Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Ven Jampa Gendun opens with J.R.R. Tolkien’s map of Middle-earth — detailed, coherent, corresponding to nothing real — as an analogy for how the mind fabricates a false self. In this 46-minute session from the “Opening the Eye of New Awareness” series, he works through the classical four-point analysis of selflessness, devoting most time to the first essential: clearly identifying the object of negation, the felt sense of a singular, unchanging, independent I. Emotional states like fear, guilt, and worry are the best moments to catch this model in operation; he introduces a “spy” technique for sustaining an emotion while a part of the mind quietly examines what the I appears to be. He then covers binary logic (same or different), testing oneness with body-and-mind, and ruling out a wholly separate self. Suited to practitioners already engaged in analytical meditation on emptiness.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 12 OtE 1992 03 04.mp3
UUID: 9060d8d7-4ae6-42c0-9c3e-3a1ff30f1f22
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: Opening the Eye of New Awareness 1991-1992 (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1992-03-04
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 46.1 minutes
Words: ~5,744
So the four essentials: the essential of ascertaining the object of negation, the essential of the pervasion. It says in the book by His Holiness, it’s translated as the essential of the entailment. The essential of ascertaining the lack of oneness. Fourthly, the essential of ascertaining the lack of difference. So these are the four essentials.
This is the way we can proceed in analyzing and coming to an understanding of selflessness. So going through these points, these four point analysis. The very first of these, the Essential of Ascertaining the Object of Negation, is the most important and it’s the most difficult of these four. We will never know if we have succeeded in negating a false object unless we know what we’re looking for. Now if you really don’t know what you’re looking for, how can you know it doesn’t exist?
You have to be able to identify what it is you’re searching for in order to come to a definite conclusion. And it’s necessary to come to some real strong conviction in order to overturn these very deep seated beliefs, which are incorrect beliefs. We have a belief in an unchanging, singular, independent self. We have a very strong belief in such a type of self due to the force of misknowledge or ignorance. As in the case where we see a striped rope as a snake, And upon analysis we see that a snake never existed there.
There was an appearance of a snake and we held that that appearance had some correspondence in reality. But that snake never existed. It was a complete fiction. It was a complete fabrication of our mind. And only upon analyzing the object which we believe to be a snake where we come to understand it’s not.
So we have to know exactly what it is that we’re looking for. We have to know how that I appears to us in order for this analysis to work. And there’s never going to be a very strong conclusion come to if it simply remains a vague idea in our mind, kind of wishy washy. We think, well, maybe it’s still there, even though I didn’t find it. I’m not quite I’m not quite sure what I’m looking for.
It could be still there. Now I just overlooked it. We have to be positive that I know what I’m looking for, and I look every nook and cranny of where it should be, if it exists at all. I didn’t find it, therefore it doesn’t exist. Coming to a diamond hard conviction, it doesn’t exist even though it appears.
Even though that snake appears, I know it’s not a snake. This ability to be able to come to understand that our perceptions can be deceived and no longer falling under their influence requires a great deal of conviction in our logic, our ability to reason. So we have to gain a strong sense of feeling, a recognition of what this I appears like. If we’re ever going to ascertain whether it exists or not. So if you’re not convinced that you behave emotionally as if you had a singular, unchanging, independent self, then you have to begin to think carefully about pain and suffering.
You have to think carefully about who or what is suffering. Who is afraid of death? Who feels guilty about what happened? Who feels worried about what’s going to happen? Things of that nature.
These are signs, they’re like smoke, which give us indication that we must be holding at some deeper level a belief in such a type of self. Just as in the case of smoke, we know that though we might not be able to see it, there’s fire. It’s an indication, it’s a sign. Otherwise we would not be worried about the future, we would not feel guilty about the past. We can reason it out, that these only have validity.
These only can arise as emotional responses based upon the false premise of a particular model of the self. Based upon the accurate model of a conventional self, such types of emotional experiences do not arise. Worry does not arise, guilt does not arise. The threat of death does not arise. Upon an accurate model of the conventional self, Such types of experiences do not arise.
