We’ve been looking at the beginning verses of Nagarjuna’s Letter to a Friend and were discussing the fourth verse with which Nagarjuna actually starts the main content of the letter. The fourth verse reads:
[4] The Triumphant has proclaimed six (objects) for continual mindfulness: The Buddhas, the Dharma, the Sangha, generous giving, ethical discipline, and the gods. Be continually mindful of the mass of good qualities of each of these.
As we discussed, this is speaking about the objects that we should try to keep mindfulness of as much as possible throughout the day and night. Mindfulness, as you remember, is the mental glue that holds onto objects and prevents us from losing them. We need to keep our attention on these six objects as much as is possible.
In our discussion, we went over how the Buddhas, Dharma, and Sangha are the Three Jewels of Refuge, the Three Rare and Supreme Gems. We have spoken about identifying what these three are. Also, last time, we spoke about how Maitreya in his text, The Furthest of the Everlasting Continuum (Uttaratantra,) has said that only the Buddha is the deepest source of safe direction for all of us wandering beings. When we talk about refuge, we are talking about an active direction that we are going in – putting that direction in our lives,. And the Buddha is the deepest source of this direction. We saw that this means that the entire path that we are aiming to go along, at least up to liberation if not all the way to enlightenment, is defined by its endpoint, which is Buddhahood.
When we talk about the deepest source of direction, we are talking about the physical bodies of a Buddha, the bodies with which Buddhas appear. We can also include in that the speech of a Buddha. We can also speak in terms of the enlightened mind of a Buddha, the Dharmakaya, and the voidness of that mind. That enlightened mind, the omniscient mind, is considered the full endpoint of the fourth noble truth, the true pathways of mind. The voidness of that mind is equivalent to the third noble truth, the full true stoppings of all the obscurations, both the emotional and cognitive ones. The Deepest Dharma Jewel, as a source of safe direction, are, again, the third and fourth noble truths on the continuum of a Buddha. The same is true of the Deepest Sangha Gem.
We saw that the difference between the third and fourth noble truths, these true stoppings and true pathways of mind – the omniscient mind – that define the Deepest Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha Jewels. is that in terms of the Deepest Buddha Jewel, the Buddhas are a source of inspiration, in terms of the Deepest Dharma Jewel, they are a source of actual attainments, attainments that we can achieve, and in terms of the Deepest Sangha Jewel, they are an enlightening influence – what can influence and move us to reach this goal. This is what we’ve covered up until now.
Now, there is also a very general presentation of why the Buddhas are the deepest sources of safe direction. This has to do with a list of four qualities that Buddhas possess, which, actually, are very, very inspiring:
A Buddha Is Free from All Fears
The first quality is that Buddhas are free from all fears for themselves. A Buddha has no fears about making the proclamation of what they have attained and no fears about making a proclamation of what they have rid themselves of – these obscurations and so on. If someone has no fear about these two things, then obviously they have nothing to fear in terms of outside dangers or things like that because they have no internal dangers. If they have no internal dangers, then they can face any type of external situation. Because of this, it doesn’t matter what other people might do to a Buddha. Whether they are nice or not, doesn’t matter at all; they have no fears.
A Buddha Is Skillful in Freeing Others from All Fears
The second quality is that Buddhas are skillful in using effective means to free others from all fears. So, Buddhas have all the abilities to help us. This is also in terms of when we are looking for a source of safe direction in life, what to follow, looking for what our goal, is what the inspiration is, what our model is, and so on. Then it’s wonderful that a Buddha is someone who doesn’t have dogmatic methods. Buddhas are very skillful in using means, or methods, that are effective for teaching each individual being. Not everyone has to follow the same thing.
Whether or not we actually meet the Buddha himself or get directed by a Buddha in terms of what would be helpful for us, individually, is not the most essential point. This is because we can learn from the Buddha’s teachings and see within those teachings what is the most useful for us. This also is very encouraging as a source of direction – that it’s not going to be something dogmatic and that one thing is what everybody must follow. And a Buddha has no doubts about this. A Buddha is free from these types of fears.
