Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 43-minute session, Ven Jampa Gendun dismantles the sense of a separate, persistent, autonomous self through close psychological analysis. He anchors the inquiry in a striking story: a wartime psychiatrist hypnotizes a soldier who stamps his foot on command, then instantly fabricates a reason — “something in my shoe” — raising the unsettling question of whether all mental life is a kind of low-grade post-hypnotic fabrication. Gendun then argues that roughly 99 percent of daily actions are involuntary, habitual, or unreflected, leaving no credible controller, and that even cases where intention and action align are better read as the mind describing habitual patterns rather than directing them. The session closes with the Buddha’s verse: “Suffering alone exists, none who suffers; the deed there is, but no doer thereof.” Suited to practitioners already working with concepts of selflessness who want an analytic, experientially grounded approach.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 04 3 PA 1990 08 10.mp3
UUID: b807d3f6-048d-46a1-9708-f919d93a3847
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: Three Principal Aspects of the Path 1988-1990 (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1990-08-10
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 43.7 minutes
Words: ~4,837
Refuting it, negating it. The characteristics of a such a type of self, of a such a type of I. I, you know, I am different from you. You know, I have a history and I have a future. And I will, I feel, I register, I act, all these various activities that go on.
I do all of these. These are as of second nature. Even animals have a sense of self. Most of our experience are seen in the context of a self. Someone who is experiencing experiences, sees, hears, sounds, thinks, thoughts, all in the context of a self.
There’s a self which is doing all these actions. Our most fundamental belief at the very root of our being practically, almost, is belief in a self. It’s a this is why the great fear can arise in coming in contact with the when doubt arises as to the nature of the self. Because there’s no there’s a sense that if I don’t exist, then nothing exists. Just because our misconceived model of the I doesn’t exist does not mean that I don’t exist.
So all of our experience are laden with a theory, a sense of self. All of our experiences are conditioned by our beliefs, and this is an important point. Our experiences are conditioned by our beliefs, contain our beliefs. Our experiences are constructed on the basis of our beliefs. You know, what we our experiences are based are constructed on the basis of beliefs.
There’s a very simple but, you know, quotation. It’s quite long, but it’s just a short little story. You know, this this with the statement I just made that one’s experiences are constructed on the basis of one’s beliefs with our you know, one of the hallmarks of Buddhism is that things don’t exist objectively from their own side, that it is what we might say nowadays a participatory universe, that our perception, determines what we perceive. Our beliefs were constructing this reality moment by moment, what we what appears to us, what we see, what we experience. It’s not as if things were out there hard cold facts just kind of forcing themselves upon us.
But in fact, you know, we’re interacting, participating in the arising of the world. It’s interdependent with our own minds, with our own beliefs, with our own assumptions, our ideas about the world. It’s not something out there divorced from ourselves, which simply impinges or throw forces itself on us, and this is objective reality. But all our we have we are preconscious processing goes on in which we construct a type of reality. And this is what appears to us.
And this idea of experiences are constructed on the basis of beliefs. Several years ago when I was moderating a so this is an account by a psychiatrist. Several years ago when I was moderating a seminar of psychiatrists and clinicians, the real dimensions of this affirmation process were 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 the 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 a 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. 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 beet red. Damn it all, he said, I’ve got something in my shoe. So the speaker slowly puffed on his pipe, and his face became extremely serious. The rest of us could not understand why he seemed to be making so much of this well known 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 obviously felt that this man, whom everyone acknowledged as 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 simple question, as though he were at the very moment internally revising everything that he’d ever understood about the mind. Everyone was looking at me, waiting for me to reply. 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 registered not only amazement but something akin to horror. Do you think, he said, 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, that though only now do I see it as important. The moment I asked the soldier why he had stamped his foot, there was a split second when he realized 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 the foot stamping were blotted out of awareness. The decision informs the perception. Most of what we take as indicating a self merely indicates a belief in a self and cannot be considered as anything that exists as an entity. There’s a the sense of self cannot be said to be evidence for the existence of a self.
