Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Opening with a TS Eliot line on endings and beginnings, Ven Jampa Gendun frames the recurring challenge of reorientation before making a key distinction: the awakened heart is not merely love and compassion but the additional intention to develop actual capacity to help — illustrated by the band-aid-versus-heart-bypass analogy. In this 45-minute talk he guides a meditation sequence covering compassion cultivation and “choiceless awareness,” a noting technique for observing experience without identifying with it. The second half distinguishes three conceptions of self: ignorance’s grip on a fixed, independent self; wisdom’s recognition of a dependently arising self; and the unreflective conventional “I.” A wartime psychiatrist’s story — a soldier fabricating reasons for post-hypnotic foot-stamping — anchors the conclusion: belief in a self conditions perception of a self, but appearance is not evidence of existence.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 07 HMA 1997 08 06.mp3
UUID: 6f376f47-f957-4b4b-a9af-dc01821218b3
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: The Heart and Mind of Awakening 1996-1997 (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1997-08-06
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.1 minutes
Words: ~6,442
A red light problem. So I’m glad you I was a bit concerned about yourselves that you might lose them on the way over the week. No. It’s such lot. So we have to begin again in this constant process of reorientation, process of of getting back in touch, reprioritizing what is meaningful, important, worthwhile in terms of of our time and energy, our life, taking stock of things.
What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from. I don’t have any idea what that means. But it was said by TS Eliot, so it must be pretty good stuff.
I think, you know, to make a big ending is to make an end. You know, to begin again, to begin all over again if necessary, to begin in a different way than perhaps the way you’ve been habitually approaching your life up to present in some way or shape or form to change your your style of thinking, the way of acting. You know, something comes to an end, perhaps an alternative possibilities begin to open themselves up to us. And I guess, you know, it gets kinda boring in terms of I’m not pushing suffering. You know, I’m not saying that you by all means, you know, it’s not not that perverse.
A little bit maybe. Don’t think we should negate the important the place of importance, the place the importance of happiness in our life by any means. It’s just that happiness is not the problem. Suffering which is the problem. The problem is the problem and the problem is suffering.
And so that’s where we have to concern ourselves. But generally, when we experience happiness, our minds, I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed, they become terribly superficial. They only dwell up on the surface. That’s okay. That’s fine.
But from time to time, it’s necessary for us to we nonetheless, we still suffer. And I think it’s it’s in our own self best interest to to perhaps gain some perspective on on that suffering that we’re that we are going through, to gain an awareness and begin to see how it in fact is a very significant truth about our lives. How it permeates our lives, but also how it permeates others’ lives. You know, the idea of at least from the point of view of the universal vehicle, Mahāyāna, at least the the ideals that we’re aspiring to theoretically is to go beyond our own perspectives and begin to to take a accept a greater responsibility, a universal responsibility as the as the Dalai Lama puts it. And, of course, it begins with ourselves in terms of our own suffering and then beginning to understand.
You know, as long as we are ignorance driven beings, and we’re we’re beginning to investigate the nature of ignorance and its significance and how it is involved in all of in terms of all of our suffering, all our difficulties and dissatisfactions, it is the root of of our problem. It is what is to be eliminated. But having gained, you know, some kind of appreciation that that to be an ordinary human being is to a large extent to suffer. That’s not a very inviting truth, is it? We spend a great deal of time resisting that truth, spend a lot of energy and mental effort in denying it and rejecting it in some form or another, trying to distract ourselves from it, numb ourselves to its reality in our life.
But nonetheless, it’s still there. It won’t go away unless we begin to deal with it in a more confident and effective manner, begin to use some of our resources into as a means to to work through it rather than run away from it, the truth of suffering in our lives. But what is true for ourselves is just as true equally so for all other sentient beings, all other ignorant driven sentient beings, living beings. No difference. Just, you know, perhaps their suffering takes another form, perhaps a different degree of suffering, the extent of suffering, how it affects them in their life.
