by Tang Huyen

Tang Huyen was among the most philosophically rigorous voices on talk.religion.buddhism in the 2000s, working a sustained critique of spiritual self-deception across dozens of posts. This piece opens with the warrior frame — the practitioner who trains precisely for the moments of challenge, in whom mindfulness functions as a bulwark that redeems all options — and then pivots to its clinical opposite: the person who cannot stand themselves as they are, who inverts every incoming signal to protect a rigid self-view, who spends a lifetime in systematic bad faith.

The mechanism Tang Huyen identifies is signal inversion: the bad-faith practitioner does not merely ignore negative self-information but converts it — so that signals about delusion become confirmations of awakening. When the crash arrives (midlife crisis, post-midlife crisis, any major challenge), the wall built over decades has everything prepared in its favour. Mindfulness would have contained it; self-falsification fortifies it. They could fool themselves, they could fool others — but they could not fool Mother Nature. She wacked them for it. The existentialist vocabulary here (mauvaise foi, Sartre's term for the project of making oneself a fixed object to evade the responsibility of freedom) is carried lightly but precisely.

Posted to talk.religion.buddhism on June 21, 2006, in reply to norbu_tragri. Message-ID: <[email protected]>. Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.

My experience has been that when life gets crazy, I then
have the best chance of putting my practice (my prior
practice) to use. A warrior trains all his life for just the
moments when he fights, so the cultivator trains for the
moments of challenge. Mindfulness does the job, whether
one chooses the option of having a moment of distance —
not getting caught-up in the waves — or the option of
diving in and going with the flow (though one has to take
care not to bite more than one can chew). Openness to
oneself and honesty to oneself are always present and
adjacent to mindfulness. When mindfulness is there, the
options that one chooses from moment to moment are
not that important. Mindfulness is their bulwark and
redeems them all.

This is the opposite to the life strategy of some people,
who cannot stand themselves as they are and have to
block themselves-as-they-are from themselves and
invert themselves in order to make themselves acceptable
to themselves. They hold a rigid self-view and force
everything to fit it in order to become conscious to them.
So, say, they take themselves to be awakened, develop
a priori the consequences of that, and allow only
incoming signals about themselves that fit just that
category. If any incoming signal about themselves is
about to tell them that they are deluded and not
awakened, they immediately block it and invert it, so
that it ends up telling them that they are awakened. Thus
they spend their entire lives in self-blocking and
self-falsification. They live with an inverted image of
themselves, and can only live with an inverted image
of themselves. Existentialist philosophers would say
that they live in bad faith with themselves.

When some major challenge like, say, a crash aka
mid-life crisis or post-mid-life crisis hits them, they
are totally unprepared to deal with it. They have never
prepared themselves to deal with it by means of
mindfulness. If anything, they have systematically
practised the contrary to mindfulness, have built up a
wall within themselves to hide themselves from
themselves and protect themselves from themselves,
so the crash, when it comes, has everything prepared
in its favour. The wall that they set up decades ago
to defend them against themselves and protect them
against themselves is already there, and the crash
merely fortifies it and ramifies it, to break them into
multiple parts that don't know each other and don't
recognise each other's actions. So when the crash
comes, they immediately become zombies who don't
know who they are and what they do.

They desperately bounce around trying to find out
who they are and what they do, but there is a logical
problem, in that they don't know who they are and
what they do, so if there are pieces that belong to
them (and almost all they do is projection, so in fact
the world, by means of their projections, reflects
themselves back to them from all around), they
don't recognise any of them as their own. They
wallow in themselves but don't recognise themselves.

Mindfulness would have kept the crash under control,
contained its effects, and would perhaps have been
able even to reverse its effects, so that its practitioners
would come out on the other side better off for the
experience, but they never cultivated it. They rather
cultivated the contrary to it, namely self-blocking and
self-falsification. So their entire life strategy plays right
into the hand of the crash. They could fool themselves,
they could fool others, but they couldn't fool Mother
Nature. She wacked them for their self-deception. The
moment the crash comes, they're goners. And there is
no going back. That's what a life strategy entails.

Colophon

Posted to talk.religion.buddhism on June 21, 2006, in reply to norbu_tragri's observation that when life gets crazy there is usually no time to practice. Interlocutor: norbu_tragri. Author: Tang Huyen. Message-ID: <[email protected]>.

The post introduces the existentialist vocabulary of "bad faith" (mauvaise foi, Sartre's term for the project of making oneself into a fixed object to evade the responsibility of freedom) into the Buddhist diagnostic. The mechanism Tang Huyen identifies is signal inversion: the bad-faith practitioner does not merely ignore incoming information about themselves — they invert it, so that negative self-signals are converted into positive self-confirmations. The crash defeats this mechanism not through insight but through brute force: Mother Nature does not accept the inversion. This post extends the corpus's self-deception theme ("Self-Deception as Obstacle," <[email protected]>) to its endgame. Compare also "Dysharmony" (<[email protected]>) on the same arc from a 2004 posting. The introduction here is new: the warrior frame, the inversion mechanism, and the zombie aftermath.

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

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