Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. The claim that our way of making sense of the world is “pathological” — like a carpenter using an uncalibrated level — launches this 45-minute talk by Ven Jampa Gendun into the view of emptiness and the awakened mind. He argues all afflictive emotions share a single root: a misconceived model of a solid, unchanging, independent self — the linchpin whose removal dissolves hatred, jealousy, and attachment together — and draws a pointed contrast between psychotherapy, which adjusts us to dysfunction, and the view of emptiness, which questions what it means to be a person altogether. He then maps four progressive stages of understanding reality, from the Hearer school to the Consequentialist Middle Way — regarded as the Buddha’s final word on emptiness — illustrated through tinted sunglasses, maps versus territory, and stepping off a riverbank into the waters of emptiness.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 04 HMA 1997 07 23.mp3
UUID: 4a0ce044-533b-48a7-8bc3-495a6ba5bea5
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: The Heart and Mind of Awakening 1996-1997 (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1997-07-23
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.4 minutes
Words: ~5,936
All this dissatisfaction, frustration, disappointment is pathology. Pathology just means unhealthy, diseased, sick, not so good. Epistemology. Epistemology is a very important word. It’s very important in Buddhism, the area of epistemology.
Epistemology are the way that we know the world. The rules that we use to make sense out of the world. You know there’s this chaos going on all about this and we’re trying our our damnedest to make some kind of sense of it all. And so we we we organize our reality into some coherent, recognizable, predictable world. And we use and and we use certain rules in that process of organizing to make meaning.
Those rules that we’re using are part of our epistemology. The way that we make sense of our world is our epistemology. And the way that we are making sense of our world is in many ways pathological, is unhealthy. That’s the point. The point is that this is So understand this because it it you know, if the rules that we’re making to you using to make sense of our lives and try to get by on our lives and try to work with the world and the things about it and our relationships and the people are some kind of defective.
It’s like a carpenter using defective tool. You know, their level is some kind of out of whack. Know? And and and though they try their best to build a proper structure, there’s always going to be some something wrong. And there’s something there’s a basic flaw in their approach because their tools aren’t calibrated correctly in some way.
So if the rule, the basic way that we’re approaching our world, the basic way that we see our world, we’re creating this reality about us, is some is are defective or unhealthy in some way, then no matter how we may struggle, all the blood and sweat and tears that we might expend in trying to manipulate and arrange and order this world about us to create some kind of happiness and some kind of security and well-being for ourselves is all in vain. It’s all it can never work in the end. You know, if suffering individuals are ever ever expected to get rid of their misery, they have to be be prepared to let go of their mistaken deep seated beliefs about the world in general and about their lives in particular. This is a tremendous message of Buddha. You know, our convictions are consistently being constantly being invalidated, but we invariably miss or we dismiss the lesson.
And therefore there’s no real change ever occurred. So the central assertion of Buddhism is that we are all living our lives on the basis of mistakes. Many of us haven’t recognized those mistakes. The Buddha was a great pointer out. He said look at this, look at this, look at this.
Identify the mistakes and begin to correct them and begin to lead a healthy life. These mistakes at this level are epistemological errors, errors in the way that we’re making sense of our world. And because we haven’t spotted these mistakes haven’t how pathological they really are or we’re continually losing sight of what we have once learned. We continue to recreate for ourselves a world which is by its very nature is dissatisfactory. cyclic existence is by its very nature dissatisfactory.
Our approach to life as it is presently being lived is by its very nature dissatisfactory. It’s a put up job. It’s not our fault. It’s not life’s fault. There’s a flaw in the way we’re approaching the way we live our life, the way that we’re viewing our world.
So, you know, our life is is based upon varying levels of illusion. So, you know, and growth is, to a large extent, becoming disillusioned. You know, the the and we’ve talked the whole path is a process of becoming disillusioned. I know all of what we’ve talked about in developing the will to awaken in the awakened heart. These illusions might surround our feelings of insufficiency or immortality or that chance and external factors are primarily determined by the quality of our lives or that self centeredness is an effective way of getting what it is that we want in our life, we’re finding happiness.
But the most the mother of all illusions is the nature of ourselves, a misconception about who we are as a person and and the things about us. You know we we grew up with models of the world in which we put our trust but which in countless ways are our fault. So you know this isn’t meant to be some kind of bitter or some kind of cynical attitude toward life in general. We’re critiquing or analyzing a particular approach to life. You know, a life which is marked with dissatisfaction and frustration and disappointment.