But the fact of suffering, the mere fact, that that that quality of experience, how it permeates our lives is no different for any of us. And last night, last night Geshe-la was talking about the awakened heart. And we’ve we’ve spent a lot of time discussing it and and the means for its development. And he emphasized one fact, and I thought I would, you know, kinda emphasize that myself.
Can’t be original and copy somebody who knows what they’re talking about. Khensur Rinpoche emphasized And that was the fact that the awakened heart, it’s not merely love and compassion. That’s its prerequisite. Love as the the wish that others be happy.
Compassion being the wish that others not suffer. Something more than that. It’s that’s part of it. But it’s additionally taking a responsibility for this to be so. In fact, an act of compassion and act of love.
But even something more than that, it is beginning to look at ourselves and our present capacity. You know, if we do take on some degree of universal responsibility or even responsibility for making our own selves happy and solving our own problems at a more basic level, you know, what to say is beginning to that out to others as we’re trying to familiarize our our minds with that conception, that idea, then we have to really take stock and see that in fact we can’t. And then it would be very much the blind leading the blind. You know I don’t quite go along fully with the truism or the saying, you know, the streets in hell are paved with good intentions. But because I think good intentions won’t go take you to hell.
But I think we often can cause our contribution to the world can be greater chaos if we even with the best of intentions if we don’t have some degree of wisdom in implementing those good intentions. We we need effective compassion. You know? Some some I mean, our real ability and skills in working with others and helping them to solve their problems. So it is this not just love and compassion, but an aspiration to develop those skills, those abilities.
You know, we we consider a Buddha to be that paradigm of of an optimum mode of being of someone who, in fact, has the maximum of skills in working with others to help them to solve their problems. So that it it there is this twofold purpose in what we’re about. We want to help others, and the way I’m going to do it is by developing my own abilities, by the attainment of whatever you wanna call it, a happy, healthy, loving, sane human being, a tremendously skillful, compassionate human being, someone who solved their own problems and and through that experience of working with the methods and the means, having achieved that in, is able to, you know, adapt it to others and working with them so that they can do the same. So it’s not so it’s something a little more profound, I think, little an extension of what we normally how we normally relate to others in a positive fashion, something more than love and compassion, Something more than just love and compassion. It’s something that the additional intention to be able to do it in fact.
And to, you know, who we are as a person is the greatest benefit we can be to the world. I sincerely believe that. You know, not so much how much money we are able to give. That’s important, for sure. We can’t escape that factor.
In all the various physical and material activities we can interact with, ways in we can act in the world. But who we are as a person, that that profound effect, I think, is the most far reaching means by which we can help others. So to become all that you can be for the sake of another person, for the sake of of all other people is what the motivation that we’re trying to establish here. And and how do I become the most that I can be? Well, we have a a path.
You know, a path takes us from where we are now to where we want to get to, that place that makes us the most that we as far as the Buddhist paradigm is concerned, that we can be, which helps us to realize our complete human potential in all its possibilities. So it is traveling this path. I’m traveling this path for you and you and you. And we can say that in an honest, sincere fashion. And I think this is we can honestly say that in terms of coming here together tonight.
I mean, it’s not that you know, it can be a genuine motivation. And then everything becomes meaningful. Every become everything becomes a compassionate gesture of our caring, of what we’re about in our life. And we our life has meaning, and we have a beneficial effect in the world about us just by who we are and what we’re trying to do, whether, you know, we’re able to Buddhism is very much concerned with the mind. You know, if if the if the intention is there sincerely within the mind, it will find some external manifestation for sure.
You know, it’s just not a matter of of mind trip of some nature. But it is foremost of the mind and who we are in terms of our own mental development. You know, that orientation is the way that we can be of greatest service to the world. So the inner focus of our life becomes Buddhahood. This is the, you know, this is the actualization of the path.
The becoming the most that we can be as a person as far as the Buddhist conception is concerned. And we we do something. We travel a path, you know. We can travel this path for others in a very sincere and genuine fashion. It can be a gesture of compassion toward others.
Even our sitting on our cushion can be a tremendous manifestation of our love for the world. It’s necessary, it? Isn’t it really? If you think about it, somebody has to develop their mind to its fullest capacity. And it may be necessary to sit on your cushion to do that.
