatta-lakkhana Sutta. In this sutta, he lists the characteristics that we often associate with who we are, and found that these characteristics, ultimately, are not who we are because they are subject to change. He further illustrates the changing nature of our feelings, perceptions, and consciousness.

We can look at the concepts of impermanence and not-self in objective terms, for example by deconstructing the concept of an aggregated object such as a lotus and seeing that the flower is made up entirely of non-flower elements like soil, nutrients, photosynthetic energy, rain water and the effort of the entities that nourished and grew the flower. All of these factors, according to the Diamond Sutra, co-exist with each other to manifest what we call a 'flower'. In other words, there is no essence arisen from nothingness that is unique and personal to any being. In particular, there is neither a human soul that lives on beyond the death of the physical body nor one that is extinguished at death since, strictly speaking, there is nothing to extinguish. The relative reality (i.e., the illusory perceived reality) comes from our belief that we are separate from the rest of the things in the universe and, at times, at odds with the processes of nature and other beings. The ultimate or absolute reality, in some schools of Buddhist thought, shows that we are inter-connected with all things. The concept of non-discrimination expands on this by saying that, while a chair is different from a flower, they 'inter-are' because they are each made of non-flower and non-chair elements. Ultimately those elements are the same, so the distinction between chair and flower is one of quantity not of quality.

The Diamond Sutra, a Mahayana scripture, has many passages that use the formula: A is not A, therefore A is called A.