So initially, the most important point is the essential of ascertaining the object of negation. And His Holiness quotes Śāntideva from engaging in the Bodhisattva deeds, where he says, Without contacting the imagined, without contacting the imagined existent, its non existence is not apprehended. We have to gain a sense of the imagined existent, what we imagine to exist in order that we can come to understand it doesn’t exist at all. If one does not firmly identify such a self or such a type of eye, then the analysis cannot proceed for the reason that either there’s no object to be analyzed, we don’t know what we’re looking for. And then when we’re going through our body, Is the bone the eye?
If I don’t know what the eye appears to be, how do I know whether the bone is the eye or not? It may be, may not be. I can’t say. I don’t know what I’m looking for to be able to identify if I ever find it or if I don’t find it. Or if it’s held as a vague and blurry image, then the analysis loses its strength through not having a well defined object.
So we’re trying to bring to conscious awareness an unconsciously held mode, model of what we conceive of the self to be. Our life, our experiences, the way our mind is operating is based upon models, beliefs, ideas, premises. Many of these are mistaken premises. Many of these are mistaken beliefs. One of these mistaken beliefs is with respect to the nature of the self.
The mind uses models, symbols, language. Simply because there is a model, simply because we use the I of I am angry, simply because we have the map, the words, does not mean they correspond to something, in reality, in fact. So these baseless models, these misconceptions which have no correspondence, are the basis for all our suffering, the root cause of all our problems. It’s a pure fiction. It’s fiction, and that’s good.
And like Tolkien, Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings. It’s wonderful work of fiction, but it’s only fiction. But his books he actually has a map of the forest and where. It’s well drawn, but that map doesn’t correspond to anything in reality. Within this context of his fiction, it has a great meaning and you know where you are in this imaginary world, this fictitious world that he’s built up, very imaginative.
But does it correspond to anything in reality? The map is not the territory, that kind of famous saying. There’s no correspondence. So we have a model of a type of self, but it doesn’t correspond. It’s a fiction, Just like Tolkien’s map is a fiction.
It doesn’t correspond to anything in reality. We have a map, a model, and a type of self. It’s a fiction. It’s been fabricated by the mind. It’s purely imaginative.
It’s an imaginative existence. It doesn’t correspond to anything. But on the basis of that imaginative existence, existent, holding that in fact it’s real, that there is something which it corresponds to, then we generate aversion, we generate attachment. So we have to come to recognize it’s a fiction. And what do we have to come to recognize?
Is this, this model which is held at a very deep seated level of our unconscious. We have to bring it to conscious awareness. What does that model look like in order to negate it, in order to refute it? If we don’t know, we can’t refute something that we have, it has to appear to It’s there. So this analysis is only effective to whatever degree we are able to identify within our own experience this network of wrong beliefs.
It’s like a latticework of wrong beliefs which forms an image of a self. Some of the most important components of this model are in this presentation that it’s singular, homogenous, whole, partless, that it’s unchanging, that it’s independent, separate. Are some of its components, its facets. So we have to set up a target and we have to know what we’re shooting at. And then we’re going to shoot the arrow of our reasoning to be able to hit the target.
But we have to know where we’re shooting. You know we’re not looking, it’s important in this analysis to understand, we’re not looking for our empirical conventional self. Our everyday self. The self that wakes up in the morning, the self that has breakfast, goes to work, comes home, plays with the kids, talks, eats, does all these various activities. That’s not the self we’re looking for.
That’s not the problem. And that self exists. We can’t refute that which exists. We can’t negate it. It exists.
That which is true upon analysis becomes more apparent, becomes obvious. That which is false upon analysis becomes more and more vague, more and more indistinct until it disappears. That’s the nature of falsity and truth. Upon analysis, the truth becomes more obvious, the faults finally disappear. It becomes more and more unclear.
So in this first analysis, in this first essential, we’re trying to identify the I, the self, as conceived of by misknowledge, as conceived of by ignorance. In this case, a singular, unchanging, independent self. This is the object of negation. So as we did, we calmed our mind and we began to perform an analysis. We evoked our model of this eye.
