I proposed a scenario, to help us see how this mass of suffering – from feeling ill-at-ease, to being mentally afflicted, and on to violence toward self and others, and between nations – how all this mass of suffering arises.
(Of course, I’m not talking about mental problems arising primarily from organic causes. If someone has a motor accident which destroys a part of their brain, resulting in outbursts of violence, we don’t have to look for a model based in psychic causes, do we? Some aspects of that illness might respond to this understanding, but in general, it’s not these cases we are talking about, here.)
Beatrice is out riding, and she thinks she sees a friend on the trail coming in the other direction. But, it’s someone who it is impossible for her to be encountering. The friend died last year, from a horse spill.
In the initial moment she reacts as though she has had a valid recognition, and some old patterns of behaviour begin to arise – delight at seeing her friend arises. It’s as though there was a fusion of a familiar image with the perception of the unknown rider coming the other way, meaning she couldn’t tell the two apart.
The early Buddhist texts, the Nikāyas, suggest that something similar is happening in you and I, every day. The quality of our awareness is compromised by an entrenched error of perception, an error which confirms a distortion as ‘me’; as ‘who I am.’ Putting it simply, we are functioning as if we truly have an ‘I’ at our centre. It is a spanner in the works, but we have, as a species, become habituated to it. We have built philosophies, psychologies, and religions around this structure of the human thought. And, we seem to avoid questioning its claims to centrality. Why? Because we have come to believe we are that. To question it would be to undermine our sense of ‘identity.’
How does the Nikāya Buddha break the spell which the egoic centre has on a person? By the cultivation of intelligence and independent enquiry, introducing direct insight into the human ‘I’-making system. Basically he teaches people to study how their minds create the impression of a separate mind, and their limited identity. The practitioners in the Nikāyas learn to recognise processes such as those detailed in our diagram (see the new version, below).