And such a life a life based upon illusion is a life doomed to suffering. You know, there is life is not at fault. We are in some strange way. But really it’s not so strange. We have to begin to see the locus of our problems within our own mind and not out there in the world.
Know from the point of view of Buddhism, people suffer because they they have a very limited point of view or the way things are or they ignore other possible realities, other levels of reality other than those they believe in or those that they’re familiar with or that they’re people of presently perceiving, or they hold their views to be absolute in some fashion or another. We continue to suffer because we persist in living a life characterized by a stubborn closed mindedness about learning anything which would disturb our present view of reality and the security that we’re able to derive from it. Now we’re going to look at this from many different levels about the nature of reality, the nature of ourselves as a person. But Buddha in all of this, you know Buddhism is not, for example, is not telling anybody that they should believe that there is a self or that there is not a self. That’s not the point.
What we should believe. It is saying that when we look at the way we suffer and the way that we think and respond emotionally to life, it is as if we believe that there was a self, a lasting, single, unitary, unchanging, independent self. And yet when we analyze, when we investigate, no such self can ever be found. So Buddhism would say that a life based upon such a model of the self, and this is only an example and we’re going to go into this in great detail, a life, you know, we, cognitive systems, minds are model builders. We try to make sense of our world.
We develop representations so we can think about the world. We have symbols and ideas by which we’re able to manipulate concepts. And we begin to try to think about how we’re going to get happiness out of this world, how we’re going to avoid suffering in this world. We’re able to think about the world. We build models, representation.
Some of these models are false. Some of these models, if we have a model, if we’re operating our life on the basis of a model of a type of self by this example, for example, of a singular, unchanging, independent self. And it’s something at the core of our being, concrete, solid self, it’s I. If we’re working if we’re operating our life on the basis of that model, which we probably are, then this is associated with disappointment, frustration, dissatisfaction. While on the other hand, a life based upon a model of selflessness is experienced as peace, as clarity, as spontaneity, as an absence of conflict both internally and externally with the world about you.
So you know that’s all they’re saying. That’s all that Buddhism is trying to get across. You know it’s not as if we are to take on any more belief systems. We have enough belief. But we become aware of what it is in fact we do believe and begin to analyze whether that has a basis in reality or not.
And maybe we can begin to correct, recalibrate many of our tools to reflect what the way things are in fact. And in this congruency in bringing our thinking in accordance with some kind of reality begin to experience some kind of lessening of conflict and frustration and disappointment. You know we’re most likely to be unaware that we harbor a belief in such a type of self, and I’m just using this as an example. But our emotional responses of hatred and jealousy and attachment and pride, they’re all indications that we we do. Because they these all of these afflictive emotions, hatred, jealousy, pride, attachment, etcetera, they all arise dependent upon such a belief.
A belief in this case, just by way of example, of an independent, unchanging, unitary, solid, concrete eye or self. This is just an example. We’re going to look at this from many points of view. This is the basis upon which these other afflictive emotions arise. If this basis weren’t there, they wouldn’t arise.
Attachment would not arise. Hatred, jealousy, pride would not arise. So, you know, both animals and humans are act as if they have an independent self to protect, to preserve, and foster. And we regard this behavior as automatic and we regard it as normal. In this you know, said that, you know, this, you know, one of the optimistic aspects of Buddhism is that we don’t have to weed out all of the afflictive emotions one by one.
We don’t have to weed out attachment and hatred and hatred and jealousy and attachment. If we are able to pull out this linchpin of the misconception of the nature of the self then all the other afflictive emotions will dissolve by themselves. They’re all dependent. They all arise dependent upon that basic misconception. This ignorance is the linchpin which holds them all in place.
And if we can remove this, the development of the awakened mind, then they will all resolve themselves. You know, without the awakening mind Buddhism would really be some kind of of a sublime ethical system at death. You know, we’re trying to become bodhisattvas, dedicating all that we are, the totality of ourselves to the welfare of others and to their complete liberation. But, you know, it but it would be an impossible task if there were not the awakened mind. And how could we achieve liberation if without the view of selflessness, without the view of emptiness, there would simply be no way that we could remove the causes of suffering such that they would never return again?