Also, there is nothing to fear in terms of being afraid that we won’t be able to find something that will be helpful for us in the teachings. “I’m afraid that I can’t help you” – a Buddha would never say that. A Buddha would never be in that position. Likewise, we don’t have to be afraid that a Buddha or the Buddha’s teachings can’t help us. It’s also very interesting that one aspect of the teachings is that a Buddha is able to teach in terms of anything. What does that mean? That means that a Buddha can take any type of activity, any type of regular worldly knowledge, and use it to teach somebody how to go further and further along the path.
Here’s one interesting example: There was one person, although I’ve forgotten his name, who lived at the time of the Buddha and who eventually became one of the arhats. He was noted for being very dull-witted, very stupid. He couldn’t learn anything, couldn’t remember anything, so the Buddha instructed him to sweep the temple. Buddha arranged it in such a way that when he swept the temple, by the time he got to one end there was again a lot of dust on the other side. So, he was forever sweeping. Buddha told him to try to remember to recite while he was sweeping, “Dirt be gone; dust be gone.” Then, he became a monk. He was actually an old man when he became a monk. He did the sweeping over and over again, and he did manage to remember “Dirt be gone; dust be gone,” repeating and repeating that. Eventually, he was able to realize that the dirt and the dust were actually the lack of clarity in his own mind, the obscurations in his own mind. Through that realization, eventually, he was able to work on the deeper teachings, and he reached the liberated state of an arhat. So, a Buddha can turn even sweeping a temple into a skillful method, an effective method, for helping somebody along the path.
Knowing this, I think, is very encouraging. A lot of people, when they study Buddhism and follow Buddhism, often think – and it’s really quite sad, actually – “Buddhism can’t really help me with my problems, so I need to go into psychotherapy.” Then they go into therapy, thinking that perhaps something is missing in Buddhism itself. Certainly, Buddhism offers a tremendous number of methods for being able to analyze what our personal problems are and how to overcome them. Also, Buddhism tends to go a little deeper than just analyzing what our parents might have done to us when we were small children because Buddhism goes into past life patterns and general patterns. The way that our parents treated us is just one example of a pattern repeating. So, Buddhism goes a bit deeper than psychology. Even so, one could also take therapy into the path. If the Buddha could turn sweeping the floor into the path and use it as a way to teach insights along the Buddhist path, then, likewise, a Buddha or a Buddhist teacher could take that therapeutic process as well and bring it onto the path.
So, if we think that going into therapy is because something is deficient in Buddhism… We tend to make a big split between the two. I don’t think that is necessarily the case or has to be the case. Now, it’s also not fair to Buddhism to say that Western psychotherapy is Buddhism or that Buddhism is just a form of therapy, although one could use various insights that one gets from therapy to help one go further on the path. So, it’s important that if we do turn to something like therapy, we don’t lose our direction – our safe direction – in terms of Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. This, I think, follows from these first two points that Buddhas are free from all fears for themselves. They would never think, “I’m afraid so I can’t help you,” and also that they’re skillful in using effective means to free others from all fear.
Just as sweeping the floor could be used as a method for getting us further along the path, therapy, too, could be used as a method for getting us further on the path and to supplement the path. It’s only the Buddha himself who can indicate the deepest source of safe direction – in other words, who can bring us all the way to the endpoint. We’re not going to reach enlightenment just by sweeping the floor. Similarly, we’re not going to reach enlightenment merely by Western therapy.
One has to keep the perspective of what our deepest refuge really is. This is the main point. We must keep mindfulness of that. This is what Nagarjuna is saying in this fourth verse: try to keep continually mindful of our refuge regardless of what other methods we might be using in our lives to help us develop.
Participant: How can we find the Buddha?
Dr Berzin: Also, how would we even know if we found a Buddha?
Participant: Even if he comes here, how would we know that this is the Buddha?
Participant: And how do we know we can trust this person?
How Do We Know We Can Trust Buddha?
Dr Berzin: How can we know that we can trust this person? This is not a very easy problem to solve. First of all, it’s quite clear that Buddhas like Buddha Shakyamuni are not around in a physical form now, although they also haven’t just totally disappeared. They’re off in some sort of Buddha-field somewhere, helping others, not just taking time out.
According to the teachings, it is the gurus who act as the magnifying glasses for our getting the inspiration from the Buddhas onto our own mental continuums. So, we can look to the spiritual teachers. Are they Buddhas? That gets into the whole question of what it means to see the teacher as a Buddha – that the teacher is a Buddha. That’s a very long discussion, and I don’t know if we really want get into that at the moment. As I have repeatedly indicated, it doesn’t mean that the gurus are literally Buddhas. However, we can focus on Buddha-nature through them, and so on. Also, they are certainly more developed than we are.
