Walls are dividers. Physical walls offer us protection from that which exists on the other side. This may be quite necessary, as in building a home with insulated walls that protect us from environmental conditions like the wind, rain, and temperature. We also construct ideological walls in our psyche to protect us from cutural conditions. The physical and the mental, the internal and the external are dualistic distinctions, yet they are helpful for developing Right Understanding and the clarity of wise discernment.
I am not typically humble enough in my relationships with others. This is one of my remaining walls that I am deconstructing and unlearning. I learned this in order to protect myself and project an insincere confidence of coolness. The coolness has gotten me far, so to speak. Yet, it has also disabled me from connecting with others more deeply, something I know I desire to the depths of my being. It is original human nature to connect freely in the midst of all cause and conditions. We can say this takes love and compassion, though it also takes deconstruction of our walls. It is my egotistic self that denies an aspect of connection, which is my wall of arrogant coolness. People noticing my wall perceive me as righteous and indignant. I try to talk through the walls of others, meanwhile missing my own ignorance which causes a great problem and certain suffering.
What is fascinating is we don’t perceive our own walls as our unique problems that we need to address and debunk. My wall of knowledgeable arrogance and stylistic coolness traps me in ignorance, where I feel quite safe from the emptiness of existence. Now I know many people don’t even tread in this territory of “emptiness,” however, when understood as the universal order of existence, we may rest in presence rather than wall ourselves with what we know. I hope that makes sense. I’ll continue with my life example. When I say I want to connect with my brother and remain unable to see my own wall of arrogant knowledge, then I am the one who is ignorant and will remain ignorant until I wake up to my own walls. What is even more amazing to me is that I often talk with others about their walls that prevent connection within our relationship. They typically may agree that a wall exists in them as I have pointed out, yet have no desire to deconstruct the wall. The wall is there to protect them and they want the wall to maintain their egotistic structure they are working on. This is what I have been consistently ignorant of for most of my life–a deeply ingrained pattern, a wall of egotistic protection. I have been both comfortable with and unwilling to see that I have been very hypocritical in preserving my egotistic wall while trying to demand that others deconstruct theirs. I thought that in helping others see their wall, I was helping them.
Yet, even if this may be partly true, if we are not “ready” or “willing” to look at our own walls as impeding factors for fulfillingly free living, we will not see our walls as the problems. Our walls are always “the problem”, always the work that we need to do in opening to reality, in enlightening ourselves, in helping others. If I realize you have a wall in place, it is now my responsibility to respect you as you are, walls and all. In this realization and practice, I must be humble enough to ‘be with’ you without arrogantly calling attention to your walls that I sense and see, which is causes me to ignorantly and firmly erect my wall of arrogant indignation and cause suffering for both you and me. SO, heretofore, I take upon my second life vow to deconstruct my wall of hypocritical ignorant arrogant indignation and practice humble connection with others.
For the record, my first life vow is to always do my best.
