We cannot step into the same river twice for the water is constantly flowing. We, also, are not the same person from one minute to the next. Constantly we acquire new information and new experiences as we simultaneously forget old information and old experiences. Yesterday we can recall what we had for dinner the evening before. Tomorrow, we will no longer be privileged to recall that menu, unless perhaps, it was a sumptuous feast of some kind...or else we always eat the same food and can say with certainty, "It was rice and bean curd."
The illusion of life is the opposite of the illusion of the cinema. In the cinema a series of individual images are run together to form the illusion of continuous movement. In life, we intercept continuous motion, isolate and freeze an image, and then name and fix it as though it were a concrete, individual object or event. We don't always agree on fixing the
moment in time. What is a young woman? If a man is ninety years old, lots of women are young women.
Well, we may have a better idea of why our small self misperceives reality, but still we wonder, why do we have two selves in the first place?
The answer is simply because we are human beings.
Our small self provides us with that conscious sense of continuing identity that allows each of us to know, "I am today who I was yesterday and will be again tomorrow." Without it, we could not organize the sensory data that assail us. Without it, we would have no sense of belonging or of being connected to others. We would have no parents or family to call our own, no spouse or children, no teachers or friends to guide and encourage us. Our small self gives us our human nature.
As we grow we discover that our lifeline's thread is not a long continuous strand with each event separately strung on it like beads on a rosary. No, the thread weaves itself into a net, an interdependent array of knots. We cannot remove a single knot without affecting the others. We cannot pull out a single line of our history without, perhaps, altering the
entire course of it. This network of information and experience, of conditionin and association, of memory and misunderstanding soon becomes a complicated and bewildering tangle; and we become confused about our place in the scheme of things. When we are young, we see ourselves at the center of our universe, but as we get older, we are no longer certain of our position or our identity. We think, "I am not the person I was when I was ten years old, but neither am I anybody different." We soon wonder, "Who am I?" Our ego self has led us into this confusion.
Confusion leads to calamity, and then life, as the Buddha noted in his First Noble Truth, becomes bitter and painful.
How do we clear up this confusion? We turn our consciousness around. We reject the outward world's complexity in favor of the inward world's simplicity. Instead of trying to gain power and glory for our small ego self, we turn our consciousness inward to discover the glory of our Buddha Self. Instead of making ourselves wretched seeking to be a master of others, we find joy and contentment in being One with our Buddha Self and in serving others