If we can invoke fear, if we can invoke worry, if we can invoke pride, that means that we are operating on that model of our self, on that type of model. That our experience at that moment is arising out of a mistaken model. So we have to work that. We know it manifests in our mind at that particular moment when we’re experiencing fear, when we’re experiencing hatred. We know that we’re operating on the basis of that mistaken model.
So holding that emotional state so we can maintain that model as manifest within our mind, have to begin a little part of our mind begins to look at the other part of the mind like a spy and tries to say, what does that model look like? What does that eye look like? We know it’s there. It’s not always there. If you’re just eating calmly, not thinking about anything in particular, there isn’t ignorance working at that moment.
There isn’t the misconception as to the nature of the eye at that moment. So there would be nothing to look for. But if we can invoke these emotional states, we can know by inference that that model is manifested within our mind. And this is the opportunity, this is the only opportunity, the only time that we can begin to identify that model, that self, that I. It’s quite a delicate task.
There are many areas which we can, Maybe we’ll talk about that next week. Usually the problem is this analytic, this analysis is we’re too gross, we’re like a bull in a china shop. We’re not subtle enough, and therefore the emotion fades away. We develop some kind of emotional state. You’re either overwhelmed by the emotion, which I get for meditating, upon analysis only a blank appears.
The emotion goes away. So the spy has to be a little more subtle. That would be the main fault initially. Probably your analysis would be too heavy handed. You have to be able to maintain that emotional state at the same time a part of your mind is performing the analysis.
So it’s like a very subtle and delicate process, which takes a great deal of experience. We can talk next week before we do meditation, we’ll talk some more about the possible errors that may be involved in the actual meditation session. So the first essential is the essential of ascertaining the object of negation. Beginning to clearly identify the nature of this I which arises in emotional experiences. How does it appear?
What does it taste like? Does it have a color or shape? Does it appear like it has parts? Does it appear like it’s partless? Does it appear like it’s constantly changing?
Does it appear unchanging? Does it appear like it’s the body or the mind, independent of the body and mind, independent of causes and conditions? Some of the things we can look for, actually try to sense. And the second essential is the essential of ascertaining the pervasion or the entailment. And this is a commitment to binary logic, either A or not A.
Everything in the universe is either A or not A. It’s either one or many. Anything we name, it’s either one or many. No third. Law of excluding middle.
There’s no third possibility. And this may sound like simple mindedness, but sometimes it’s necessary to go through these simple minded processes in order that we don’t leave any stone unturned, as it were. Any object that we’ve in this book, is it one or many? It’s one. Two books, only one or many.
A book and a table, many. Everything in the universe is either one or many. There’s nothing which is not one or many. If the same or different, we can use those terms. Everything is either the same or different.
Are these two the same or are they different? Is this the same? Yes, it is the same. Of course, it’s the same as itself. The book is the same as itself.
So if we have identified a type of self, an I, It must be either the same as the body and mind, and by same I mean identical in every exact characteristic, not one characteristic, different. It either must be the same as the body and mind or it must be different. If it exists, it must be the same as the body and mind, identical with the body and mind, one with the body and mind, or it must be different than the body and mind. It must be many. It’s not the same.
That’s the logic. Therefore we can come to some conclusion. I know it, I have this eye, I know what it looks like, it must be either the same as the body and mind or it must be different from the body and mind. There has to be a very strong conviction, that foundation. Otherwise the process of further analysis won’t hold any force.
Okay, that’s the commitment to just there’s no third possibility, some unknown vague kind of well, then maybe there’s another way it could have existed but I just haven’t thought of it yet. Therefore analysis doesn’t have any force. The undefinability of such an I, either within the body and mind or outside of the body and mind, not the body and mind, doesn’t have any force for us. Because maybe it exists in some kind of vague third possible way, I haven’t quite figured it out yet. I’ll think about it tomorrow.
So this brings us to the third essential. The essential of ascertaining the lack of oneness, the lack of sameness, the lack of identity. The essential of ascertaining the lack of oneness. So we identify the I. We know what it looks like, what it appears like, what are some of its characteristics.
And we know what we are looking for. We know where we’re going to look. Where is the eye seen? Where do we experience the eye? Where did we experience that I?
