This month we listened to Master Mark Griffin’s thunderbolt teaching on “Silencing the Mind.” Once again, in 25 minutes, the Guru conveyed a universe of profound wisdom. Every time I listen to one of Mark’s teachings, I discover a new layer of meaning and connection to the whole. The study just gets deeper and deeper.
Mark talked about nescience, which the dictionary defines as “absence of knowledge or awareness; ignorance.” Mark went on to explain: “The distillation of perceptual phenomenon and the stringing together of inferential logic-based assessment of experience, leading into the connection between words and objects and the direct introduction of flawed logic, nescience — taking the inferential input of A and B and arriving at C, but the possibility that C is a false assessment. It is nescient — having been intensely colored by the chain of experiences that led up to it, often klesha-born* and obscuring in nature.”
I listened to this talk a couple of times and absorbed more of the subtlety of the teaching. One of the things that I am beginning to understand is that in each of the various stages of cognition, all operating simultaneously in the human form at different levels of being: the physical, the energetic, and the mental, there are different subroutines playing out in completely different operating systems and at completely different speeds. Mark goes on to describe the processing of information from each of these systems into the subtlety of meaning and language — “the whirling dynamics of inferential thought driven by language, whether it be nescient or true, all mixed together with the constant accumulation of sensory fields and the dynamics of sensation and attachment and grasping that mixes in with all of these applications.” What really struck me about this statement is Mark’s reference to that which is both nescient and true being mixed together.
One then begins to get a deeper appreciation of the importance of stilling the mind, because, as Mark states, it allows us “the ability to cull the nescient aspects of perception from one’s worldview and to experience the phenomenon of arising directly.”
Om Guru.
*meaning a “poison” or “affliction;”
Patañjali’s Yogasūtra explicitly identifies Five Poisons (Sanskrit: pañcakleśā):
- अविद्यास्मितारागद्वेषाभिनिवेशाः पञ्च क्लेशाः॥३॥
- Avidyāsmitārāgadveṣābhiniveśāḥ pañca kleśāḥ[1]
Translated into English, these five (pañca) Kleśa-s or Afflictions (kleśāḥ) are:
- Ignorance (in the form of a misapprehension about reality) (ávidyā),
- egoism (in the form of an erroneous identification of the Self with the intellect) (asmitā),
- attachment (rāga),
- aversion (dveṣa), and
- fear of death (which is derived from clinging ignorantly to life) (abhiniveśāḥ).
English