by Tang Huyen

When they erected a wall between themselves and themselves, they didn't expect it to take on a life of its own, overtake them and overrun them.

I have often said over the years that honesty to
oneself and openness to oneself are the sine
qua non of mental culture, in the absence of
which no mental culture of any kind is going to
be beneficial.

Buddhist cultivation aims at the dropping of
the self, a product of mentation, and the self,
however illusory, is the centre of resistance
against openness to what happens. When the
self is present, it opposes what happens
(especially what happens internally in the
mind) and filters it according to its agenda,
which is of course an agenda of
self-justification, self-validation, and
self-perpetuation (or alternatively self-hatred,
self-rejection, self-condemnation).

In Buddhist cultivation one opens up oneself
to oneself and drops all baggage (the self),
with only mindfulness of what happens left.
Mindfulness spans the whole course of
cultivation, and one begins cultivation with
mindfulness and ends it with mindfulness.
But if one rejects oneself or hates oneself
or lies to oneself, one can't even begin
mindfulness, because mindfulness requires
openness of oneself to oneself and honesty
of oneself to oneself.

Some people hang on to something that they
can't have anymore, like some spiritual
experiences of teenage which never recur
again after that tumultuous age, and measure
the rest of their life according to those
experiences. Of course the rest of their life
(their entire adult life) is going to be a failure
when measured against those teenage
experiences, so they resort to a primitive lie
to themselves, namely that they still have
those experiences all along during their
adult life. But in doing so they have to filter
and interpret violently almost the whole
content of their psychic life to make it fit that
lie, and this is bad faith to themselves at
heroic scale. Mindfulness is impossible,
because mindfulness requires openness of
oneself to oneself and honesty of oneself to
oneself, and here they are lying to themselves
almost across the board. In effect they can
never even begin Buddhist cultivation,
regardless of externalities, because they can
never practice mindfulness. And in the
absence of mindfulness they tend to be edgy,
jumpy, frenetic, and driven by external
stimuli, a behaviour which they exhibit
profusely on these boards.

What is ironic about these people is that they
preach exactly the contrary of what they
practice. They preach Musashi's "openness on
all sides", even as they block themselves from
themselves. They preach forgiving oneself
even as they can't and won't forgive
themselves for losing those dear teenage
experiences. They preach that Buddhism is
being oneself (and not somebody else or
something else, like some ideal that one thinks
up) even as they try their best to be somebody
other than who they are and what they do, or
more exactly they try their best to put up a
self-image which is the contrary of who they
are and what they do. For example they are
rigid and unyielding (especially in their
scientistic-physicalist worldview), but since
they take themselves to be fully enlightened
and to them the enlightened must be flexible,
they therefore present themselves as flexible
— to themselves primarily and only secondarily
to others. (In addition their
scientistic-physicalist worldview reduces
everything to matter and denies spiritual
experiences, hence serves as a fall-back
defence, so that they can tell themselves that
since there are no spiritual experiences
possible, they never lost any spiritual
experiences anyway because they never had
them in the first place.)

They never realise the irony of their situation
(which is a voluntarily self-imposed situation),
namely that their very pretending to have
those spiritual experiences of teenage the
whole time through actually blocks them from
ever having any spiritual experiences again.
For by lying to themselves, they block the
openness to themselves and honesty to
themselves that would make spiritual
experiences possible. And they never realise
that by deceiving themselves so systematically,
they in effect declare to themselves that their
life is not worth living. They only live a sham,
and a sham is not worth living.

They could end the impasse by simply
opening up themselves to themselves and
being honest to themselves (and owning up
to themselves that after their teenage they
never had those spiritual experiences again),
and that openness and honesty could well
open up the possibility of having further
spiritual experiences, even experiences that
are better than those that they had in their
teenage. But that courage is exactly what
they never have. They don't know how to live
in truth, but only know how to live in sham.
It's their existential choice.

They create their own world by their thought
and lock themselves up accordingly (in their
own thought, which serves as their own
prison), in deadly finality, leaving themselves
no way out. They cause suffering to
themselves and inflict suffering on themselves,
all for hanging on to those fleeting teenage
spiritual experiences that, as Buddhists, they
should not have taken seriously in the first
place.

Those teenage spiritual experiences act like a
bone in their throat, that they can neither
swallow nor spit out. And they happened
perhaps forty years ago or more. They still
hold their owners captive forty years or more
after their occurrence, and their owners make
wild claims of freedom and liberation.

Tang Huyen

Colophon

Posted to talk.religion.buddhism on November 4, 2005, in reply to Lee Frank on the relationship between self-deception and Buddhist cultivation. Author: Tang Huyen. Message-ID: <[email protected]>.

The argument has a clinical precision: self-deception is not merely bad ethics but a structural impossibility for Buddhist practice, because mindfulness — the instrument of cultivation from beginning to end — requires openness of oneself to oneself as its precondition. The ironic case Tang Huyen describes is logically tight: practitioners who lie to themselves about their spiritual state must block mindfulness in order to maintain the lie, and in blocking mindfulness they block the only mechanism by which Buddhist cultivation could restore what they claim to already have. The self-deception thus self-seals: it prevents the very thing that could correct it. The Christian concept of "presumption" — using a spiritual framework to protect and justify the ego rather than dissolve it — is Tang Huyen's chosen name for the pathology. "The bone in the throat that can neither be swallowed nor spit out" is among the most memorable images in the corpus. To be read alongside "Opening versus Blocking" (earlier in the archive) and "The Poverty of Presumption" (Mar 6, 2005).

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

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