It’s somewhere over here, generally. We’re not quite sure where. Somewhere on this side of the looking glass, over here, somewhere around the body and the mind, the body and mind. When I look for the eye I don’t look in the kitchen. I’m sitting here, don’t experience it over there.
I experience it here, it’s on this cushion. That’s my sense. I’m not quite sure exactly where it is, but I have a vague notion of sense. It’s over here somewhere, body and mind. Sort of here somewhere.
I’m so beautiful. It seems like the eye is over here, that eye which is beautiful. That’s where we’re going to look, the place where we experience it. And we experience it within the body and mind around in this area. So we know what we’re looking for and we have an idea of the place we’re going to look.
So we’re going to analyze whether this observed eye and the body and mind are one that is identical exactly in every property, in every sense, or whether they’re the same in all ways. We observed an eye, we identified an eye. Now we’re going to see whether this eye and the body and mind are exactly the same or not, ascertain whether they’re oneness or they lack oneness, one of the two. So we’re going to perform this analysis. So what are some of the logical inconsistencies that arise if the body and mind is identical with this I that we identify?
So the I we identified, keep in mind, is not the empirical I. It’s not the conventionally designated I. You must keep that in mind. It is the I which has been identified in the course of these emotional experiences. Some of its properties which we have or hope to be able to identify has a sense of singularness, The vague wholeness, doesn’t seem to have any parts.
I hate you. It doesn’t feel like it has any parts to it. It’s kind of homogenous, undefined, vague sense of something. Like a dark room, like laying in bed at night in a dark, pitch black room, and you have this sense that there’s something leaning over your bed. You can’t see it.
It’s a sense that there’s some kind of mass there leaning over your bed. It’s kind of this homogenous whole, partless sense that this I have. It will be fine, it’s vague. But we don’t have a sense that it has any distinct parts to it. It’s unchanging, independent.
So immediately there are some logical inconsistencies which arise if we try to analyze that the body and mind is identical, the same as the I. Certain consequences which we can’t accept arise. If the I is one with the body and mind, certain problems come up which don’t correspond to our experience. And for a start, if the eye is the same as the body and mind complex, at a minimum we’d have to have two eyes. One for the material component and one for the mental component.
We’d have to have a physical eye and a mental eye. And in fact, there would have to be an eye for every part of the body, for every part of the mind. Because one of the things about that eye, the way we sensed it, the way it appeared, is it didn’t have any parts. It’s a whole. So every whole that we could identify within our body and mind must be an eye.
So first off we can just begin with the whole of the body. That must be an eye. And there’s the whole of the mind, that must be an There’s these two eyes. But the body has many parts. All of those parts must be an eye.
Because that’s the way the eye appear to us to be singular, whole. So each of those parts has to have the quality of I ness, has to have a sense of singularity that we have identified as the I. So there’d be hundreds of I’s, infinite number of I’s, at least two. The body, a physical component to the eye and a mental component. A mental eye and a physical eye.
This goes against our experience of the eye. We don’t experience ourselves as having many eyes, many selves. It doesn’t accord with our experience. So we experience the eye as one unit, as a whole, without parts. So if that were the case, if the body and mind were the I, then the body and mind would have to be one whole, one unit.
They would have to be singular. That is if the body and mind were identical with the identified eye, the body and mind would be undifferentiable. They would be homogenous. They wouldn’t have the distinction of body and mind. They wouldn’t be able discriminate those parts because they are identical with the eye.
The eye doesn’t appear to have any parts. Therefore body and mind would have to be one whole mass of something indistinguishable. Or else they would be different. And that’s not how we experience the eye. Another fact to consider is that if the eye and the body were one, it would make no sense to say my body.
It would make no sense to say my mind. Because if the I is the body, how can the I have a body and be the body at the same time? How can the I have the mind and be the mind at the same time? The possessed and the possessor must be different. So it would make no sense to say I have a mind, I have a body, I have an arm.
The owner and the owned must be distinct. The container and the contained must be different. We couldn’t make such statements as my foot or my mind is happy. Another inconsistency would be be if we say that the body and mind is identical to this identified eye. Then whatever is the mode of being of the body and mind, that is to say whatever are the characteristics of body and mind, would necessarily be the characteristics of this eye.