When the Buddha passed away, he didn’t appoint somebody to be in charge. He said, “Let my teachings, let the Dharma, be your instructions, your instructor.” This is also not easy because, of course, one gets into the whole question of what the authentic teachings of Buddha, and so on are. Shantideva looked at this question quite deeply in Bodhisattvacharyavatara because Buddha’s teachings were passed down orally. The problem, of course, is always language because translations are not always accurate. If we want to go deeply into the teachings, we really need to learn the original languages. That means going back to the Pali or Sanskrit because the Tibetan translations aren’t always accurate, let alone the Chinese. So that is a difficult question – to know what really is authentic.
In terms of trusting teachers, the only thing that we can do is to look at their examples to see how well-developed they are. And even if they’re the most highly-developed teacher, we need to investigate. As Buddha himself said, “Don’t believe anything that I say just because of faith in me and respect for me but test it out for yourself.” His Holiness the Dalai Lama always emphasizes relying on logic and reason. All of the teachings are based on logic and reason, although it might not be so obvious what the reasons behind it are; we need always to test it out. This means we should always have some sort of questioning mind with regard to the teachings.
Serkong Rinpoche, my own teacher, gave a wonderful example of this once when he was teaching in a Western monastery in France. He was teaching on voidness, from Shantideva, and he said something that was completely incorrect. I translated it, and everybody just very dutifully wrote it down without asking any questions. What Rinpoche said was absolutely ridiculous, absolutely outrageous; it was so obviously wrong. Then, in the next session, he said to the people, “Last time I said something that was completely ridiculous, completely incorrect. Didn’t any of you think? Don’t any of you use your minds? You just wrote it down.”
Teachers make slips of the tongue; translators make mistakes. You yourselves don’t write down accurately what you hear. If there is anything that seems strange, ask. Check up. This is the only thing that we can do. Also, try to gain access to as many teachings as possible. What very often happens is that we have very limited knowledge of the Buddhist teachings, only a tiny, tiny, little portion. Then we hear something that is not in that portion, and we say, “That can’t be correct. Buddha couldn’t have taught that!” That’s because we are very limited in our understanding. This is usually what’s behind sectarianism – thinking, “Only my tradition is correct, and all the others are ridiculous.”
But it is a very difficult question that you ask, a very difficult problem. How do we know that we can trust somebody? We also have to trust the teachings themselves. There are also so many examples of abusive teachers that we’ve had in the West – charlatans. Although it says that ultimately the Buddha is the deepest source of safe direction, from another point of view, it’s ultimately the Dharma that we need to look to because some teachers might disappoint us. In terms of the teachings themselves, Buddha gave a long explanation about what the interpretable and definitive teachings are and how we know what different levels of meanings of the teachings are – basically, how to analyze the teachings. There are four axioms (rigs-pa bzhi) for examining a Buddhist teaching: (1) the principle of dependency – what is it based on; (2) the principle of functionality – what effect it has; (3) the principle of establishment by reason – it must be supported by logic; (4) the principle of the nature of things – some things are true just by the very nature of things. All of these sorts of tools that the Buddha gave are for us to see what we can trust.
Now, within the scope of all of the teachings of the Buddha, how do we know which teachings suit us? This is also not so easy. Then to trust a teacher to be able to use skillful means to prescribe, like a doctor, what is best for us means we really have to trust that teacher. We can also work a little bit off of intuitive feeling, but often we mistake some sort of disturbing emotion for intuition. For example, we’re attracted to some sort of magical aspect of something that looks like exotic sex with tantra and so on, but that’s not intuition. That’s usually some form of desire, lust, or ignorance. It’s a very difficult problem.
Participant: I also think there is an aspect of thinking that finding a teacher will solve all of our problems. Then we find a guru, but he can’t solve all our problems. Then, maybe, we are disappointed.
Dr Berzin: Well, this is another point, a very important point, which is that we go to a teacher, thinking that they are going to solve all your problems, and they can’t. Buddha said himself that a Buddha can’t pull other people’s problems out like pulling a thorn out of their foot. We ourselves have to do the work. Also, it’s going to take three-zillion eons to reach enlightenment by the sutra methods, so we shouldn’t expect any instant results. Our expectations are unreasonable.
