Life can be very clear if you understand the wisdom that life comes from cause and effect. Everything which happens surely has a cause. A wise person observes that reality, and understands the whole system of life; how life works.

The key point is to use your observing power to observe your life and all other life. Most people live without observation. You pass through life according to your emotional feelings, your desire feelings, and your thinking.

• Emotional feelings are what Westerners call emotions, e.g. anger, sorrow, happiness.
• Desire feelings are your wants, e.g. feeling hungry, coveting a shiny, red sports car.
• Thinking refers to certain ideas that are easy to get lost in, such as “Life has to be this way” and “I have to behave that way.” This process involves a lot of calculation that will eventually turn into worry.

Normally you live blindly in these three feelings.

When you live blindly, you don’t understand life. When you are in life but don’t understand life, of course you are going to have a lot of problems and suffering. This is your blindness. It comes from Original Blindness, which is the origin of life.

The First Aspect of Original Blindness

You live, you exist, but why do you exist? You don’t know why you exist and you don’t know the goal of life. This is called the Meaning of Life Blindness.

The Second Aspect of Original Blindness

You live and connect to the entire universe, directly or indirectly. If the sun exploded, the Earth would be destroyed, and so would you. If a nearby star exploded, that would also affect you.

It’s like water on Earth: rivers, waterfalls, rain, the ocean, and clouds are all connected. Likewise, stars, planets, and people are all connected; everything is influencing everything else, even if it’s only in a small way. The whole universe is the power of changing influencing other powers of changing and you don’t understand how it works, even though you are connected to all of it.

Your body is the first phenomenon you connect to. It is an “appearing form” built from the four elements (earth, water, fire, and wind), but you don’t take the time to understand your body because society doesn’t think it’s very important. This is a major cause of your suffering. Human society has high-level material development, but low-level awareness of life.

The whole universe is just an appearing form that is constantly changing. That changing power has a system, which Buddhism calls dharma. Dharma is the true, wise way to describe the way this system works. If you go against it, you will create suffering; if you understand it, then life is easy.

If you swim down a river you move quickly and easily. If you don’t know how to swim, then you drown or hit a rock. If you try to swim upstream, you will wear yourself out and still be washed downstream. If you understand how the system works, and are able to follow it, control it and enjoy it, then life becomes pleasurable and joyful. If you don’t understand how the system works and get controlled by it or go against it, then suffering appears right away.

The Third Aspect of Original Blindness

You have awareness ability. This is the ability to develop your awareness to understand Original Blindness.

To develop your awareness ability correctly, you must understand the first Original Blindness by learning the goal of life. Then you can develop the second aspect: how the system of life works. Unfortunately, you don’t automatically know how to do these things. That is the third blindness: you don’t understand your potential ability.

You are living blindly in your desire, emotion, and thinking, but behind these three blindness powers there is unmeasurable potential ability. By observing that potential and waking it up, you become sensitive, calm, and intuitively aware from every angle that you can harmoniously match every situation.

This ability is in every life, but few know how to wake it up or how to use it. This is the Blindness of Your Awareness Ability.

Original Blindness

Taken together, these three aspects are called Original Blindness.

Your existence in this life is based on this three-part blindness, which is why you experience suffering. If you can awaken – i.e. become enlightened, or out of blindness – then life suddenly becomes bright and you experience no more suffering.

Before you reach that stage, your blindness will harm you, torture you, and make you feel insecurity, worry, stress, fear, and pain. Buddhism teaches you the way to awaken your consciousness. When your awareness ability is awakened, you can use it to understand the goal of life and the system of life, and then use the system to reach the goal. Finally, you are on the right track for life to become perfect.

For a wise consciousness with an awakened ability, life is always perfect. For everyone else, the ability to understand what life is has not yet been developed enough: life is imperfect, life is scary, and life is stressful. But it’s not really about life; it’s about us, opening our heart, opening our mind and trying to understand life.

Buddha asked one of his students, “Do you see the sun shining brightly in the sky?”

The student replied, “Yes.”

“There are blind people who don’t see the sun, never look for it. Is it the sun’s fault that they see only darkness?”

“No, the darkness they see is nothing to do with the sun.”

Just as the sun doesn’t create darkness, the system of life doesn’t create suffering. It is the blind person who creates the darkness because there is something wrong with their body or awareness ability. Likewise, if you don’t have the wisdom to be aware of life, it is you who creates your blindness and suffering.

This post is taken from a talk by Forever Wisdom Forest on 4 March 2011 at the Sydney dojo.