This fellow, through this post hypnotic suggestion, when the doctor snapped his fingers reflexively, he stamped his foot. The foot just stamped. But as then when asked the question why, he filled in that I was the controller. I intended to stamp my foot. And he filled in a reason because there was something in my shoe.
And we begin to question. Perhaps this is all of our actions are done in the same way, that there are simply actions. And we fill in the thought, I am performing the actions. I am the controller of this action. I intended to do these actions.
You know, remember that we’re trying we’re beginning at a our approach to the understanding of selflessness on a very coarse level, examining a very coarse sense of self. You know, first off, this sense of of separateness. You know, if I if I look for my boundaries, I and not I, you know, where do I stop and and other begin? You know, substantially, the obvious place to look is at the is at the, the place my edge is the edge of my body. On the one hand, you know, I identify with objects on my book.
I identify with people, my child. I identify with causes in a clean environment, place, my country. All of these lie outside of ourselves physically. But if there’s a threat to any of these, I can treat them as if they were me. You know, most many parents would would be more upset when their child is threatened than when they themselves are being threatened.
The eye seems to be able to be extended outside of its physical boundaries as if when my child is being threatened, I am being threatened. On the other hand, sometimes, for example, if if your foot goes to sleep and it’s just kind of this numb there’s this hunk of flesh without any feelings. And it’s very there’s a sense that not identifying. This is this is me. I.
It’s like when you begin to walk around, you kind of just drag this this lump of flesh along with you as if it weren’t a part of you. It weren’t it wasn’t part of your I. Then the sense of separateness. The idea of separateness, where is the boundary, is quite vague, quite indefinite. There’s a sense of persistence, a continuous thread of an I running throughout all of my life.
But this sense of I, which has been doing all this running, is it many eyes in a relay race? The eye passes on a baton to the next eye. And this is it passes on the memories of the eye, the tendencies of the eye, the predispositions of that eye, the model of the eye, and passes on to the next eye. The child passes on to the teenager. Having passed those on, the memories change, the tendencies change, the model of the I changes, and the self changes.
And this, again, is passed on to the next I, the young adult. So Because I remember myself, I have a sense of an unchanging persistent I. So But all that that demonstrates is that there is a a rational continuity to the self, to our remembrances. That they have a chronology like like like building up a scrapbook about somebody’s life. There’s not there’s been nothing which persisted through this entire process.
Just the passing on and constantly changing. Then there’s a sense of autonomy, a sense of personal control. You know I have a problem. I have a decision to be made. I review.
I list all the possibilities. I think about it. I check up, and more and less in a rational way, And I weigh up all the difficulties, the pros and cons, and I I decide what I’m going to do. And when the time is right, I I make my I make my decision, and I act upon that. And I feel like, you know, that I feel very autonomous that I I I feel I’m in control of the situation.
I thought about it, came to a conclusion, and acted upon it. So in in examining this, the sense of control, the sense of autonomy about ourselves, that we have about ourselves, this process, the first thing to begin to look at, to note, is that the way we identify so closely and especially you know, what are we identifying with so closely in this decision making process? You know, we identify most closely with a selection and control of future action. You know, I have a strong sense that in some crucial respect, I am running the show. And the way in which I run it and exercise control is through the influence of my thoughts and actions.
These are the two things which we identify with most closely, my thoughts and actions. I am I the sense of I, the sense of controller through identifying with our thoughts and actions. The logic behind that is that for such an influence to be demonstrated, there follows that an action must follow a thought, you know, and the thought must agree with the intended. The action must agree agree with the intended thought. A particular action follows a thought, and that action must agree with the intended thought.
And dependent upon this logic, there’s a sense of control of the I being able to influence. There’s a causal link between thought and action. So if we begin to look at this and examine this. So it’s true that somehow what we do turns out in accord with what we intended. But much more of the time, there is no intention whatsoever, or no intention to act in any particular way.