You know, somebody has to do that work. Somebody has to withdraw from the world if only for some time to to go inside themselves and to work with their mind in the most direct and effective fashion means. It can be of in the most real way, in the most in terms of the pragmatics of suffering in the world, the greatest contribution to humanity may be occurring in the in the mountains of the Himalayas, may be occurring in somebody’s bedroom in Adelaide at this very moment. We don’t know. But it’s quite possible.
There’s no reason why it can’t. And so, you know, even ourselves here discussing in this mundane, you know, even after that, you know, confused way that I kinda jabber on, maybe it can be of significant benefit. It can be a gesture of love and compassion for us all if that’s our motivation. You know, it can be our way of helping the world at this very moment. There’s no reason why it can’t.
You know, it’s a it’s a little more abstract way of thinking in terms of benefit but a very necessary way to begin to orientate and think. And otherwise, you know, we’re like someone who wants to sincerely generally wants to help the world, and maybe they take a, you know, a first aid course. And then, you know, they look around for people who just had a cut or a bruise. You know, let let me let me put that band aid on you. That’s really wonderful.
It’s something to be admired. But what what happens if they come across somebody who needs a a quadruple heart bypass? Let me put that band aid on them. It’s nice. This is this the sincerity of thought is is admirable but the it’s not effective in it, you know, in bringing about the what is actually needed in that situation.
So maybe if they if they withdrew from the world and took up the study of medicine or whatever, you know, this is just by way of analogy. You know, maybe what we do here this evening and just listening and discussing, reflecting upon these teachings can be our way of demonstrating our compassion. There’s no reason why it can’t. It’s something of the mind. Somewhere, I don’t know where it is, quite quite.
So this is the means that we can travel the path, the Dharma. And that’s what we’re sharing here this evening. That’s what we share here every Wednesday in terms of the actual teachings. But there are two types of teachings of Dharma. There is the Dharma which is communicated to others and then the Dharma which is realized within our mind.
And it is this Dharma. You know, both are necessary but the in helping others, in helping ourselves, that at a certain point we have to realize the doctrine, what these teachings, we have to integrate them, have to make them our own, we have to be the person who we become by means of them which is actually going to solve our problems for ourselves and others. And then we, in this process of working with our problems and integrating the Dharma, we rely upon others. Obviously, we rely upon the teachings. We rely upon this building.
You know, all the you know, these people who don’t know what they’re doing to work in the office and all these all the office holders of Buddha House who give us a hard time by not doing exactly running the place exactly as we think it should, you know, all of these. These are our Sangha. These are our spiritual community. We rely upon them both in indirect and direct fashions in a very real way. And then, you know, taking refuge in them, taking finally trying to raise the level of our motivation, you know.
There are other people, you know, besides ourselves who are equally suffering just like ourselves. The person sitting next to you, the person sitting in front of you, the person sitting on this raised seat is suffering just like yourself. The form of their suffering, the extent of this present moment might be unique, might be different than your own, but nonetheless the fact of suffering in their life is just as real. And perhaps we can go beyond our usual egotistical boundaries, you know, our skin encapsulated ego and begin to open up to a wider possibilities of what the good life, what the a way of life which is full of meaning and fulfillment might be like. Maybe it begins to take into consideration others.
Maybe we have to open our minds to a greater vision in order to become a great minded individual. It’s emphasized in the teachings, and again and again, those with small minds, with narrow goals, with limited perspectives will enact deeds or activities correspondingly, and they will achieve corresponding results. They will achieve very little term in their lives. But those who have vast vision, you know, we can there’s no limit to what we can aspire to. And why not?
Why limit yourself? Out of that aspiration, you will involve yourself in vast, more profound deeds. And out of that, correspondingly, more vast and found results, you will you will become something that you could not have imagined in your finest moments. Maybe you will even become a Buddha. Why not?
