Practitioners of mystical

Practitioners of mystical traditions around the world have frequently questioned whether the self we experience is illusory in nature for at least several thousands of years (Wickramasekera II, 2014). This is very consistent with the socio-cognitive view of the self as a believed-in imagining. In this section I wish to relate some of the transpersonally oriented ideas within the EIT to ideas that have been developed by the Bon-Buddhist tra- dition of Dzogchen meditation (Wangyal, 2005, 2011; Wickramasekera II, 2004a, 2007d, 2010). In particular, I wish to examine the similarity of the Dzogchen model of identity to the neo-dissociative and socio-cognitive traditions of hypnosis.

The Dzogchen tradition of meditation can be found in both the Bon and Buddhist reli- gions of Tibet as well as other Himalayan countries (Reynolds, 2005). The tradition of Dzogchen states that the self that we generally experience is an illusion constructed by a deep structure in our mind called the kunzhi-namshe. The self that Dzogchen medita- tors describe could very much be described as a believe-in-imagining consistent with the socio-cognitive theory of hypnosis and dissociative phenomena. The nature of the self is formless in both traditions, and the self is said to rely on the empathy and TOM of the person to discern its own structure and character. A simple way of thinking about this

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is to reflect on how much we often rely on feedback from other people to discern who we think we are. Theoretically, this probably means that the nature of self could have a variety of characteristics, appearing to be unitary at times and polypsychic at others depending on the context of the experience of self.