Or when there is an intention, what actually happens? Does the intention, what actually happens match up with the intention? Of all our various actions we’re going to take a look at, the first category, we’re into two different categories. One is that category of actions in which there is no intentions whatsoever. The second category is the type of actions in which flow out of some particular intention, that we decided to do something and an action arose out of that.
This first category, the category in which the various types of actions in which there is no intention. There’s no thought preceding those actions. Actions which without intention, like reflex actions, involuntary actions. You know, I don’t decide to, for example, to circulate my blood or or to breathe. I don’t I don’t claim responsibility for digesting my food, For, like, I don’t claim responsibility for jerking my hand away from a flame or suddenly turning my head toward a sharp sound.
These are all what we call reflex actions, involuntary actions. Also, I have a what do you say? Little investment in my voluntary actions that occur as a matter of routine or habit. I get up. I make a cup of tea.
I get dressed. I go sit down. I scratch. I I look around. I stand up.
I I walk over to the window and look out the window. Go back to sit down. Scratch again. Look around. Feel bored.
All of this is habitual routine activity. We don’t have any sense of intention or will about any of this. It’s just going along as if by itself. Many of my daily choices are made without much or any conscious deliberation. Or another possibility, you want you you want a snack, you want to eat.
So you go to the refrigerator and you look at all, you scan all the various food in the refrigerator trying to decide to make a choice. You know, what am I gonna to snack? I’m hungry. What am I gonna eat? And and the dessert left over from yesterday kind of looks up at you and says, you know, take me.
Take me. Pick me. I’m the one. And so you you pick out the you pick up the dessert. If if someone were to ask you, why did you choose that dessert?
Why did you choose that? And you say, well, it looked good. Which, well, it looked good. Which is to say, which is the same as saying, I chose that one. If I chose that one, it must be good.
The thought is created to fit the action and not vice versa. You wouldn’t choose something that was bad. You chose and then you ask why did you choose that? Well, I must have chose it because it was good. I’m not going choose anything that was bad.
Because I chose that, I must it must be good. So the thought the thought fits the action, and the action is not fitting the thought. Another type of action in which there is no intention. These three categories of involuntary, routine, and unreflected, This process of choosing that dessert, unreflected. We have covered probably ninety nine percent of every action we do.
There’s involuntary, routine, and unreflected action. In our daily normal activity, this would constitute ninety nine percent of our actions that we do. And all of this, we have to admit that there’s been no personal sense of authorship or responsibility, controller about any of these actions. They’ve just been going on as if by themselves, ninety nine percent of our actions. So now we’re going to we’re left with a minority of occasions on which action is preceded by a decision, a decision or intention.
So we’re left with we’ve covered ninety nine percent of our actions in which we can say it was not necessary to posit a controller, an author, anyone responsible for those actions involuntary actions, unreflective actions, routine actions. We’re going to look at the rest of those one percent of our actions. Where there was some intention, some decision, and then out of that seemed to flow some action where it seems as if there’s an author, a controller, someone who’s responsible. Of these one percent, a sizable proportion of those, there’s no agreement between the intention and the action. There’s no matchup.
There’s no fulfillment. The intention is unfulfilled. The intention is forgotten so that the action remains uncommitted. I I I meant to be patient, but I lost my I lost my head. I meant to be patient, but I got angry.
I went to mail the letter, but I forgot. I I had decided to study, but there was a good movie on television. There was an intention, but the the object of that intention was never fulfilled. I forgot. I got distracted.
I changed my mind. I lost my head. Whatever. In all of these, there is a mismatch between the intention and the action. We tend and we tend to overlook these, instances or we try to rationalize them.
You know, I really didn’t mean to say that. I couldn’t control my anger. Now we we don’t feel responsible. We’re trying to avoid responsibility that we’ve done something that we didn’t intend. I didn’t mean to say that.
I lost my head. That wasn’t myself. So these are kind of the the evidence of the emptiness of the self. I didn’t mean I I lost my head. I lost control.
