tells a great story says there's this guy um who is pretty sure he's got a snake in the wall of his house and in india um 00:14:13 that's still a problem and it was a much bigger problem back in the 7th century that snakes especially crates but also cobras would in order to get warm take up residence in the nooks and crannies of the stone wall of a house so this guy 00:14:26 is afraid that he's got a snake in the wall of his house and he's in order to dispel his own fear he walks around the house convincing himself that there's no elephant there and chandra charity says wouldn't this 00:14:40 guy be a public laughingstock who tries to assuage his fear of the snake by convincing himself that there's no elephant and what's the point of this weird story 00:14:52 you might ask well the moral of the story is this the snake is the self it's the self that you really do john vacardi thinks believe that you have and 00:15:05 the elephant is all of the things you might convince yourself that you don't have or that the self isn't um in order to really convince yourself that you're a really cool no self person so you might say hey i know my body's not a 00:15:18 self i've really got no self down pat or i know my mind isn't the self i've got myself myself i've got myself really on the right track here or all of these things and chandra kiriti thinks that a lot of the time when we think that we're refuting 00:15:32 the idea of a self we're actually refuting something else and so that the first important thing to do is to identify what that thing is that is the target of 00:15:43 our critical inquiry