For the sake of all that. You know, there’s something that’s with your your life. To the Buddha, the Dharma, and the supreme community, I go for refuge until awakening. Through the creative potential of my listening to the Dharma, may I achieve the state of a Buddha for the sake of all living beings. Through the Buddha, the Dharma, and the supreme community, I go for refuge into awakening.
Through the creative potential potential of my listening to the Dharma, may I achieve the state of a Buddha for the sake of all living beings. Through the Buddha, the Dharma, and the supreme community, I go for refuge into awakening. Through the creative potential of my listening to the Dharma. May I achieve the state of a Buddha for the sake of all living beings. Reverently, I pay homage with my body, speech, and mind and present clouds of every type of offering that was actual and imagined.
I disclose all my destructive acts accumulated since time without beginning and rejoice in the skillful actions of holy and ordinary beings. Please remain until psychic resistance has ended and turn the wheel of Dharma for living beings. I dedicate the skillful actions of myself and others to the great awakening. And we’ll meditate? Kadampa Geshes were a tradition which was noted for their seeking to put into practice all of the various teachings in a very in a very sincere and profound way.
They were very much concerned with the cultivation of love and compassion and leading the simplicity of life. And amongst them was one great master, Geshe Chekawa. And he said that that this this fault ridden mind of ours has one really wonderful quality. In whatever way it is trained, it will develop. Know, keeping that in mind that we don’t have any inherent identity, there are no intrinsic nature to ourselves in terms of the quality of who we are or the qualities of our mind.
In whatever way that we familiarize our mind with, in that direction, it will move. It will it’s dynamic in its nature. It’s continually changing. So, you know, continually simply accustoming our mind to qualities of love. You know, that’s what we mean by a loving person.
There’s nothing particularly inherent in them that we might think so. You know, when we look at the you know, we we are able to excuse ourselves in some way or another by thinking this way. But when we look at the Dalai Lama’s and the Mother Teresa’s of the world and think thinking that somehow, you know, that they have these loving electrons and compassionate protons and caring atoms running around in their brains and somehow that’s just who they are. They’re just carrying people by their very nature as if they didn’t have to become the person that they are now, that they didn’t have to familiarize themselves with these qualities that we would like to be more prominent in our lives. So, you know, a compassionate person is someone who simply predominantly thinks compassionate thoughts.
Nothing more no more than that. There’s nothing nothing nothing particular about their nature. So, you know, we at present perhaps are the preponderance of our thoughts in terms of love and anger are are are are toward the anger side. And so but through custom accustoming ourselves by continually generating compassion thoughts through meditation practice, and this will overflow into our everyday life, we will develop a preponderance of more compassionate thoughts. And lo and behold, we become loving people.
That’s all. There’s no great trick to it. There’s no magic involved. It’s just working and changing our mind, a process of accustoming. And that’s basically, fundamentally what we mean by meditation.
Just that quality of habituating, familiarizing, accustoming our minds to positive productive states. It can go it can become terribly profound. They can we can get used to reality, but it’s still just a getting used to. So then so we’re going to, again, work with cultivating love and compassion. And this time, you know, towards somebody who you have a great deal of caring about, not your primary partner, the most significant other in your life, but somebody one step back from that.
Okay? We try to develop love and compassion for them, then mindfulness of breathing. And then I thought we’d just practice my what is sometimes referred to as choiceless awareness. Choiceless awareness is simply allowing the mind to become involved in any object that it naturally tends toward. But that’s what we generally do.
But this is the only difference now in this instance is that we maintain awareness. Generally, we go. We don’t maintain awareness. We become totally unaware. And the best way that we can do this is by noting.
This is a helpful technique. It creates some kind of space between ourselves and the object of consciousness. Generally, we identify with the object. We get wrapped up in and we whatever the scenario is going on, we lose ourselves. We lose the that kind of perspective, that that standpoint from which we can simply watch as an observer what our mind is aware of, what’s going through our experience.
So in this situation, we’d simply allow the mind to become involved in any object that naturally tends toward. It might be an external object. It might be sound. A car might go along the street. Simply noting here and here and here until it’s gone.