For example, if the body grows, which it does, then the eye would grow. If the body had an arm amputated, the eye would be less. It would be diminished in some way. Also, the mind is constantly changing its state, undergoing constant change, various conditions. Therefore the I would have to be constantly changing, undergoing different states.
But we’ve identified it as it appears to be unchanging. Appears to be unchanging. I was trying to think of an example. Another indication that we hold onto an unchanging eye is that Monday night, we were talking about nirvana as being complete peace. And this one guy, he was very upset because he thought it would be terrible just to sit around under a tree and experience complete peace.
So it wouldn’t be, it’s like a grosser example, and I’ll come back to this, would be if you were to age ten years overnight. That is to say, you have a sense of I and as if you were to put on an older body. You couldn’t stand that. You have a conception that it would be the same I in terms of here you would be identifying with your mind, with the same values, the same outlook on life, the same needs, the same wants. An unchanging eye which would be now stuck in an old body.
The fact is we have aged quite a lot. But we haven’t freaked out yet. But if we were to go from say fifteen years old and they put on our thirty five or forty year old body, we would freak out. It would be a disaster. But we have, just as in the case of attaining peace, the fact that people can’t conceive of themselves as changing.
It is not that they’re grasping onto an unchanging self, it is not that. Like in the fact of renunciation or giving up something. There’s a saying, a bird only flies as high as its wings will support it. It can’t fly any higher. That is to say whatever we are experiencing is in keeping with our present abilities, with our present values, with our present principles, beliefs. We can’t experience anything over and above that.
This person who couldn’t conceive of being peaceful was trying to, was holding on to as if his present value system and all beliefs and principles were going to somehow be, transplanted into this ideal body and mind situation. And it would be incongruent to be in that situation. It would be a terrible experience. Just like it would be a terrible experience to have aged thirty years overnight because you have a sense that I would be the same person mentally with all my values and all my beliefs and wants and needs in an older body. But because we have a sense that it would be a terrible experience.
Why? Because we have a sense that we are holding to an unchanging self with particular values, particular beliefs. And to take that type of self and put it in this old body would be a horrifying experience. But the fact is that we have done it. And why has it not been such a horrible experience?
It’s because the self is constantly changing. As we grew older and our bodies changed, our needs changed, our values changed, our wants changed in accordance, in harmony. And it hasn’t been too horrible an experience. Maybe for some. So I don’t know, that’s of vague.
I’m trying to get some kind of What do we mean by unchanging? Like when I was little, I was born in Ohio and I went to California and I went to India, And there seems to be this same person that’s been with the same value system and the same belief needs once, etc, moving throughout my history, my particular history up to now. And I sort of hold on to that unchanging self, which is my essential core, has these essential values and needs and wants. And I hold on. Sometimes we fool ourselves.
We think that we want something and we never really check up to see whether we want it or not. We get what we thought we wanted and it wasn’t what we wanted after all. But we’ve been holding on to these wants and needs for so long as if they were unchanging that we never really bothered to appreciate who we are at this moment. What do we really want and what values do we really have? But maybe I’m getting off this subject.
So we might think that between the body and the mind, that the I is only one of these. It’s only one of the body of the mind. But if it was the body, it would be material. It would have color and shape. And that’s not the way we experience the eye.
We don’t experience it as having color and shape. This contradicts our experience. The eye is experienced as something immaterial, shapeless, not physical. And the eye would, because we experience the eye as being independent of the body And the body is dependent upon causes and conditions. Its well-being or ill health is determined on various conditions.
And we have a sense that the eye is independent of cause and conditions. On the other hand, if the eye were oneness with the mind, it would be senseless to say I am happy or I am angry. It would be wrong because the I could not be separated from the happiness. It could not be separated from anger. It would be wrong to say I am thinking because the thinking would be the I.
There’s no one thinking. The I is the thinking. And also if the I were one with the mind, we could have no continuous memories. There would be no I to connect up past experiences and our present mind. I couldn’t say I went to the shop yesterday.
Went to the store. There would be no continuum of I. That the I of yesterday would be discrete from the I of today just as the mind of yesterday is discrete from the mind of today. There would be no I to connect up. There would be no I, continuum I, which experienced that particular situation yesterday and was remembering it today.