It would just we would just continually be on the treadmill of having to again and again relieve our suffering, again and again find happiness. There would be no possible way we could find some kind of ultimate liberation without the view of selflessness, without the view of emptiness. You can make any great effort you want in practices like charity and morality, but without this meditation on no self you will never be able to attain freedom. As the four hundred verses says, four hundred verses is a text by Āryadeva, there is no second door to peace. The illustrious Candrakīrti has said as well, on the vast wide spreading wings of both conventional, which is mainly the awakened heart, and the ultimate, mainly the awakened mind, the king goose flies at the center point of the formation of the other geese, all beings spurred by the wind of virtue reaching to the farther most shore of the ocean of the victor’s qualities.
So in this metaphor, this imagery, likening the awakened heart and the awakened mind to the two wings of a bird. And in order to fly we need both of these qualities. One without the other is insufficient. You know we need to develop ourselves both cognitively and affectively and integrate those two. Without the view of selflessness and emptiness, Buddhism could not go beyond psychotherapy.
Know, therapy and much of Buddhism, they prune the branches of our misconceptions about what it means to be a normal, sane, worthwhile person. The view of Buddhism and its practices aim at cutting the very root, know, are namely our deep misconceptions, unexamined fallacious notions or premises about what it means to be a person at all. You know therapy and a great deal of Buddhism are trying to help us to be well adjusted people. But the view of emptiness goes beyond all of that and begins to question what it means to be a person altogether. Why be well adjusted to a dysfunctional situation at all?
And to be normal in an insane society is not to be very healthy, that we have to get by. At one level, at another level we have to try transcend the situation altogether and find peace and freedom. So now we’re trying to set off in the direction of this third principal aspect of the path. The development of the awakened mind. You know, we’re going to be talking a great deal about ignorance and different levels of ignorance and different stages and the way it is interpreted and therefore the various levels of wisdom which are active as an antidote to these levels of ignorance.
Trying to get an idea of what we mean, what Buddhism means, what is it getting at when it talks about ignorance and the necessity of overcoming ignorance and how it acts as the basis for all of our problems on all of our afflictive emotions. You know, most basically ignorance is a stubborn, closed mindedness about learning anything which might just threaten our self identity, you know, and up to upset the security that we’re able to derive from that, from our particular version or model of reality. So ignorance is like is an absence of precision. It’s a lack of clarity out of which we create mistaken models of the nature of the self, the nature of the eye, the nature of the world about it. So it’s like a cloudiness, a veiling.
It’s an obscuring factor of the mind. You know, it’s not as if we’re talking about patterns of thinking, patterns of concepts within our mind which are reoccurring and have a high degree of stability. Ignorance is such a pattern of mind and it has these characteristics about it. And it prevents us from seeing the absurdity of many of our most fundamental beliefs. It functions to undermine our basic sanity.
It hinders us from learning about ourselves and our situation. No matter how determined we may be to grow, no how much we want to be free, no matter how much love and compassion we may have in our heart, we still are not fully awake. We have not realized our full potential. We have not cut the roots of ignorance governing existence. We don’t have the skills yet to be of ultimate benefit either to ourselves or to others.
We have to awaken our minds to the nature, the ultimate nature of reality. So Tsongkhapa advises us to, in this verse, to realize dependent arising. So we’re going to discuss what dependent arising is. The Dalai Lama said that dependent arising is like the slogan of Buddhism. They were badges, they used to have badges, dependent arising badges.
You know if the awakened heart, if love and compassion, if they are the heart of Buddhism then the realization of dependent arising is like the mind of Buddhism. But its realization, its understanding, isn’t necessarily a gradual unfolding. You know, as I mentioned, one of the primary influences of ignorance is a stubborn closed mindedness about learning anything which would disturb our which would cause us to to feel that we were losing our self identity or that disturb or threaten make our self identity, our sense of self that we have that we have, and which would have a sense of security that we derive from it. So here when we talk about a that which is meant by learning, learning means something more than a mere accumulation of knowledge. I think this has been emphasized quite often.
You know, it means seeing the way things actually are. To the extent that our mistaken conceptions are somehow interrupted. These patterns are no longer able to arise as readily and as forcefully and as frequently. And we’re beginning to interrupt these patterns by means of our learning, these understanding. New patterns are beginning to evolve which are antithetical to the mistaken ones.
Let us say we develop wisdom. This is what we call a realization. You know we talk the idea of realization. People are always talking about he’s realized or she’s realized. You know it’s more than a matter of getting twenty Ph.