And then you’ll notice the mind will become involved in something else. It might be smell, if possible. It might be an internal object. It might be the internal object. It might be the pain in your knee.
Feeling. Feeling. Feeling. It might be thoughts. Different thoughts arising.
Good thoughts, bad thoughts. Simply thoughts. Thinking. Thinking. Thinking.
Hearing. Feeling. Smelling. Hearing. Sleepy.
Sleeping. Try to from moment to moment, try to maintain that that watchfulness of mind, that perspective. This is it’s very useful in everyday life. You know, generally, we we we identify with our emotions, whatever feelings arise. We hook into them.
Now we can can take the perspective that anger has arisen in my mind. But we don’t have to identify the I as if I am angry. Anger has arisen. We don’t if we simply neither indulge nor try to repress, most of these I mean all products, including states of mind, are impermanent. They will eventually cease to themselves if we’re able to take a position of neutrality toward them.
And the way that we can do this is simply by the technique that we can make use of. It’s simply acknowledging their existence. I am angry. But we don’t have to identify with that anger. Anger.
Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Generally, we we bite into it, don’t we?
And we we lose that, you know, we become the anger as it were. But we can’t so anyway, this is useful because dispassionate mindful observership, this ability neither to indulge nor repress in the content of experience. We can apply this eventually, to our meditation on selflessness. So this is like a training for something more, but in itself it’s quite useful tool to be able to develop a skill of the mind. Should we try that?
So take a firm, comfortable posture. Getting in touch with your body, noticing any tightnesses, any So we’re trying to climb the rungs of a ladder, you know, working our way from our present, maybe, position understanding of a of a naive realist, someone who unquestionably accepts the appearances about them, that things exist very much the way they look and beginning to question. And this process has four recognizable stages that we’re going to work through, these these rungs of the ladder. Beginning with the Hearer stage, and we’ll go to the Mind Only stage, the Autonomy Middle Way stage, and finally the Consequentialist Middle Way stage. And we’re looking at the way in which the hearer, the individual who is coming to that understanding approaching the development of the awakened mind is getting in touch with the ultimate nature of reality.
The means by which we can can overcome ignorance which is the root of all our problems, all of all of our suffering. Yeah. Taking they simply take into they call into question the nature of the self. That’s all. The world of the of things and buildings and all its various objects.
The universe is it’s very much taken to exist the way it appears to ourselves. It’s built built up physical objects are built up out of particles, and the mind is built up out of discrete moments of mind. Sort of units are building blocks of the universe like and I remember hearing that when I was a child, the building blocks of the universe. Atomic energy will save us all. So anyway, that that’s kind of the notion that we’re we’re at or we’re trying to get to, perhaps, where we’re at now.
And so we’re just calling into question the nature of the I, the self. We talk, you know, we to, we use an analogy, for example, that things don’t always exist the way they appear. You know, the fact this is, we experience this almost every day, but perhaps we aren’t, we don’t acknowledge it, that fact. That We use the simple analogy of walking along a maybe as the sun is going down along a path, it’s becoming dim and there’s a coiled striped rope along the side of the path. And it appears to us for various reasons, due to external conditions, the lack of light, shape of that rope, due to certain predispositions within our own mind, to condition the factors, certain beliefs.
Maybe just we read an article about snakes that day. That could be a contributing internal factor. For these various internal and external reasons, there appears a snake. And this is purely a mistaken conception, isn’t it? But even though it’s only something which has arisen in our mind, still we experience fear, we experience aversion, suffering in various forms.
And it only arisen due to our attachment to a particular misconception or wrong idea. Yet there is nothing in reality which corresponded to our our idea about what was there. That’s all. Nothing more than that. So we experience this with these types of misconceptions, these wrong thinking, these wrong thoughts every day of our life.
But they go quite, to a large extent, unnoticed or unappreciated. So beginning to appreciate that the world doesn’t always exist the way it appears. Or maybe you’ve had a boyfriend or a girlfriend. You’ve experienced that same thing yourself. Or a used car salesman.