There would be only the I of yesterday and the I of today because there is the mind of yesterday and the I of today. So there are all these dialectical tests which we can set up. We should try to go through lots of reasoning and find one which really kind of works for us, which kind of contradicts some of our beliefs and try to really work with that particularly. But there are a great number of dialectic contradictions when we try to hold that the body and mind is identical with the I, with this identified I. Also as we did in this analysis where we actually went through our body and mind, looking at what this is called in terms of analyzing the six elements.
In Buddhist cosmology everything is made up of a combination of these six elements. There’s nothing other than these six elements. Earth, water, fire, air, space, and consciousness. Everything. Just as in Western science, don’t know how many elements they have these days.
It keeps growing, think it may be one hundred and eighteen or whatever. All material objects are made up of a combination of these elements. Likewise, if the eye exists, it must be one of these elements or a combination of these elements. And we try to locate it. Maybe I’ll just go back quickly to the fourth.
And the fourth essential, the essential of ascertaining the lack of difference. So this is ascertaining whether we perform an analysis. We’ve identified the eye. We say it must be one or different than the body and mind. We go through the body and mind, we don’t find it and finally we have only one place left to look, in the mind, separate from the body and mind.
It’s just as if have in a pen. You put a sheep a goat and a pig, a sheep goat and a pig and a pen. And you take out the sheep and the goat. There must be the pig left over. So we have two possibilities we’ve come down to.
Either the self, this identified I, is one with the body and mind or is not one with the body and mind. If it exists, then it must be separate from the body and mind. If it exists, it must be different than the body and mind. That has to be the only one left over. If we can’t find it there, then we conclude it must not exist.
So some of the logical reasoning is that if the eye, this identified self, were separate, different than the body and mind, then the experiences of the body and mind and the experiences of the eye would bear no relationship to one another. That the body and mind age and the eye would never age. The body could go through suffering and the eye would not suffer. The mind could suffer and the eye would not suffer. The body becomes old, the eye does not become old.
They’re unrelated. Just because there’s the body and mind, there’s the self, the eye. There’s no relationship to them. Whatever happens to the body and mind doesn’t have to happen to the I. So we have to look in terms of terms of sometimes the eye seems to be a possessor of the body and the mind, like the relationship between a shepherd and a sheep.
The eye seems to be in charge, central command, in control, an agent behind everything that we’re doing, thinking. The thinker of our thoughts, the feeler of our feelings, etc. That’s the way it feels to us. So sometimes it has a sense of the relationship, if we have the body and mind, of a shepherd who is controlling the sheep, leads them, makes them do things. Sometimes it appears like the relationship is that of a head salesman, another salesman, salespeople.
The head salesperson is a salesperson, but he’s in control. But he appears just like all the other salesmen. So sometimes the I appears to be associated to be the body, appears to be the mind, but it’s in control. Sometimes it appears to be separate from the body and mind, but it still appears to be in control. So we can also analyze.
If the body and mind are separate from the eye, then we can go through. We take our arm, we look at the arm, we set it over there. Is that the eye? No, that’s not the eye. We take this arm, is that the eye?
No, that’s not the eye. And legs, head, organs, etc. Take our mind apart, set that over there. There should be something left on this side, on this seat. There should be something left on this seat which we can identify as the I.
It should be left over if the eye is separate, not identical with the body and mind. Having separated the body and mind, piled it up over there, then the eye should be left over here. And examining to see if in fact it is. So just summarizing these four essentials. The point of analysis is to identify the object to be negated.
The first essential, ascertaining the object of negation. Different levels. Here we’re talking simply about a single unchanging independent self. Whether it’s a truly existent self, inherently existent self, it’s simply a more subtle type of object of negation which is to be identified, we perform the same type of analysis. The second is to acquire certainty that if the self exists, it must be one identical with the body and mind or it must be different than the body and mind.
The ascertaining, the ascertaining the pervasion. The third point is the essential of ascertaining the lack of oneness. Determine whether this identified eye is identical with the aggregates of the body and mind. And the fourth point is the essential of ascertaining