Saturday, August 14, 2021

the swarming throng of "I"

 
 
 
 A detail from the Sea Journey: People Without Borders by Erub/Lifou Project, commissioned for APT9.
 
 

The secret teachings lead the pupil further. 
They teach him to look, with the same serene indifference, 
at the incessant working of his mind and the physical activity 
displayed by the body. 
 
He ought to succeed in understanding, in noting that nothing
 of all that is from him, is him. 
He, physically and mentally,
 is a multitude of others.

This "multitude of others" includes the material elements—
the ground, one might say—which he owes to his heredity,
 his atavism, then those which he has ingested, which he has inhaled 
from before his birth, by the help of which his body was formed, 
and which, assimilated by him, have become, with the complex forces 
inherent in them, constituent parts of his being.

On the mental plane, this "multitude of others" includes many beings
 who are his contemporaries: people he consorts with, with whom he chats, 
whose actions he watches. 
 
Thus a continual inhibition is at work while the individual absorbs
 a part of the various energies given off by those with whom he is in contact, 
and these incongruous energies, installing themselves in that which
 he considers his "I", 
form there a swarming throng.





~ Alexandra David-Néel and Lama Yongten
frjom The Secret Oral Teachings
 in Tibetan Buddhist Sects
 
art from A detail from the Sea Journey: 
People Without Borders by Erub/Lifou 
Project, commissioned for APT9.
 
 with thanks to Love is a Place

 
 
 
 

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