10th Fetter
The Wisdom Curriculum

Ignorance vs. Wisdom

The 10th Fetter pairs with the 2nd Fetter of doubt, which makes it relevant to be acquainted with, even while working with the lower fetters.

A belief is nothing but a thought. And doubt is when two conflicting beliefs are present at the same time. Essentially, one thought is followed by a contradictory thought, which is followed by an alternate contradictory thought, again and again. And each one feels true, and plausible, and brings a cascade of sensations throughout the body that reinforce the apparent relevance and truth of that lone thought.

Consequently, all beliefs (as well as other types of thoughts) have a root in the ability to know something to be true. And their stickiness is due to the feelings that make them seem tangible. And this feeling contributes to the fiction that we can truly know the truth about anything. But we cannot.

As soon as you accept one belief as truth, then two conflicting beliefs you also accept as truth will cause doubt and confusion.

In the 10th Fetter we release all of that, because not only have we realized that there is no one to know anything, we now can acknowledge, accept and understand that we can never know anything to be truth, since no one ever has all of the relevant information to determine what is or is not.

With the 10th Fetter we learn to live in the freedom of ambiguity.

It’s okay to not know.

It’s okay to never be able to come down on any side of any argument.

It’s okay to let go of the need to understand so that we feel a sense of safety by knowing what is true, and that we stand on firm ground.

We don’t.

And we can let go and fully relax into this wisdom.

Enjoy

10th Fetter

Exercise:

Look at your hand.

Breathe deeply, soften your gaze, and truly look.

Do you notice that the image that your eyes are seeing is not how a hand looks? What is this strange structure?

Close your eyes and feel into the sensations of a hand.

Do these sensations feel the way the image looks?

Do you notice that the sensations are not “hand shaped”?

Now notice how the sensations in the area where you believe your hand to be, dissolves and changes.

How do you know you have hands?

Does a voice pop up insisting that you do?

Do you feel a contraction somewhere in the body insisting that hands are real, and that you have at least one of them?

Feel those sensations that give us the impression that we know this fact to be true.

Aren’t they also just dissolvable sensations?

What are you relying on to feel that you know anything at all?

Do this with your entire body, and notice what resistance comes up just before you are completely dissolved.

And then throughout your day, investigate what it feels like to know even the most basic, societally-agreed-upon facts.

See if you can dissolve all certainty at any moment.

None of it is real.

All of it is a thought that can be seen through in an instant.

Enjoy.

Full playlist for the Wisdom Curriculum

See Through The Self Delusion Course

We are so happy that there is now a full course for you to see through the identification of the self!

This course is like a practical handbook of all of the different angles that you need to be aware of when you are investigating identification in your direct experience. We hope that it will be equally useful to people who are absolute beginners on this awakening path, as it will be to seasoned seekers who believe they have seen through the sense of self and are currently working with the higher fetters. We believe that everyone will find things in the course that will help them to deepen their insights regardless of whichever stage of awakening they feel they are in.

Take your time with this course! It is quite comprehensive. Through it we will be discussing many aspects of awakening, some of which tend to be overlooked by those on the path. We stress the importance of integrating awakening into our daily lives, so we spend a lot of time helping to bridge the gap between the spiritual world and the relative mundane one in which we all live.

In this course we will go into detail about meditation practices, discerning thought from “reality”, how to approach long-held trauma, how to investigate and manage our fear of death, practices to stimulate deep non-dual insights, and how to avoid many different pitfalls and egoic traps that you might encounter on the awakening path.

For those who are familiar with our The Awakening Curriculum and Unfettered Mindfulness YouTube channels, you might have already seen many of these videos. But they have been assembled in a practical sequence that allows progressive insights and practice, and they have been expanded with 50,000 words of written summaries, extrapolations, further inquiry and meditation practices, and more. It’s effectively like having a whole book integrated into the video material. Even if you have already watched the videos, we hope that these written lessons will help to deepen and expand your understanding of the material, and provide you new directions to take your practice.

To get the most out of this course, we recommend watching each video in sequence, and taking lots of time to actively do every inquiry at least once. It can help to do the same inquiry multiple times before moving on. It’s always recommended to rewatch lessons, if not immediately, then come back to them weeks or months later to see if you now hear something that you missed the first time, or that now makes sense to you in a way that you couldn’t access previously.

It should be emphasized, you might accumulate a lot of new concepts from this course, but that will be of comparatively little benefit next to the insights that you glean from putting everything you hear into practice.

You are likely here, doing this course, in order to experience some sort of transformation of experience. But concepts have limited ability to do this. At least not in terms of creating long-term transformation.

For that, you need to have an experiential understanding of what we are pointing to. So relax, settle in, take a deep breath, and allow the experience to unfold all on its own.

No one knows what will happen on the other side of any practice. So remain curious, open, and remember to have fun.

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