Seven Points of Mind Training

Point 5 : Evaluation of Mind Training

20: Of the two witnesses hold the principal one.

Point Five : Of the two witnesses hold the principal one.

Commentary :

In any situation there are two witnesses: other people's view of you and your own view of yourself. Of those, the principal witness is your own insight. You should not just go along with other people's opinion of you. The practice of this slogan is always to be true to your self. Usually when you do something, you would like to get some kind of feedback from your world. You have your own opinions of how well you have done, and you also have other people's opinions of how well you have done. Usually you keep your own opinion of yourself to yourself. First you have your own opinions about something, and then you begin to branch out and ask somebody else: "Was that all right? How do you think I'm doing?" That is one of the traditional questions that comes up in meetings between teacher and student.

In many cases, people are very impressed by you because you look fit and you are cheerful a great deal and you seem to know what you are doing. A lot of compliments take place. On the other hand, a lot of criticism could come to you from others who do not properly and fully know what is actually happening within you. This slogan says that of the two witnesses, hold the principal one as the actual, authentic one. That authentic witness is you.

You are the only person who knows yourself. You are the only person who has been with yourself since you were born. And even before that, you carried your own great baggage of karma with you. You decided to enter the womb of somebody or other; you were born in somebody's stomach and you came out of it and you still carry your baggage along with you. You feel your own pain and pleasure and everything. You are the one who experienced your infancy, the pain and pleasure of it; you have gone through your teenagehood, the pain and pleasure of it; you are the one experiencing your adulthood, the pain and pleasure of it. You are beginning to experience your middle age years, the pain and pleasure of it; and finally, you will experience getting old and dying, the pain and pleasure of it. You have never been away from yourself for even a minute. You know yourself so well. Therefore, you are the best judge of yourself. You know how naughty you are, you know how you try to be sensible, and you know how you sometimes try to sneak things in.

Usually "I" is talking to "am." "Am I to do this? Am I to do something naughty? If I do, nobody will know." Only we know. We could do it and might get away with it. There are lots of tricks or projects you and yourself always do together, hoping that nobody will actually find out. If you had to lay the whole thing out in the open it would be embarrassing. You would feel so strange. On the other hand, of course, there is the other possibility. You could try to be very good so that somebody would be so impressed with you and with how much effort you put into yourself. You might try to be good boy or a good girl. But if you have to spell the whole thing out, nobody will actually believe how good you are trying to be. People would think it was just a joke.

Only you really know yourself. You know at every moment. You know the way you do things: the way you brush your teeth, the way you comb your hair, the way you take your shower, the way you put on clothes, the way you talk to somebody else, the way you eat, even if you are not terribly hungry. During all of those things, "I" and "am" are still carrying on a conversation about everything else. So there are a lot of unsaid things happening to you all the time. Therefore, the principal witness, or the principal judge, is yourself. The judgment of how you are going in your lojong practice is yours.

You know best about yourself, so you should work with yourself constantly. This is based of trusting your intelligence rather than trusting yourself, which could be very selfish. It is trusting your intelligence by knowing who you are and what you are. You know yourself so well, therefore any deception could be cut through. If someone congratulates or compliments you, they may not know your entire existence. So you should come back to your own judgment, to your own sense of your expressions and the tricks you play on others and on yourself. That is not self-centered, it is self inspired from the point of view of the nonexistence of ego. You just witness what you are. You are simply witnessing and evaluating the merit, rather than going back over it in a Jungian or Freudian way.