Saturday, 9 February 2008

Self and Manifesting Kilesas


This is a map showing the three main delusions of Buddhism, greed, hate and delusion. The idea of the diagram is, after a long time observing the mind, it's possible to see many repeating varitions in thoughts and daydreams, on the same themes. So the self exists in the centre of the diagram. The are various fantasies in the mind, they are bason on aversion to something that happened in the past, or a desire for something to happen in the future etc.

There are some examples from an observation of my own mind. At the bottom left, it says 'school, starving and psychopath'. I've noticed there's a mental sequence that often plays, seemingly without my volition, in my mind, and it's about people, 'teachers and educators', being sadistic to me, cruel and hurtful (something that happened daily) and the fantasy continues (usually without my awareness at that point) to myself being at the same age and having decided not to eat anymore, I'm starving to death and free of the torment.

There's also a rarer fantasy, of myself at that age being diagnosed as having a psychopathic illness. I don't, incidentally! I don't even eat meat for pacifist reasons. But in the daydream, I've been diagnosed as dangerous, and the people around me are fearful and stay away from me.
So these two habitual fantasies, are based on aversion to the past.

But there's another daydream which starts often, which is being falsely accused of things I haven't done, usually by policemen, and going through the criminal justice system.
The word 'injustice' has been highlighted, because this is something that runs through all of them. In my past, there was this sadism and cruelty to me, and I've obviously carried it and now if fires avoidant type daydreams concerning my past and projections of the same basic emotion of pain I don't deserve as an aversion to a possible future.

The emotion this mindlessness causes fuels energy to the self which weaves the story of my past and future around itself and projects expectations onto other people and the future itself.
The idea of the diagram itself was to try and make some sense of the insight one gains into the self after an established mindfulness practice bears some fruit. Possibly the patterns that emerge can be linked to the life situation that one has created.

Although presently, I'm not sure this is a great idea. One has to bear in mind that the idea is to extinguish the self and be free of suffering, to pay to much attention to the mechanisms of self might in itself give it too much energy, and I'd be 'discovering myself with psychology' rather than 'freeing myself with Nirvana', thus it's not a practice I've continued.

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