When we or our children watch television, we are being entranced or, more bluntly, hypnotized. In fact, when we engage with much of our everyday world we are unaware that it is geared to keep us entranced (asrava). Still, we believe we are fully awake yet, if truth be known, we are sleep walkers. We lead unawakened lives.
The psychologist Charles Tart argues in his book, Walking Up, that what we like to call reality may not be so real. In fact, much of what we believe to be true about our ordinary reality is only conditionally true (samvriti). Reality, in this wise, is a consensus reality which is the result of being put into a consensus trance.
The induction methods may include parenting, our association with other people and friends, the media, in general, such as newspapers, television, radio, the Internet, including films, and even religion. These all conspire to induce and maintain the consensus trance. Even those who are prominent in entrancing us are in a consensus trance—maybe one induced in them a generation or two ago when they were children.
So how do we know we are in such a trance? Well, the answer is not so easy. Often, we only know we have been in a trance when its spell (asrava) has been broken. Not surprising, too, many who are deeply involved in the consensus trance would, naturally, deny they are. Nobody wants to admit that they are operating under numberless post-hypnotic suggestions.
Important in this train of thought, the original understanding of hypnosis was believed to involve the transference of one mind to another where say, a suggestion, dominated another’s mind. In this wise, hypnosis was conceived to be an instrument by which to impress a foreign idea on the mind of another. Moreover, as Freud discovered, by using post-hypnotic suggestions, behavior, such as opening an umbrella in doors can be induced without the patient being able to explain or be aware of why he or she opened it. At this point the patient also becomes defensive, if not altogether angry, if pressed as to why they opened the umbrella indoors. Here enters the unconscious: the hidden world of active suggestions. But for Buddhism, perhaps it might be better said, here also enters unawareness as the susceptibility to suggestion including all forms of sensory impressions (asrava).
At this point, I would argue that much of preliminary Buddhist training involves breaking the present trance we are under through the practice of awareness thus, to wake up from the consensus trance. For it is only by being free of the consensus trance that we can see the doorway to the Buddha's path inside of us which is self-verifying—a path that requires neither master nor follower.
Such awareness is not easy to master—especially, for one in a trance. In the beginning, it demands that the Buddhist practitioner be constantly aware of their physical actions from such small things as turning a doorknob, to taking a third person perspective with regard to the flood of their thoughts and emotions, being able to describe them freely (i.e., without hesitation) and in detail. In Zen training, as passed on in the tradition, one of its key features has always been the insistence of cultivating self-awareness: not doing things in a trance or behaving with an unalert, boring (middha) attitude. It cannot be stressed enough how heavy the demand for self-awareness is in Zen training. And if it is not there—Zen training is nothing less than Zen brainwashing. One, in this respect, is being put into a Zen consensus trance.
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