Why True Stoppings of Unawareness Are Possible

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Review

We’ve been talking about the various mental factors, and we’ve seen that there are ten that function all the time and help mental activity to function. We don’t want to get rid of them. In fact, we can’t get rid of them without destroying mental activity itself. However, there are other mental factors that we do want to try to get rid of, and we want to get rid of them forever so that they never recur. Some of them, like unawareness, occur all the time, and some, like anger, occur only sometimes.

The one that occurs all the time, then, is unawareness. Here we’re talking specifically about the unawareness of how everything exists: persons – ourselves, others – and all phenomena. Either we simply don’t know, or we know in an inverted or opposite way from the way things actually do exist. Correct discriminating awareness of voidness will replace this incorrect understanding, and in this sense, is an opponent to this unawareness, or ignorance. Nevertheless, there has to be more force behind that mental activity in order for that discriminating awareness of voidness to act as an obliterating opponent to achieve a true stopping of this unawareness. Otherwise, a professor – not Buddhist or anything – could get a correct, merely intellectual understanding of voidness and would become enlightened from it, but that’s not the case.

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