Two things that happened today, gave rise to some response to this question.
1. Some of my hens have scaly mite - a typical problem for poultry which irritates their legs. I have dealt with this for years, and I use the standard remedy that I researched on the Web back in the 90s: kerosene and sump oil, on their legs and on the roosts. But I thought perhaps I'd re-look it up on Google to see if there is any new treatment. (I have passed the sump oil days, but I still have some new thick engine oil around.)
On Google, I have it set up to display 50 responses to my query on the first page. I checked the first half dozen, and they all were for poultry owners who have become part of the new-age paradigm of super-sensitive to healthy living approach, which recommended using olive oil. Now this is most worthy, but unfortunately my budget does not extend to buying 20ltr cans of olive oil just to dunk my chook's legs in. So I kept looking for the pages I had seen many years ago on the standard farmer's remedy of kerosene and sump oil.
I could not find it in the whole list of 50 returned items to my search (save for a few comments at the bottom of pages alluding to the 'old' ways). This got me wondering. I ask a question of Google, and naively expect to get the answer. But Google is not interested in giving me the right answer to my question. It wants to give me the answer that most people on the internet are looking at. Truth has replaced accuracy with reflection. We have become encased in a web of reflection, back upon us, of what the majority of other people are focused on. Our vision is refracted, again and again, by all kinds of hidden agendas, until we have lost any sense of direction and purpose.
We now inhabit a world of mirrors.
2. An article in the newspaper about the effects of Climate Change on the wine industry. Quite an interesting article of how that industry is struggling to cope. But one comment took my eye. One solution, especially pursued in the USA, is to produce different varieties of grapes, and thus wine, which can adapt to the changing climate conditions of any wine producing area. Unfortunately, they can't get the customer to shift away from the standard varieties. One reason, is that the number of varieties of grape wines has become a problem in itself. Buyers are experiencing 'choice fatigue'.
We are faced with a level of choice that sabotages our ability to act.
I may have mentioned something similar in this long thread, from an experience in my youth, when very stoned at a party once, I became aware of my consciousness standing at a multiple crossroads of infinite choices. The more I looked, the more possibilities presented before me - a point of pre-decision facing a complete surrounding of doorways, any of which I could enter, and my life would forever change accordingly.
I experienced that as ultimately debilitating. It sucked all the energy out of me. I realised, that the only way to live was to deny the ultimate potential available, to select just one option and move! Don't stand still at the centre of a star, gazing at the infinite: ACT, and find the infinite through action. What we choose to do is not the issue - it is how we do it that changes our future.
Each of these examples demonstrates that the dimension of the Second Attention is not the path to freedom. It is the path into the bush, not the path through the bush.
The world has become more and more ensnared in the belief that we can simply choose any reality - they are all as equal, and none more real than another. This has caused a mental illness in society, where our collective agreements and understanding, which we take for reality, are becoming increasingly involuted - we are spinning deeper within our own reflections, and further from objective reality and truth.
The task for those who still yearn for something definably real, to use as a reference point for life, has become extremely difficult: we don't trust anyone, or anything, any more. This leads to depression and walking the edge of suicide, because death at least is real - isn't it?
This is what the ancient thinkers of India called Maya.
There is a way through the maze. It doesn't spring from words and ideas, but from the spirit of one who has found the spring. One who has struggled upstream in the maze of reflections, and finally located the spring of life. If you have found that spring, then Maya is at your disposal. If you haven't found that spring, you are at the disposal of Maya, and no matter how clever and insightful your 'seeing', it is ultimately false, for although you see a fragment of reality, you don't see the path through the bush.