I didn’t mean to do that. The self becomes kind of has a sense of being rather impotent. It it can’t quite do what it wanted to do. It’s in this way, it’s rather uncomfortable. It doesn’t fit into our vague belief about our that we have about ourselves, that we’re in control.
That we but we can always say, oh, I really didn’t care anyway, or I changed my mind. Which changing I changed my mind. I changed my mind. We say that quite a lot. This the re identification with the made up mind.
It’s like an aligning ourselves instead with some decision maker and controller who can choose to override the mind. We’re we’re identifying with some controller who can choose to override the mind. I changed my mind. First, we had a decision and then something overrides that. I changed my mind.
Now we can look at those cases where our self control appears to manifest. Those actions which are associated with the sense of control. I meant it. I meant to and I did. I I said I wouldn’t and I didn’t.
There’s a feeling that that we stand outside of the flow of events, this Automa self, and that we influence them. There is a controller over these events. Suppose we had to make a decision. Now we we make up a list of pros and cons. We have some kind of, you know, weighing up all the possibilities, deciding what to do and how to do it.
So it’s a very, you know, a very rational, methodical process that we’re going through. I’m to come to this this decision making process. But we can we begin to look at it. How did you how did you draw up your list of considerations? Did you decide which ones to look at or did they just sort of come to you by themselves?
How long did you take over it? How how did you decide what was relevant and what was irrelevant? Did you decide to trust some authority and not another? Was your listing influenced by subconscious factors? How did you choose when to stop deliberating and come to a conclusion?
Having made your decision, did you think carefully about the manner of and timing of putting your decision into practice or did it just happen? When we begin to analyze seeming rational decision making process, the sense of autonomy and control begins to dissolve. We persist in selecting selectively focusing on some occasions that thought precedes an action. And there’s a congruent congruency between thought A and action B. But the belief informs the perception.
The belief informs the perception. Believing in a controller, we perceive a controller. Believing in a controller, we perceive a controller. And we filter out all of the instances where thought A and action B did not match up, where we thought A, B did not happen, but C or D happened. And then we selectively filter those out, those instances which aren’t congruent with this our belief in this controller that if I think A, then B is going to occur.
And all of those times when C or D occurred and B didn’t occur, we overlook those. Any time there’s a sense of lack of control, that there is no control. What is actually an attempt at prediction is conceived of as control. The ego is based upon reoccurring patterns, almost by its very nature. Reoccurring patterns.
There’s a regularity of tendencies. There’s a regularity of dispositions that’s predisposed to respond to similar stimuli in a similar way, in a particular manner. I can have a sense of what I might do before I do it. I can have a sense of what I might do before I do it. Thought in this way can be seen as a tentative description of what I’m going to do, as a tentative description of what I will what will happen, and not a prescription about what must happen.
Because there are certain cues, triggers in my environment, since I perpetually operate from these reoccurring patterns, unconsciously being aware of these triggers, these cues, I can know what I’m going to do. If I proceed If that’s preceded by a thought, then there This thought is a tentative description about what’s going to happen, but in no way determines a prescription about what I have to do. This thought is not determining the action. It’s just describing what’s going to happen after because the habitual nature, the tendency for ego to respond in a like manner to like stimulus, triggers, cues. I can know what I’m going to do unconsciously.
It looks like we’re beginning to tell a story about ourselves. It’s a very compulsive the more more strongly I I identify I with these thoughts and therefore believe them to be the seed of my control, the more compulsive does this anticipatory storytelling become and more concrete and solid the self appears. Now, in this, we’re not saying that we cannot direct our actions, But we are saying that the sense of a self who is the director of these actions, the thinker of the thoughts, the doer of the deeds is a misperception formed out of mistaken beliefs. The mind is the initiator of all actions, the creator of all things, but there is no control there’s no controller standing outside apart from the mind and body directing the whole process. And the Buddha said, suffering alone exists, none who suffers.
