Inasmuch as I see myself as being this definite identity, my life is never going to go beyond the limits of ‘yes’ and ‘no’, ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. This is because ‘yes’ and ‘no’, ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ are the projections of that definite identity! The definite identity doesn’t (and absolutely can’t) understand the world in any other way; everything is either yes or no for the definite identity.

 

 

The DI lives in a world populated by its own definite categories and there’s no other way this could be, therefore. It has no time at all for the indefinite, the undefined, the uncertain, and this is the same thing as saying that it has no time for anything other than its own projections, its own assumptions. And yet what an absurd thing this is, to have no time anything other than one’s own assumptions! This is such an absurd thing, yet I can’t see it to be so because I have nothing else to go on apart from myself.

 

 

The DI is the yardstick with which I used to measure the world and the world that I construct for myself in this way is nothing other than my own completely unwarranted prejudices (or unsupported assumptions) reflected back at me. This way, my ‘completely unwarranted prejudices’ (or ‘unsupported assumptions’) get to seem true to me and this is the only way that they can get to seem true. They can’t seem to be true any other way precisely because they are completely unwarranted, because they are completely unsupported.

 

 

So what then – we might ask – are the DI’s ‘unwarranted prejudices’? What are the so-called ‘unsupported assumptions’ that I’m holding so tightly onto? This question is easily answered: what all my prejudices/assumptions come down to simply myself as this DI! That’s the long and short of it, there’s no more to say on the subject than this. I assume myself to be this definite identity and then I project it out onto the world.

 

 

My prejudices seem to be ‘true’ (and not mere pigheaded assumptions or unfounded prejudices) simply because I have taken it for granted that I am the DI – that’s my blind spot right there. Were the blind spot to vanish then all my prejudices would be immediately revealed as mere pigheaded prejudices, all of my completely unsupported assumptions would be pitilessly revealed as exactly that – unsupported. All of a sudden I will find myself in a world that has nothing to do with yes or no, right or wrong, success or failure, and what a remarkably different world that is! There’s no comparison, no way of relating the one to the other…

 

 

When I stop projecting my blunt categories out onto the world (when I cease my interminable aggression, in other words) then what happens is that fathomless peace arises. Fathomless peace is (needless to say) normally a complete stranger to me, and yet just as soon as I stop asserting the DI (which isn’t who I am but merely as we have said a pigheaded act of aggression) then fathomless imperturbable peace comes about; there is a boundless spaciousness that has nothing whatsoever to do with the meanness of our categories, nothing whatsoever to do with the churlishness of right and wrong.

 

 

So what is this ‘fathomless peace,’ this spaciousness like, we might ask? We have all had experience of peacefulness (even if not too often) but what exactly is fathomless peace? One fairly uncontroversial way of talking about it is to say that it is the complete lack of aggression. This goes deeper than it might sound however – it goes deeper than it might sound because aggression is all that we are, and all that we know. The DI is aggression personified, so ‘fathomless peace’ is really the absence of all our attempts efforts either to assert ourselves or not to assert ourselves (which comes to exactly the same thing).

 

 

Instead of ‘peace’ we could say ‘bliss’, which is another word that is often used in this connection. We tend to get confused when we think about bliss however. We think it’s something we can have, something we can earn or achieve. We personalise bliss, in other words, which is a very peculiar thing. Yet when we get excited about or in any way enamoured of ‘the state of being the state of being that comes about when the DI is no longer there’, aggressively asserting its categories, seeking one thing and rejecting the other, then this is frankly ridiculous. How can the definite identity get excited about its own absence – what exactly does it think that it is going to gain here? If we were to clearly understand that there is nothing to gain (because there’s no one there to gain it) then why on earth would we be getting so very enthusiastic about talking and thinking about bliss in the way that we do?

 

 

Ordinarily we personalize euphoria and dysphoria; the idea of not personalizing euphoria or dysphoria is utterly incomprehensible to us. When we get to understanding that there is something beyond the euphoria of succeeding and the dysphoria of failing, and that this ‘something’ is what the mystics call ‘bliss’ or ‘ananda’, then we personalize that instead!