Today’s reading is about a wish, a fog, and a shadow.
The Wish
The wish isn’t fully conscious in most humans, although it drives their behavior and decision-making processes. It is the wish to be something, commonly felt as the wish to be somebody. It is the wish for distinctness. It is the wish for identity. It is the wish for separation.
This wish is core to the human psyche. From the time that a child is a toddler, it begins seeking identity. At first, the child looks to its parents or caregivers for its identity. Whatever they tell the child it is, it believes. Later, the search for identity broadens. Identity comes from a wide range of “sources” including other people, media influences and most especially, one’s own developing mental chatter.
The Fog and the Shadow
Driven by the wish to be something, we each develop a view of the world and a sense of self. The fog is one’s view of the world. The shadow is one’s sense of self. They are completely illusory, decided upon solely by the individual mind. It is as Nisargadatta said:
The world you can perceive is a very small world indeed. And it is entirely private.
Since our world and individual sense of self is completely private and not shared with anyone else, they can’t be truth. They are individual made-up illusions.
As we learned on Day 85, we are free to maintain a false sense of self and a false sense of the world. We are not guilty for doing so. However, “the fog and the shadow” block truth as long as we cling to them. Even more, we typically suffer because of the fog and shadow we’ve made.
The Antidote
Since the wish to be something is the reason we made up an individual view of the world and self, a different wish (or different desire) is the antidote. That different wish is one’s spiritual aspiration.
