by Tang Huyen

"His adult life was like the logical deduction from the initial choice that he made in his youth. Once that choice (or non-choice) was made, the rest of his life merely followed suit, in logical deduction. Nothing new happened. It was all pre-fabricated — in religious terms: pre-ordained."

These are issues that form the ground of our idea of
what it is to be human, and I have said many times
onboard that many major options are fated. Either
we do not make them but they are made for us, in
our stead, or the dice is so loaded that we have no
choice about what choice to make. And I'm talking
about fundamental choices, major existential choices
that will determine the rest of our lives. Once they
are made, we invest so much energy to implement
them and are so committed to them as part of our
self-image that the option of changing them is vastly
too costly to even think about. Perhaps the option of
changing them is blocked out of our consciousness
altogether.

Sphere and Fu got knocked out flat by spiritual
experiences that they got in their teenage years and
never recovered, still haven't recovered now
(Sphere presumably in his fifties, Fu in his sixties).
For the rest of their lives (the entirety of their adult
lives) they stood in thrall to them, took them to be
the acme of their lives and used them as yardstick
to measure the rest of their lives. Of course when
held up to such norms and standards, the rest of
their lives would be lacking and failing, empty and
worthless.

At least Sphere was honest and knew that they
never occurred again afterward, during the rest of
his life (the entirety of his adult life), but couldn't
let go of them and take them to be merely pleasant
memories. He lived his whole adult life in the shadow
of such a massive and overwhelming flash. He lived
his whole adult life in the past, so to speak, and the
nostalgia of that brief, glorious past dwarfed his
present, though he knew that there was no going back.

Fu was different. He started reading Buddhist and
Zen books at fourteen, around the time his father
died after an hour of agony due to a heart attack. At
sixteen or seventeen he had his major garden-variety
experience, which impressed him for the rest of his
life. Shortly thereafter, in his early adulthood, he
landed in Thailand by pure accident, couldn't bring
the experiences back, approached the Thai masters
of the Theravāda, learnt meditation (the jhānas, etc.),
but was too much of an extrovert mesmerised by
external stimuli to succeed in it. He then had a choice,
a stark choice: either own up to reality and admit that
his teenage experiences were gone for good, or fool
himself into thinking that they still recurred all along
his adult life. Faced with such an existential choice,
which would affect the rest of his life (the entirety of
his adult life), he chickened out and chose to fool
himself.

Had he chosen to be honest to himself and to admit
that he had lost the teenage spiritual experiences for
good, such a decision would have been a Buddhist
decision — one of honesty, openness, letting go —
and would have turned the experiences into Buddhist
experiences, whatever they had been. From such a
Buddhist decision of letting go of his teenage spiritual
experiences, he would have opened up new perspectives
and enabled other Buddhist experiences that would
have been bigger and better than his teenage
experiences.

But he fatefully chose instead to hang on to his
teenage experiences and to fool himself into thinking
that he still could bring them back all along his adult
life. From that moment on, mental culture would never
work, and all he would have was a ghost of the past,
which totally dominated his present. He tried to fortify
it by reading on Buddhism and Zen, to build up an
intellectual understanding, but all he got was an
intellectual understanding. From that ghost of the past
(now forty-five years old) and his intellectual
understanding, he fooled himself into thinking that he
was "fully enlightened."

Once he made that decision, he would have to live
the rest of his life not in truth but in falsity — not as
he was (deluded and deprived of his teenage
experiences) but as he was not (fully enlightened and
able to experience his teenage experiences all along).

What is ironic about his self-deception is that he
preached exactly the contrary of what he practiced.
He preached Musashi's "openness on all sides," even
as he blocked himself from himself. He preached
forgiving oneself, even as he couldn't and wouldn't
forgive himself for losing those dear teenage
experiences. He preached that Buddhism is being
oneself (and not somebody else or something else,
like some ideal that one thinks up) even as he tried
his best to be somebody other than who he was and
what he did. For example, he was rigid and
unyielding, but since he took himself to be fully
enlightened and to him the enlightened must be
flexible, he therefore presented himself as flexible,
to himself primarily and only secondarily to others.

