HUMAN FOLLY, PART TWO

The word “folly” means lack of good sense.  It manifests as errors in judgement.  What causes a person to make such mistakes?  Misperception.  He sees something as one thing when it is really something else.

In Vedanta, a good example is a traveler on a road who sees up ahead what he perceives to be a coiled snake, when in fact it is a coiled rope. Errors in perception such as this are both individual and collective, and can include entire nations.  Countries have gone to war because of it.

In Buddhism the issue is, for example, why a person chooses to believe something even when he knows he is not seeing it correctly.  It is because he wants it to be true.  The reason he wants it to be true is because his ego has something to gain by it, such as the satisfaction of knowing he made the right call, when in fact he made the wrong call.

The point is that human folly is the doing of our thinking mind.  It certainly is not God’s doing.  It is our thinking mind that misjudges.