Participant: So, it gives false hope, then, when you say Buddha can solve all our problems.
Dr Berzin: It doesn’t give false hope if we go back to the point that I made at the beginning and that I made strongly last week, which is that the Buddha is the endpoint of the path and defines the path. A Buddha can give us methods to proceed all along the path, but a Buddha can’t give us a method that is instantly going to bring us from where we are now to enlightenment. When the teachings speak about enlightenment in an instant – this, His Holiness the Dalai Lama always says, is Buddhist propaganda.
Participant: Instant?
Dr Berzin: “Instant enlightenment” means that, in one instant, we become enlightened. It’s not as if, all of a sudden, we snap our fingers and we are enlightened because we’ve taken some magic pill. If we have the three-zillion eons of merit, of positive force, behind us, Buddha only has to say one thing, and then then – boing! – in one moment, there we are. But that happens very rarely.
If You Meet a Buddha, Kill Him
There is a wonderful Zen koan, which is that if you meet a Buddha, kill him. Let us reflect on that a moment in terms of what we just discussed. Then, perhaps, you can give your ideas of what it might mean.
[Meditation]
Okay, what does it mean, “If you find a Buddha kill him”? Does anybody have any idea what it means? To recognize a Buddha ourselves, we ourselves have to be enlightened. So, if we, at the state in which we are now, think that we have recognized a Buddha, we must be wrong.
Participant: Yeah, maybe.
Participant: It’s impossible to kill a Buddha. You can’t do that. You can remove the body, but the energy remains. You can’t actually kill a Buddha.
Dr Berzin: Right, it is true that it is impossible to actually kill a Buddha. One might destroy the body that one sees, but the energy, the mind of a Buddha, can’t be killed; Buddha has overcome death. That’s very true. But then what does the koan mean? It’s a very famous koan.
Could it be like in some of the tantric teachings where it says to kill your mother and to kill your father but where those words have a deeper meaning? In tantra, the mother and father represent the right and left channels and the subtle body, and to kill them means to kill the winds going through the right and left channels so that they go into the central channel and we can gain the clear-light understanding of voidness by dissolving them at the heart chakra. Could the koan mean something like that? Well, I don’t know because Zen is not anuttarayoga tantra that has this type of language. So, it’s better to kill a Buddha than it is to see a Buddha. Sometimes His Holiness says that, rather than have a wrong idea about tantra, it’s better to learn about tantra even if we don’t have initiations and so on. Even if there are disadvantages from that, at least we don’t have a wrong view of tantra. Could that be what this Zen koan means? I don’t think so.
If we think that we have found the Buddha – the understanding that will bring us to Buddhahood and so on – we could become very self-satisfied and smug and not go further, thinking that we’ve reached there already. You have to kill that conception.
Participant: And regret…
Dr Berzin: Do you mean the regret you would have from killing or trying to kill the Buddha, or the regret of having thought that you had gotten all the way to the end when actually you haven’t? Which do you mean?
Participant: Well, it’s more to feel that it’s not appropriate, that you really wouldn’t want to kill a Buddha.
Dr Berzin: Then why would the koan say, “If you meet a Buddha, kill him”? Anyone else? How about putting this together with the voidness teachings that we’ve had for so many years in terms of finding something?
Participant: I would go in that direction…
Dr Berzin: Right. We could go in the direction that Jorge did, I think that’s going in the right direction, but one could go much further in terms of bringing in the teachings on voidness here.
Participant: Well, if I can describe, or try to describe, the Buddha by his qualities, I’m actually mistaken because he is beyond what can be expressed with words.
Dr Berzin: OK. This is the view of voidness in terms of “voidness beyond all words and beyond all concepts.” If we think that we have found a Buddha and can put it into words and concepts – that’s not a Buddha. In essence, we have to kill that conception in order to actually find a Buddha. We have to go beyond words and beyond concepts.
Participant: Yeah, and as soon as I say, “This is a Buddha,” then I’ve nailed it down, and then it’s wrong.
Dr Berzin: Right, but I think we can get a little bit more precise in terms of the voidness teachings.
Participant: Since a Buddha is void, you can’t kill a Buddha.
