by Tang Huyen

"Such conditions are like vicious circles, from which there is no way out — or at least it so seems from their owners' point of view."

I have the hardest time understanding people who deceive themselves, sabotage themselves, or do anything nefarious to themselves long-term and in the big scheme — I am not talking about this little deception here and that little lie there, but only of unforgiving, wholesale, across-the-board attempts of such a nature. I suppose that when people do so, in full freedom and not forced by internal or external circumstances like poor health or political or religious pressure, it is due to physiological predisposition, especially if the people in question talk voluminously about freedom, liberation, transcendence, mysticism, and show lots of familiarity with meditation, Buddhist, Hindu, and other practices.

However, after investigating them, I find them really, truly stuck, hung-up, trapped, with no way out. They know practically all the technique of mental culture, Eastern and Western, can talk about any topic of mental culture, so know how to free themselves — but apparently never do anything to free themselves. The symptoms of something being amiss with them are anger, bitterness, agitation, all in extreme measures, and considered together, such symptoms would indicate extreme self-hatred.

So in plain language, they hate their own guts, all their adult lives, know all about the possible cures for it in mental culture, yet never put any such cures to practice to remediate their suffering, in whole or part. In a sense, they have to want to sabotage themselves, because they fail to make use of such profuse knowledge of technique to alleviate their suffering during their long adulthood, even when their circumstances would seem to favour such use. And let us remember that such knowledge tends to be sparsely distributed in the general population — few people even hear of it at all. It is supposed to be esoteric.

I infer that some conditions that are negative toward oneself, like self-hatred, are self-reinforcing: they both reinforce themselves and prevent their removal. Probably they make their owners feel so bad about themselves that they do not want to challenge such conditions, telling themselves that such conditions cannot be mended, are too big to be mended, and that they just have to live with them. Such conditions are like vicious circles, from which there is no way out — or at least it so seems from their owners' point of view. They so to speak break their owners ahead of time, so that their owners are cowed ahead of time and do not dare to challenge them. In that sense they loom larger than life and dwarf their owners. Their owners accumulate a reservoir of esoteric knowledge about mental culture, which could be used to mend them, but get cowed into submission and never put it into use.

It is all fated. There is no freedom in there.

Colophon

Posted to talk.religion.buddhism on 22 October 2008, in the "A squeaky wheel gets the oil" thread. Author: Tang Huyen. Message-ID: <[email protected]>.

This post addresses what TH elsewhere calls "the crash" — the total spiritual failure of long-term practitioners who know the theory perfectly but remain locked in anger, bitterness, and self-hatred. His analysis here goes beyond mere hypocrisy (say one thing, do another) to something more structural: the self-hatred is not a separate condition that prevents practice; it is the practice's negative mirror image, a closed system that both generates itself and prevents its own repair. The "vicious circle" is self-sealing: the worse one feels, the less credible it seems that anything could help; the less one tries, the worse one feels. TH's final lines — "It is all fated. There is no freedom in there" — are not theological fatalism but diagnostic realism. The tragedy is not that liberation is unavailable; it is that the condition of extreme self-hatred makes the available liberation effectively inaccessible. Compare with "Dysharmony" and "Prefabricated."

Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.

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