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You don't have to systematically unravel all the karmic knots in order to be free from them. You only need to realize, to recognize, their emptiness. This is what Manjusri, the Bodhisattva or Buddha of Wisdom's sword symbolizes: the cutting through the apparent conditioning that apparently binds us by recognizing that this conditioning, these emotional chains of delusion, are not inherently real. They are a mass, a knot of interdependent ideas, each of which have no reality and thus have no collective reality. But we could, and do, spend an apparent eternity undoing them through therapy or meditation, when we could wield our sword of wisdom, and recognize their true nature, their emptiness of independent inherent reality, and be free.
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