Fu lived his adult life, not as he was, but as he was
not. He lived a ghostly life.

Thus Fu built up a massive internal wall to protect
himself from himself. But when the crash came, it
found that the work had been done to help it, in the
form of that wall, and it needed only to fortify it and
ramify it further. If Fu had practised mindfulness,
he would have withstood the crash, contained it and
perhaps reemerged on the other side better off for
the experience. But he had practised the contrary to
mindfulness, in that he blocked himself from himself
to protect himself from himself, so his crash had
only to push his existing self-estrangement and
self-alienation further. The initial moment of the
crash occurred, and he had no inclination to face up
to the crash and fight it. He simply took defeat, once
more, and let it rip him.

Coming back to the question: had Fu any chance of
making a different decision in his youth? And if he
had made a different decision in his youth, would it
have helped him to face up to his crash in his old age
and fight it, and reemerge on the other side better
off for it?

Nope. It was fated. (At this level of attempts at
explanation, everything is going to be circular.) If he
had had the courage to face up to himself in his youth,
he would have done it. But he hadn't it, so he
surrendered. And once he made that first decision in
his youth, there was no way he could have faced up
to his crash in his old age. Facing up to the crash and
fighting it would have required self-awareness, but he
had spent his adult life blocking it. He chose to live as
something other than who he was and what he did,
and his crash took him from there and fulfilled his
wish — turning him into a zombie who didn't know
who he was and what he did. The way he lived his
adult life (namely, self-deception and bad faith to
himself) played right into the hand of his crash.
It was fated.

So he was "presented" with choices that he had no
hand in the forming of, and a choice once made is
made for ever. All his claimed mental culture didn't
help. Mental culture works only in openness and
honesty, and he couldn't stand himself and had to
resort to closedness and dishonesty to deal with
himself, so mental culture didn't work. The wall of
defence that he set up within himself to protect him
from himself blocked mental culture from working.
The rejected option — namely, to be open and honest
to himself and to face up to his reality — simply
ceased to exist and exert pressure. He had too much
self-stuff invested in self-deception to even allow it
into his consciousness.

Those teenage spiritual experiences acted like a bone
in his throat that he could neither swallow nor spit out.
And they happened perhaps forty years ago or more!

His adult life was like the logical deduction from the
initial choice that he made in his youth. Once that
choice (or non-choice) was made, the rest of his life
merely followed suit, in logical deduction. His crash
followed right in the logical premiss of that fateful
choice of his youth and merely developed it further.
Nothing new happened. It was all pre-fabricated (in
religious terms: pre-ordained).

Colophon

Posted to talk.religion.buddhism on 17 December 2006, in the "Just desserts (was Re: Straight or crooked?)" thread, in reply to Noah Sombrero quoting Brian Mitchell on the illusoriness of choice. Author: Tang Huyen. Message-ID: <[email protected]>.

A case study in what Tang Huyen calls the "pre-fabricated" life — the life whose entire arc is logically entailed by a single fateful choice, usually made in youth and usually involving how one handles a formative spiritual or psychological event. The figures of Sphere (honest about his loss, unable to let go) and Fu (dishonest, building self-deception into a wall that the crash then used against him) are two modes of the same pattern: refusing to let go of a peak experience. The Buddhist alternative is clearly stated — honesty, openness, letting go — which would have converted the teenage experience into a properly Buddhist one and opened larger possibilities. The determinism TH arrives at is curious: it is a fated determinism precisely because the resources for freedom (self-awareness, honesty) were the very things foreclosed by the first choice. Read alongside "Bad Faith" (<[email protected]>) and "The Vulnerable Type" (<[email protected]>) in the crash phenomenology cluster.

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

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