S. Actually it’s something, you know the reality is always there in front of ourselves. It’s here within our room. It’s not as if we’re going to create some kind of new reality for ourselves which has never been before by gaining more and more information about the nature, its nature, understanding emptiness or whatever, selflessness. It is a removing of an obscuration, a removing of what we call superimposition.
Superimposing, that is to say a mental fabrication that we project upon things and people ourselves, for example. A fantasized way of existing that we project, that we that we overlay. You know, it’s like like if you, you know, if you look at a snow mountain with sunglasses on and you saw it as green and you took the sunglasses off and you saw it the way it actually was, you saw the snow mountain as white, you would be removing that overlay, that superimposition of factor which in reality wasn’t there, which which appeared to be to be there. That’s what we mean by a realization. That’s nothing more than that.
And a reality has always been there before us, but we’re over which we’re exaggerating. We’re superimposing our misconceptions upon it. So to realize is simply to begin to remove those misconceptions and see the way things actually are in their true nature. But if we had some emotional investment in Green Snow, you know for example, I don’t know why you would, you know you came out with a company that was invented, Green Snow, you’d spend all your money, invested all your money in the stock of Green Snow Incorporated. We wouldn’t we probably wouldn’t we would shy away from even questioning whether the mountain was green or not.
We wouldn’t even want to think about it. We’ve got this huge investment in green snow. I don’t want to hear about it, snow is green. I’m not to question it. But there be some kind of natural resistance even to maintaining a question as to whether the snow, the mountain was green or not.
And we begin to see unless we begin to see that somehow green snow, seeing snow as green, is somehow not in our own best interest. You know? That is that somehow it’s detrimental to ourselves. Then we think, oh, well, maybe I should think about this, if it’s causing me a problem, if it’s pathological, if it’s causing me difficulty, in fact, some kind of disease. And then if we begin, the more we begin to see how in fact it is problematic, Then we’ll begin to be motivated to even entertain the notion that perhaps maybe that Green Snow Mountain is not really green after all.
We’ll begin to open up to the fact that we could be wrong about it. Anyway, Āryadeva said to even to begin to have a doubt about whether cyclic whether true existence exists or not is to shake the very foundations of cyclic existence. Even to have the doubt, a crack, an iota, a suspicion that maybe this table, maybe the I, the self isn’t truly existent, isn’t this solid, concrete, independent, unchanging, unitary self that I’ve always constantly imagined it to be. Just even to have that quiver of mind with regard to that begins to shake the very foundations of these reoccurring compulsive patterns of our minds and our lives. Just that doubt in itself.
The process of learning is is a process. It’s an unfolding, a restructuring. It’s a letting go. And this is a process we, you know, we’ve talked about in terms of listening, reflecting and meditating. When talk about the awakened mind, this third principal aspect of the path, we’re talking about awakening our minds to reality.
We mean seeing deep. And when we say awaken our minds to reality, we mean seeing deeply into the nature of reality, seeing deeply in the nature of reality, you know, seeing the way things actually are, devoid of our misconceptions, our wrong ideas about them. And, you know, an unhindered, undistorted direct awareness, understanding things in and of themselves. And here deeply refers to the ultimate way things are. You know, we can understand an object on many different levels.
And here we’re trying to understand the nature of, for example, the I, the self, on its most basic nature, at its most basic level. You know, that which we come to upon an ultimate analysis. You know, if we if we analyze the self, if we analyze this glass in in an ultimate manner, try to find its most deepest way of being. You know, how does it what what is the nature of its existence? What is the nature of the existence of the I, of the self?
Have we ever actually questioned or looked at that? And we try to understand it at its deepest most level. Then we’re going to understand its emptiness. We’re going to understand its selflessness. You know, it’s trying to go beyond superficial appearances that we usually cling to, that we usually get captivated by, that we usually accept without question.
You know like the shadows on the wall of the cave and looking beyond the shadows to what it is that is actually casting them. So in Buddhism this ultimate nature of reality, the endpoint of our analysis is emptiness, the most fundamental way in which an object exists. The most fundamental element of existence or experience. You for example, if you know, we can look at something on various levels. We can analyze it in different ways.
If we analyze, if we take a clay pot, you know, potter might say that in absolute terms it was clay. But a scientist might say it’s a collection of atoms. You know, if the scientist were to be more precise, he might say that it consisted of subatomic particles moving in space. And even those subatomic particles can no longer be defined precisely, but they have to be defined in terms of probability. The precise position, precise speed can only be expressed in probabilities.