Dr Berzin: Well, I don’t think that’s true because everything is void of true existence, yet one could certainly kill an ant.
Participant: Well, it has something to do with voidness.
Participant: The point is that you take it to be an inherently existing Buddha, and you can’t do that.
Dr Berzin: Right. Remember when we spoke about the voidness of true existence from the Prasangika point of view, it posed the question, “What is the object to be refuted?” It’s that we actually find what a word or concept refers to, meaning that it is findable from its own side – that there is something on the side of the object that makes it what it is. So, if we conceive that this is a Buddha, it means that we’ve actually found a truly existent Buddha who by their own power can bring us to enlightenment by snapping a finger (this is why I said to bring it into what we were just discussing). This, I think, is at least one deeper meaning of what this koan could mean.
Don’t think that just because a Buddha has no fears and because a Buddha has skillful means and so on, a Buddha is going to save us by their own power and that all we have to do is open up to the grace of the Buddha. That’s not Buddhism. A Buddha became a Buddha from a million-billion causes. We, likewise, will have to put in millions of billions of causes to become Buddhas. We can be inspired by the Buddhas’ examples. They can indicate the actual attainments that we are aiming for, and they can be a strong influence on us as we’ve discussed in terms of the deepest source of safe direction. But ultimately, we have to create a tremendous number of causes. If we think that we’ve found an inherently existent Buddha from their own side – forget it. Kill that concept because, if we have that as the direction that we are going in, it’s false.
Participant: What about those Japanese people who pray to the Buddha Amitabha?
Dr Berzin: This gets into a discussion of Pure Land teachings. One way of understanding Pure Land is is to see that one is open to the power of “other” – “other-powered,” it’s called. This is emphasized particularly in the Japanese form of Pure Land. Chinese say that we have to do some meditation as well, but Japanese say, “Just rely on the power of the other.” Well, to look more deeply at what that means, it’s explained that this means that we have to give up the whole idea of achieving enlightenment by the power of a self – a false “me” that can do it all by itself. Now, opening up to the “other” means “other than that.” It’s not that Amitabha by his own power is going to save us, although on a popular level people might think that. It’s basically saying in very simple words that we have to get over the idea of this false “me” and that this false “me” is going to get this false “me” enlightened. At least that’s what I’ve heard as an explanation for the Pure Land philosophy. It is very easy when we’re coming from a different tradition to say, “That’s not Buddhism at all,” but actually, it does fit into the Buddhist teachings.
Participant: We have to get over the conception that such an imagined, false “me” is brought to enlightenment by Amitabha?
Dr Berzin: That a false “me” is brought to enlightenment by the efforts of the false “me.”
Participant: By the efforts – oh, OK. Good.
Dr Berzin: We can’t rely on such a self; we have to rely on what is other than a truly existent self. In other words, we can’t reach enlightenment through an ego trip. There are a few people who do go into Buddhism as an ego trip.
The point that Daniel made is very, very good – that very first point. We, or at least some people, tend to project onto somebody else, “Ah, they’re a Buddha. They are so wonderful!” And then we worship them in a very destructive way. That is projecting our own, limited sort of “great father who’s going to save me” idea onto someone else. So, that is something that we have to kill because, actually, only a Buddha could really know what a Buddha is. So, this is a good point.
OK. Those are the first two qualities of why a Buddha is the deepest source of safe direction.
A Buddha Has Equal Compassion for All
The third quality has to do with great compassion. Buddhas involve themselves with everyone, never regarding some as close and others as distant. This is a very important quality to have if we are going in this safe direction. It isn’t that there are special ones that a Buddha helps and that we have to become part of that inner circle or group in order for Buddha to be able to help us. There aren’t any that are closer and others that are more distant. This is a very wonderful quality.
A Buddha Fulfills Everyone’s Aims
The fourth quality is that Buddhas fulfill everyone’s aims regardless of whether they have helped them or not. So, it’s not that we have to praise Buddha and make offerings in order for the Buddhas to help us and that if we go to some false god or we don’t praise Buddha or even if we destroy Buddha’s stupas, a Buddha is not going to want to help us.
These are the four qualities in general that indicate why the Buddhas are the deepest source of safe direction. These qualities are very good to keep mindfulness of, to remember, “This is why I want to follow Buddha’s path.”
