Looking for your True Self (I)

Xuefeng

August 5, 2012

Who are you and how much of your life do you control: all of it, some of it, any of it? Needless to say, no one can control their lives absolutely. If a person can control just one tenth of their habits, hobbies, behaviours, and words, then they are quite extraordinary.

Eighteen things are beyond people’s control, including their height, appearance, race, ethnicity, environment, era, birth date, birth place, parents, death, and so on. All these things are predestined and no one can do anything about any of them, but what about our habits, usual practices, hobbies, behaviours, words, and so on? Are these self-controllable? Let us look at two specific examples:

· As reported in The World of Unsolved Secrets, a pair of paternal twin brothers were separated from an early age in Ohio, the United States. They meet again after being separated for thirty-nine years only to discover that they both had received legal education and were keen on mechanical drawing and carpentry. Even more surprisingly, their ex-wives had the same first names, as did their sons, and even their second wives. In addition, both of them vacationed often in Saint Petersburg, Florida.

· A pair of paternal twin sisters had been separated since childhood for more than ten years. They agreed to meet at a train station and one sister temporarily decided to get a hairdo. When they met, she was taken aback, because her sister had also gotten a hairdo. They also wore identical jackets, skirts, shoes, and carried identical purses. Both of them were utterly amazed.

We can draw conclusions about these. Both pairs of siblings had almost identical habits, hobbies, behaviour, and appearances, though they had been separated from early ages. When they did not know that they had twins, everything about them was taken as individual preferences; they had all believed that they controlled their own habits and hobbies until they found that their twins were almost exactly the same. Everything that they believed to be self-determined turned out of to be from invisible consciousnesses rather than their own wills; the habits, hobbies, even the names of their wives and sons had been pre-arranged and predestined.

These cases represent identical twins, but what about the rest of us? What habits and hobbies do we choose for ourselves?

The answer is NONE! Our Habits, practices, hobbies, interests, behaviours, and choice of words are not our own decisions, but controlled by mysterious consciousnesses.

What are these mysterious consciousnesses? They are our true selves. The selves that we believe we are, are not our true selves but false ones, and our true ones are the mysterious consciousnesses that control our hidden ones behind our appearances. Case in point: a woman's husband was killed in a war; when the bad news came, she grieved and wailed sadly, but her true self cried with joy, “Finally I'm free!”.

Nine people out of ten are pretentious. So, most of the people we face are false, do not talk sincerely, and are hypocrites. We often face cognitive dissonance when our true selves conflict with our false ones. Our false selves tend to be pretentious, to cater to the times, the public, and others; our true selves have nothing to do with them, and that is Tathagata.

How does one find their true self?

Continue to “Looking for your True Self (II)”.