So you know we could define that part at varying levels, deeper and deeper levels. In the same way ultimate truth presents itself to practitioners at various levels. And we’re going to look, we’re going to work through those levels. So these levels are the experience of a single practitioner but they’re also they occur historically in the development of the Buddhist scriptures as they begin to emerge. And they’re progressively presenting deeper and deeper profundities of the Buddhist teaching.
You know, ultimately we’re trying to understand dependent arising according to what is called the Prāsaṇgika Madhyamaka school. In Sanskrit, Prāsaṇgika Mādhyamika. This is said to be the final thought of the Buddha as to the ultimate nature of reality. But it’s highly doubtful whether we’re able to gain an accurate understanding of this most profound teaching if we haven’t gone through the progressive steps of those teachings which lead up to this. So we’re going to work through four stages in coming to the deepest most, the final thought of the Buddha as to the nature of reality.
So these have these are presented in increasing subtleties of levels of understanding. There’s first what’s called the hearer stage. Then there’s mind only stage. Then there’s the middle way Autonomy Stage. We’ll call it the Autonomy Middle Way Stage.
Svatāntrika Madhyamaka. And then finally the deepest stage, the most subtle stage, the final thought of the Buddha as to the nature of reality which is the Consequentialist Middle Way stage. So these are named after schools, Buddhist schools, which formulate them. But in fact they represent the stages of an individual’s understanding of the nature of reality. You know, so each of these levels will build upon the preceding understanding, you know, like a ladder which we’re working our way up to more and more subtle.
You know, we each level of understanding builds upon a proceeding. Each has challenges a more and more deeply held model, erroneous model of reality. Until we go beyond all models of reality altogether and we actually see the way things we are nakedly, the way things are in fact directly. You know, what we come to understand upon ultimate analysis, the deepest way an object exists, the way I exist for example. Depending upon what it is that we’re looking for, what is the purpose of our analysis, we will find just that.
We can analyze, for example, this table on many different levels. Some of the levels which are fairly superficial level down to one which would describe the ultimate way the table exists. Superficially we can examine the table and we can understand it in terms of its size and its design, its shape, its color, what material it’s made of. So that’s a way of analyzing the table, investigating, examining the table, how strong it is. This is useful information if you need a table, you’re going to use the table, you want to know how much weight to put on the table, if you want it to fit in with your other furniture in your home.
So this is useful information, just kind of investigating the table. A carpenter might look at the table and think of it, analyze it in terms of how it’s constructed. Antique dealer, how rare it is, how old it is, what kind of condition it’s in. A botanist might look at the table in terms of what kind of wood is it made from, what species of tree did it come from. A physicist, you know, as we mentioned before might look at it in terms of that it’s just a group of atoms or this probability pattern.
So to a large extent what we find upon examination of an object is very much determined by what we’re looking for, you know, how we’re going to look for it, what we use, what we are going to make use of that information that we gain, And what level of organization are we trying to analyze? So in this present context and what we’re going to be doing in terms of the awakened mind, we’re trying to understand the deepest way the object exists. In the case of the table, the deepest or the ultimate mode of existence. Now what is its ultimate mode of existence? How does the table exist?
Questioned it. How does that I exist, the self exist? What is it that we find upon ultimate analysis if we analyze the table, if we analyze the self? The way the table exists. This is what we call the ontological status of the table or the self, the eye.
It’s being. The nature of its being. So if analysis penetrates deeply enough, what we will find is emptiness, selflessness of the table, of the eye. The table’s emptiness. You when we first hear about emptiness, what appears to our mind?
Emptiness. Our minds are just empty. Maybe not much appears to our mind when we hear that term. We have to come to have a we have to gain a sense of feeling for what we mean when we say that emptiness. You know, that what do we find?
We find an absence of something. We find an absence of a particular fantasized way of existing. This fantasized way of existing has has many different names, and we’re going to look at these different terms which used to describe a hallucinated way of existing, which we’re projecting, superimposing upon all phenomena continually. The self, the I, the table, whatsoever. The terms that are used, for example, inherent existence, intrinsic existence, existing from its own side, true existence, self defining existence.
There’s lots and lots of terms. But they come down to a fantasized way of existing. What do we when we analyze the table, what do we find? We find an absence of this fantasized way of existing. What is an absence?