Now, what I would like to begin is a discussion of the various good qualities of a Buddha and to go more specifically into the qualities of the body of a Buddha, the speech of a Buddha, and the mind of a Buddha. As we have said with this koan, that although we can’t pin a Buddha down with this or that concept, nevertheless, it doesn’t mean that a Buddha doesn’t have good qualities and that we can’t gain inspiration from these qualities.
Also, as we have seen from this discussion of the koan, it isn’t that these various qualities by themselves have the power to save us. This is actually very interesting here because the physical bodies of a Buddha – let’s look first at the physical bodies of a Buddha – can, first of all, manifest simultaneously in innumerable physical forms to help innumerable limited beings. The example that’s used in the Uttaratantra (The Furthest Everlasting Continuum) by Maitreya is that this ability is like a moon. The moon can shine in countless numbers of pools of water simultaneously. Likewise, a Buddha can be reflected in the minds of limitless beings, appearing like a hologram, a mental hologram, which is the way that we’ve been explaining cognition – a mind producing a mental hologram. A Buddha can be reflected as a mental hologram in everybody’s minds simultaneously. Buddha doesn’t have to go anywhere or do anything. It’s sort of like the sun – that the sun can be seen and reflected, or the moon can be reflected, in countless bodies of water.
When these emanations of a Buddha are in the form of Sambhogakaya (we’ve discussed what this is: subtle forms that teach arya bodhisattvas in pure lands,) or in the form of a Supreme Nirmanakaya, they have, in total, 112 physical faculties, or qualities. This consists of the 32 excellent signs and the 80 exemplary features. The important point here is that each of these excellent signs and exemplary features has a corresponding cause in terms of the actions in previous lives that produced them.
So, the excellent signs are indications of a great person. They’re signs of all the causes that have gone into making this person great. Exemplary features reveal inner qualities and serve to make a positive impression on the mental continuums of others. This is the definition of them: they reveal inner qualities and serve to make a positive impression on the mental continuums of others. Again, it’s indicating the causes. It’s not just that a Buddha’s fingernails are like this and his hair like that – so what? That isn’t the important point.
The point here is that when we take safe direction from knowing the qualities of a Buddha’s body, it’s not that Buddha’s body itself is going to save us by its own power; rather it’s that all of these features have arisen from their causes. In the explanations of each of these forms, we have the explanation of their causes, which indicates how all of them have arisen based on causes and conditions. If we then apply the understanding of the voidness of causality, which we’ve studied for so many years, we can get the deeper understanding that we ourselves have to build up these causes. It isn’t that the result exists in the cause or that the result is already there in an unmanifested form or that the result comes from absolutely nothing. One needs to apply these understandings of voidness.
If we’ve had these teachings already, we can go back to earlier levels in the Buddhist teachings, earlier stages of the path, lam-rim, because this material is obviously initial scope material in the lam-rim. If we apply the voidness teachings to this, then we can get a much deeper understanding. So, it’s always very worthwhile to go back over the earlier stages of the Great Path and apply the understanding that we’ve gotten from deeper study onto these initial steps. Then we get a much deeper understanding.
Starting next time, we’ll go through the 32 excellent signs. We won’t do the 80 exemplary features; that’s a bit too much. The 32 signs give a very good overview of all the bodhisattva practices. So, we’ll study the signs of a great person. Maybe another time we can go over the exemplary features that reveal inner qualities and serve to make a positive impression on the mental continuum of others.
Participant: Both together are signs of a great person?
Dr Berzin: No, just the excellent signs are. There are the signs of a great person. These signs indicate the causes for becoming a great person.
Remember that we said that Buddha statues are just Nominal Buddha Gems; they just represent Buddhas. We don’t actually take our safe direction from statues; we’re not statue worshippers. Similarly, when it comes to the Apparent Buddha Gem, which is the physical bodies of a Buddha, or the Form Bodies, it’s not that the body itself, on its own, indicates the direction that we want to go to. The only way in which the body indicates the direction is that all its signs indicate what their causes were.
So, when we look at a body of a Buddha as represented, for instance, in a statue or a painting, what we try to continually keep mindful of is what the causes for those features were. Those causes are the actual direction that we have to go in, the direction of bringing about those causes in ourselves. It works like that. It works like that as well with tantric visualization in terms of what all the different aspects of the bodies that we visualize ourselves in represent.