Tenrikyo-Ofudesaki.com
We ordinarily take being consciousness for granted and ordinarily don't think about it, nor as a rule do we know or even claim to know anything about it; instead our usual waking focus is upon using our imagination - hopefully the effort was made to quickly identify the imagination as requested on the preceding page - to experience the much more interesting and varied content of consciousness that we experience as the world. After all experiencing the world is what being alive is all about.
It is natural for all human beings to gradually, over time accumulate some of that interesting imagined content as truths of our self and truths of our world. Those accumulated truths of the world* result in a very cool and powerful way of learning and our ability to use imagination provides enormous advantages for our species. Many of us, or at least I do, use their imagination to talk to themself about themself and what is liked or disliked about the world. Those mental judgments being made according to the truths of the world that have been accumulated and which function as fundamental truths for informing the opinions held in our self-centered imaginings.
Some of those imagined truths of the world deliver great benefits to us such as ways and means of finding or producing food and shelter. Other creations of the imagination entertain us and have provided us with delight; while others have exhibited genius in revealing the causal workings of what we call the natural world. Unfortunately some of those experiences and truths of the world have ended end up depressing us and as a result have become the cause of wide spread dissatisfaction, disappointment, frustration and even fear; as opposed to the original high spirited mind that was ours when as a new separate person we entered into the adventure of experiencing life and the world. Stepping out into that high spirited exploration of life is often referred to as the point of view of "courage" and "innocence" or "the mind of a three year old child".
A great deal of effort, both individual and collective, goes into various schemes that try to find common truths of the world that will serve, at least for some and often at the expense of others, that dissatisfaction. These poems and this path recognize that the ordinary truths of our world have not and will not overcome our deepest dissatisfactions but there is a way to do so and quickly do so at that.
* Most human languages have some way of distinguishing between experiences that come and go and are done with and those that stick around, deepening and coloring our ongoing experiences of the world - in the English language we speak of "taking something to heart", having one's heart "pierced", "broken", "gripped", "stolen", "warmed", "on one's sleeve" etc.- An experience so saved could be a good thing or a bad thing, sometimes it is hard to tell which. Knowing how to distinguish our original conscious "Heart" and "Core" from the self-images accumulated on it is the way to be able to separate in our own mind what is actually "good" from what is "bad " for our self, our happiness and our joy.