PPP, Part 24, Avijjā Revisited

Greetings, Friendlies. :)

Just before the PPP, I wrote about Avijjā (mis-understanding) as the polestar of practice and offered an interpretation of the term.

Though the general shape is the same I’d like to offer today’s, maybe more nuanced(?), understanding:

First: the concept of Avijjā is empty. How we understand it at any point depends on the context. As Rob Burbea would say, it depends on our way of looking.

As such, we might think about Avijjā at different levels of zoom.

Zooming all the way in there is moment-to-moment gross Avijjā. Believing that reacting to some particular stimulus in a self-privileging way is for the good. Fulfilling this particular desire. Scratching this particular itch. Lashing out at this particular offense. This is the zoom level of moment to moment behavioral Saṅkhāra stuff. Gross reactivity.

Zooming all the way out, I understand Avijjā to mean that we humans do not understand what kinds of beings we are. In a Heideggarian Human-Beingness-In-The-World (In-der-Welt-sein) kind of way. We don’t understand what Being is and we don’t understand what kind of beings we are within that. This is what I wrote in July and I stand by it.

However.

I don’t think it’s always, or even generally, useful talking about Avijjā at this level of zoom. I think it’s better to scootch in just a hair and say that Avijjā is our not understanding how our minds work.

“Mind” is more familiar in both dhammic and cog-sciencey discourse. And DhP 1:1 is a handy starting point. Would I prefer to have bus-stop conversations about In-der-Welt-sein? Absolutely. But pragmatism demands.

Your thoughts?