Session 2, The Sovereign Mind: Defusing the Propaganda of the Mind
We must see for ourselves that we are standing on shaky, not solid ground.
The late Jesuit priest, author, and psychotherapist Anthony de Mello wrote in his book Awareness, “When you fight something, you’re tied to it forever. As long as you’re fighting it, you are giving it power. You give it as much power as you are using to fight it.”
We have fought with our failings and emotions. We have resisted them. We have buried them with our addictions. Then, as de Mello points out, we renounce them: “When you renounce something, you’re tied to it. The only way to get out of this is to see through it. Don’t renounce it, see through it. Understand its true value, and you won’t need to renounce it; it will just drop from your hands.”
Haven’t we all noticed the truth in what de Mello writes? Sometimes, a seemingly entrenched part of our personality falls away, and we don’t realize it until months later—a part of our mind simply saw through it.
We have seen that what we call the self is based on very shaky ground. It is helpful to remind ourselves of David Hume’s profound observation:
For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I can never catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception.
Hume saw this for himself in the 18th Century.
As we have also seen, when we live through our shaky narrative, we create problems for ourselves and others. We become like an NPC (non-player character) in a video game, living entirely through our conditioning. Each day becomes a slight variation of the day before. The characters and situations may change, but at the end of the day, we wonder why we act and react in the same old ways.
I can’t say this enough: this is not a mere intellectual exercise. We can put what we are learning into practice every day. We know more about what we are not, our reactions, our conditioned responses, our habitual states of mind, than who we really are. Like Hume, we must see for ourselves that we are standing on shaky, not solid ground.