A lack of something that is emptiness. So an emptiness is a nothingness. We find something. What is that something? It is a lack of a particular way of existing.
A type of way of existing that we’re continually superimposing upon objects. And due to that superimposing, you know, what’s the relevance? Why? Why does it matter? I could care less.
The essence of Buddhist practice hinges upon the realization of this emptiness. Why? Because all afflictive emotions arise dependent upon this basic misconception about the way things exist, this table, the nature of the I, the Self. We have some misconceptions if we take the example of the nature of the I, the Self. This misconception we call ignorance.
It misconceives the nature of the I, the self. You know, as I said, you know, that cognitive systems are model builders. We build models to think in order to think about things. Build models of the self in order to think about the self. You know, I can’t stand you.
We’re using models. We’re using symbols in order to be able to have conceptualize that process. You know, the nature of the eye, the nature of the self. I’m going to town. I want to become a worthwhile person.
I was a little boy at one time. That I. You know, something which is abstract, something which isn’t, you know, we think the thought, I’m going to go to town tomorrow. That I isn’t present. We’re using a model, aren’t we, in order to think about what something in the future to develop some kind of motivate direction, to be able to predict, to to be able to to gain control over our lives about what we’re going to do.
I’m going to do this. So we use the model of an I. Now that’s fine. That’s fine. But we have to understand that using a model in itself is not problematic.
But what happens if we’re using a model which is inaccurate in some way, which is false in some way? Then, you know, that we, you know, we use no, we use we develop maps by which we, these concepts, models, ideas about how we’re going to navigate the course of our life, how we’re going to get what it is that we want, avoid what it is that we don’t want. But there’s a very basic notion, and it’s a very popular thing in some circles I guess. The territory is not the map. That is that our ideas about the world are not the world.
But sometimes our ideas become more vivid and real than the actual things themselves. You know, we, you know, You know, we have maps and we can make use of a map. But, you know, there’s little blue lines and red lines. We can’t drive on those. And there’s little black dots.
We can’t go shopping in those little black dots. We can’t go to restaurants and have a meal there. They stand for something in reality. They represent. They models for something which we can actually find, real roads and real towns where we can go shopping and we can go to restaurants.
But but the map is not the territory. But sometimes we think the map is the territory. And these maps become terribly real for us, even more real than reality in many cases. You know, if you ever read the Lord of the Rings by Tolkien where he develops this fantastic world. He’s got he’s got he even draws maps of where all the villages are and all the places that but these maps don’t correspond to any definable reality.
We can we we can have maps which are useful, which we can which we can navigate the course of our life, which we can think about the world and we can gain some kind of control and some kind of, we can get what it is that we want. Other maps correspond to nothing in fact findable in reality. These fantasized maps are what causes our problems in life. We have a fantasized notion or model about the I. We have a fantasized notion about the world in general.
And we’re continually relating with this projection rather than reality itself. And out of this discrepancy arises all our frustration and disappointment. Out of this arises all of the various afflicted emotions, our hatred, attachment, and jealousy, and pride. We have to to begin to undermine this misconception, this false notion about the way things are. Begin to see the mistaken nature of these models that we’re working with as to the I and things about this.
Begin to see that these maps are only fantasies that we’ve created in our mind and to rely on them more and more and begin to rely upon the way things in fact are to a greater and greater degree. You know, this but it’s a gradual unfolding process. You know, it’s like, you know, right now we’re, you know, like what what we call a naive realist. A naive realist is somebody who simply accepts the world as it appears and doesn’t question at all. And it’s like standing on a riverbank, very feeling very secure.
But now we’re going to step off into the waters of emptiness. And we’re always been we’re not quite sure if we’re going to be able to if we’re going to sink or swim, you know. And so we need some kind of security we got to hang on to. And we hold on to some kind of these different levels of misconception, some kind of security blanket, a log so that we don’t sink, that we can stay afloat, some kind of insurance policy against some kind of existential drowning. So that’s what we’re doing.
So we’re just stepping off what we felt to be the secure shore. But that security was in fact never a security for ourselves. It was bound up with dissatisfaction and frustration and disappointment because we never wanted to step off of it, then we’ve never we’ve never even began to question. You know, what was where were the deeper more fundamental sources of our problems? You know, holding on to that security at all costs.
But, you know, gradually, if we can grow in some kind of confidence.