Something like that. Anyway, so here we’re only going to question the nature of the self. The self appears to us. And it we can the self can appear or we can have three definite types of conception as to the self, with regard to the self, a way of thinking about the self, how we conceive of the self. We can distinguish three distinct conceptions of the self.
So the first of the and the first of these three types of conceptions that we have with regard to the self. By conception, conception is what we call thinking. Think a type of mental process which uses mental images, which makes use of symbols in the mental maps as a way of of relating to the world. We think about we can understand things by using symbols, by manipulating ideas within our own mind which correspond or maybe they don’t even correspond, but we say generally they might. We can come to understandings about the world through the proper manipulations of symbols which stand for, which are represent representations of things out there in the world.
So that type of mental processing, we’re calling it conceptual thought as opposed to what we might call direct perception, which is like the eye consciousness directly seeing the the stick. It’s not involved in understanding the stick via a symbol or representation. It’s understanding the stick directly. We can say that. We can make that kind of rough statement about that.
So we’re talking about conceptual thought, using ideas and images within our own mind. And we can have three distinct conceptions about the self. And the first is conception is what we are presently talking about in terms of ignorance. Ignorance is a type of conception. It is a wrong conception, a particular variety of wrong conception.
It is a conception of, at this level of our analysis, a level of a conception of a unitary, and we will discuss what some of these words mean, a unitary, unchanging, independent self. That is one type of conception that we can have about a self. We can conceive of the self as being unitary, as fixed, unchanging, as separate, independent. We can have that notion about the self. Another type of of conception that we can have about the self is of a of a a dependently existent self.
The self which arises in dependence upon causes and conditions. A self which has which has many parts. A self which which is continually changing, impermanent, momentarily disintegrating. You know, we can have that we can have that kind of conception with regard to the self. So this is the this is the self which is understood upon analysis of the actual nature of the self.
This we’re going to you know, this is what we would call a wisdom. A wisdom is is a type of conception which is able to penetrate its object through analysis to a deeper level beyond the superficial, beyond the simply unquestioning appearance, but begins to understand its more basic nature. So it is a wisdom consciousness understanding the self. So we can have an ignorance conceiving of the self, we can have a wisdom consciousness conceiving the self, and then there’s a third type, a conception that we can have about the self, which does not consider whether the self is dependent or independent, whether it’s changing or unchanging, whether it’s unitary or made up of parts. This third self is it just simply accepts the appearance without reflecting, without any type of analysis.
Third type of self is the self or the I which eats, which sleeps, which comes to Buddha House, reads all of these various things which ourselves do, if you’ve ever noticed. The empirical self, the conventionally existent self. So of these three types of conceptions that we can have with regard to the self, The first is what we term ignorance, or sometimes a synonym would be self grasping, a grasping at a particular type of self or a misconception as to the nature of the self. It is mistaken. The second is a valid understanding of the self, which arises through investigation, analysis of the self.
So it’s not it takes some purposive reflection upon the self and an investigation of the self in order to develop this wisdom. The third self is just our non reflective, everyday, valid sense of self. We say, I’m going to the store. Can I get you something? Or, you know, I’m reading a book.
That is to say, in this in this context, and it’s quite often the case, that are neither ignorance is operative nor wisdom operative. A non reflective, but nonetheless valid conception. It does not it is not though it’s valid, it simply takes the superficial appearance of itself in a correct fashion, it doesn’t see it at a deeper level as as as opposed to wisdom. So there’s we can have those three distinct notions about the self or conceptions about the self. Now as, you know, trying to we’re gonna you know, it’s talking about the self, taking taking into you know, you know, this question about who am I and the necessity to begin to gain some sense around it or begin to question it.
Not to take it, you know, a taken for granted truth which in fact is false for granted any longer as to the nature of the self, nature of what it means to be a person. You know, most one of our most fundamental beliefs is belief in a self. You know, our experiences are laden with a theory of a self. You know, it doesn’t mean that we we are able to articulate it by by any means. Perhaps we’ve never even thought about it.
