________________
INTROVERT-CONCENTRATION petual self-transformation. The mind-stuff is compared, therefore, to melted copper, which when poured into a crucible assumes its form precisely. The substance of the mind spontaneously takes on both the shape and the texture of its immediate experience.
One effect of this process is a broken, continually changing reflection of the light of the life-monad in the ever-active thinking function, which brings about the illusion that the lifemonad is what is undergoing all the transformations. It appears to be taking on, not only the shapes of our various perceptions, but also the emotions and other reactions that we experience in relation to them. Hence we imagine that it is we ourselves who are unremittingly following and responding to whatever affects the flexible tip of the mind--pleasure and displeasure, sufferings without end, changes of every kind. The mind, according to its natural propensity, runs on, transforming itself through all the experiences and accompanying emotional responses of an avid, troubled, or enjoyable life in the world, and this disturbance then is believed to be the biography of the life-monad. Our innate serenity is always overshadowed, tinged, and colored in this way, by the varying shapes and hues of the susceptible thinking principle. Perceptions, however, belong to the sphere of matter. When two material perceptions do not contradict each other, they are regarded as true or right. Nevertheless, even "true" or "right" perceptions are in essence false, and to be suppressed, since they, no less than the "wrong," produce the conception of an “identity of form” (sārūpya) between consciousness-as-mind-stuff and the life-monad.
b) Right inference. Inference is that function of the thinking principle, or activity of the mind, which is concerned with the attribution of characteristics to the objects that seem to bear them. Right inference is inference that can be supported by right perception. c) Right testimony is derived from the traditional sacred
289
