Well, it’s pretty obvious to most of us that we can’t entirely trust in the world, in people and in appearances. The world of appearances is filled with the three poisons of greed, anger and ignorance. Sometimes, our closest people have betrayed us. The world as it appears in conditioned reality and ordinary life, is filled with unpredictable and often unexplainable occurrences that definitely go against how we wish things would be. Because of our unfulfilled desires, we suffer. When I was teaching recently at the prison sangha, The Unpolished Diamond Sangha, one man laughed at me and said, “You might be able to trust out there, but in here, that’s seems almost impossible. There is almost nothing and no one that can be trusted.” That has stuck with me. How to respond to that? Is there something unconditioned that we can trust in?
The world is steeped in ignorance of the sacred. This ignorance creates the atmosphere of distrust. It is also dependently arisen. Ignorance and all the harm it brings, emerges in the same way as wisdom does, and from the same source, a source we can trust in.