But all our experiences are conditioned by our beliefs in a self. We do harbor beliefs about the nature of the self. And our experiences contain our beliefs about ourself. Their you know, experience isn’t simply raw data. Our minds are not blank slates like photographic plates which just simply imprint whatever is placed upon them, that they interpret, that they that they alter, that they they organize our experience.
Our experiences are the organizing process of the mind. They’re not separate. So our experiences are constructed the basis of of our self, of of these conceptions. There’s a perhaps, you know, maybe I found this quote. It’s rather it’s just a little story, but maybe it begins to give some some sense about what we’re trying to get at.
Several years ago several several years ago, when I was moderating a seminar of psychiatrists and clinicians, the real dimension of this affirmation process was brought home in a very simple and powerful way. We were discussing the use of hypnosis in therapy. At some point during the discussion, one of the participants began to speak in a manner that riveted everyone’s attention. He was a psychoanalyst, the oldest and most respected member present. Only once in my life, he said, did I ever use hypnosis with a patient.
It was in the second World War when I was in the Swiss Army. There was this poor soldier in front of me and for some reason I decided to test whether or not he would be susceptible to post hypnotic suggestion. I easily brought him into trance and simply by way of experiment, I suggested to him that after he awoke he would stamp his foot three times whenever I snapped my fingers. All perfectly standard procedure. After I brought him out of the trance, we spoke for a while.
I dismissed him, and just as he was leaving the room, I snapped my fingers. He immediately responded and stamped his foot according to my suggestion. Wait a minute, I shouted. Tell me, why did you stamp your foot? His face suddenly turned red, beet red.
Damn it all, he said. I’ve got something in my shoe. The speaker slowly puffed on his pipe, and his face became extremely serious. The rest of us could not understand understand why he seemed to be making so much of this phenomenon of post hypnotic fabrication. But he maintained his silence, staring somberly down the length of his pipe.
No one else said a word. It was obvious that he was trying to formulate something that he took to be quite important. Then, with his face suddenly as open as a child, he looked up at me and said, Do you think the whole of our psychic life is like that? A strange and rather awkward silence followed. Some of the company felt that this man, whom everyone acknowledges a great practitioner, was having a temporary intellectual lapse.
But the others, myself included, were struck by the extraordinary feeling he had put into this. This simple question, as though he were at that very moment internally revising everything that he understood about the mind. Everyone was looking at me, waiting for me to reply. And in fact, what he was driving at had already dawned on me. But before I could speak, he went on in exactly the same way, except that his face now register not only amazement, but something akin to horror.
Do you think he said that every moment that every movement we make, every word we say, every thought we have is like that. Could it be that we are always fabricating in a sort of low grade post hypnotic haze? Because there’s one thing I am sure of, though only now do I see its importance. The moment I asked the soldier why he had stamped his foot, there was a split second when he realized that he had not done anything at all. A moment when he realized the fact was simply that his foot stamped the ground all by itself.
By asking him why he had stamped his foot, I was in effect suggesting to his mind that he had done something. In short, I was still hypnotizing him. Or rather, I was playing into the general process of hypnosis that is going on all the time with all of us from the cradle to the grave. The contradiction made him blush, and the true facts about his foot stamping were blotted out of awareness. I was totally fascinated with where the thought of this speaker was taking him.
He went on for quite a while weaving his speculations around the possibility that the whole of a man’s psychic life is a product of suggestions coming from different sources, some immediately external, others stored in the mechanisms of memory. And this whole process, he concluded, is constantly screened from awareness by the belief, also conditioned into us, that we are acting individual selves. So the decision informs the perception. You know, believing that such a self must exist, we perceive it to exist. Most but most of what we take as indicating a self merely indicates a belief in a self.
It cannot be considered in in any way pointing to anything that exists as an entity corresponding to an actual self. We definitely have a belief in a type of self. And this out of this belief, a type of self which corresponds to it appears. But that does not mean in any way that it exists in reality, that it’s a findable self, that if we analyze, we would be able to find it. The mere sense or the mere appearance of a self cannot be used as evidence of the existence of a self.
So, you know, again, we have to come back. We have to