What is a blind person in a blind society to do?

Say you are blind and all the people that you know are blind.

(Let's call this blindness delusion or samsara or dream, to make it Zen-relevant)

You don't know that you are blind, because you are blind to that. I mean, you can't perceive an absence.

And you can't detect your blindness by comparing your experience with that of your friends, because they are blind too.

So how do you get a clue that you might be blind? Here are a couple of ways that I can think of.

1. Sometimes you are less blind. Sometimes you catch glimpses of... something. You would call this hallucination. I'm not saying that this is or isn't necessarily a case of hallucination, I'm just saying that's what you will call it.

2. Some of the people in your society are not as blind as you are (This is just statistics speaking here. It's inevitable.) You will call these people crazy. Again, I'm not saying that that these people are or are not necessarily crazy. I'm just saying that's what you will call them.

Of course you will avoid hallucinations and crazy people. This is the healthy thing to do. But it also acts to preserve your state of blindness.

In fact, avoiding hallucinations and crazy people might even make you blinder. Because there's always a question, are you actually hallucinating?, are they actually crazy?. And as you get better at excluding hallucinations and crazy people from your life, that question will fade away.

So what is a possibly blind person in a possibly blind society to do if he wants to discover, and possibly cure, his blindness?

Submitted December 17, 2017 at 11:02PM by woodrail http://ift.tt/2CrnVzT