The deed there is, but no doer thereof. Nirvāṇa is, but no one seeking it. The path there is, no one who travels it. Maybe that’s Maybe that’s a good place to start. So we’re trying to, as I’ve said over and over again, become aware of these of our self representative models that we have about ourselves.
On this particular level we’re talking about a separate persistent, autonomous model of a self, which we identify as our actual self, an I. We bring it to awareness. That is to say, we try to identify it within our own actual experience. So it appears to us as if it were sitting in the palm of our hand. And we thought, the I, the self cannot exist in this way.
And we contradict it. We refute it. And slowly this model dissolves. And we move on to a more subtle type of misconceived self representative model of ourselves. And we bring it to awareness through our trying to actually experience it.
And with the this model is too also mistaken. The self cannot exist in this way because of the following reasons. We contradict it and it dissolves. And the the slowly the ego becomes more and more attenuated, more and more transparent like a rainbow beginning to dissolve in the sun. And one transcends the self, the misconceived self.
And this is experienced as freedom. So we’ll stop there. We’ll dedicate the positive energy that we create. Does anybody have a question about what we’ve talked about so far? Probably it sounds rather nice, and not at all.
So we yeah, there we were trying to contradict the sense of an autonomous self, this type of self which is in control. And this self is mainly identified with our thought and action because I think I’m going to raise my hand and then my hand raises. There’s a sense of controller involved in that. First we begin to look. Without having analyzed this, we have this vague notion that there’s a controller.
I think, I will, I intend, and something happens. Somebody’s in charge of this. What’s going on in this process? So first we say, Well, most of our actions there’s no intention anyway so we can’t use those as proof of controller. Ninety nine percent of our actions there’s no intention, no will.
Now we begin to look at those one percent of our actions. Many of our actions There is an intention, but there’s no action which proceeds from that which matches up with our intention. Sometimes we forget. Sometimes we get distracted. Sometimes what we try to do simply doesn’t turn out at all.
So there’s not always a matchup between what we intend and the action. Now sometimes there is a matchup between I intended to do something and it actually happened. This really reinforces our sense of a controller. We’re going to talk about it. Maybe I’ll just jump ahead a little bit about I made a statement that thought is a way It can be seen as a tentative description about what’s going to happen rather than a prescription.
That I have a thought and then something happens which is associated with that thought, which links up with that thought. So I have to say, Ah, I directed I intended to do something, and it happened, but it’s not necessarily so. What we’re saying here is we are picking up unconscious cues, triggers, feelings in our environment. For example, if let’s say I was sitting on riverbank sitting on this riverbank, every time I saw a cork go by, A few seconds later, a bottle went by. And I began to associate these two.
Whenever a cork appears, a bottle will appear shortly after. I can begin to play a game with myself. I can pretend I don’t see the cork. And I can think unconsciously. Is going to happen here is that we can develop we can cultivate an unawareness with respect to these triggers, these cues.
I can cultivate an ignoring quality in which I no longer constantly am aware of that cork but unconsciously I am. Unconsciously. And I can say, Let there appear a bottle, and a bottle appears. Yeah? A bottle appears.
And I seem to have gained tremendous control. I mean, I’m almost omnipotent. But what have I done? I’ve simply seen a cue unconsciously. What is a tentative description of what’s going to happen becomes as if a prescription of what must happen.
I say, Now a bottle shall appear, and a bottle appears. But it’s simply I’ve developed the ability to ignore a cue, that quirk, but I still am aware of it unconsciously. I picked it up. This is what yeah. It goes against our total thinking doesn’t it?
It takes a lot of analysis. Anyway, we’ve got a long way to go. We’ll keep going into it. We’ll dedicate positive energy that we create. May I quickly become an awakened spiritual teacher and lead each and every sentient being to the enlightened realm through these skillful actions.
May the supreme jewel of the awakening heart that has not arisen arise and grow, and may that which has arisen never diminish but increase more and more.