It Ain't Personal

If suffering is the illness, the Buddha's diagnosis is sobering: the disease is incurable. Anguish is an inherent part of the relative world in which we live. So he proposed a radical solution. If we can't get rid of the disease, let's get rid of the patient. If there is no one to suffer, there is no suffering. Brilliant! But hardly the answer we were looking for. We shy away from the topic. Meanwhile, many of the difficulties we face as a species are rooted in a hyper-developed sense of self.

Transcript

A long,

Long,

Long time ago,

Long before time was invented,

The universe was peaceful and serene.

Her bliss was just perfect.

Well,

Almost perfect.

The truth was,

After a while,

She got just a little bored.

I mean,

How much peace and tranquility can you stand before it just gets a little tedious?

So the universe decided that she needed some entertainment,

Something she could watch.

And everywhere she looked,

All she saw was herself,

Because she was a whole universe.

So she decided that she would take parts of herself and solidify them,

Make a little denser,

And see if she could break them away from herself so she'd have something different to look at.

So she would take pieces of her energy,

Like playfulness,

And get it real,

Real densely concentrated one place until it just sort of shook free and began to bounce around.

Or she would take curiosity and just turn the volume up on it,

Getting stronger and stronger until a piece broke up and just started looking around.

So these little children would interact and play with each other and gave her the first entertainment ever.

But the problem was,

It was altogether too short,

Because they knew what their true nature was,

Which was the same as the whole universe.

So as soon as she took her eyes off them,

They just relaxed and dissolved back into the hole.

So the universe decided that she was going to have to add another ingredient to the recipe.

What ingredient do you think she might pick?

Ignorance.

Yeah,

Ignorance.

If she could make these pieces ignorant about what their true nature was,

Then maybe they would stay informed just a little bit longer.

So she did the same thing and concentrated the energy.

And these parts of herself,

They were slightly denser,

But they were still fun to watch.

And they looked kind of confused.

We might call them innocent.

But the problem was that they kept on dissolving back into the universe.

They didn't know who they were,

But they just relaxed and then reverted back.

You can imagine,

It's like if you try to hold a beach ball underwater,

As soon as you relax,

It just pops back out.

So they would go do their thing,

And then as soon as she relaxed,

They would just pop out of form.

So she had to add another ingredient.

What do you think the next ingredient might be?

Suffering.

Lust.

She thought fear.

The problem was they were just insipidly trusting.

They didn't know who they were,

But they just relaxed and they wouldn't pop out.

So she incorporated fright into them.

And this was not very easy.

This would get them to run around and attack and do all kinds of things.

But it wasn't easy because it was so far from their essential nature,

Which was what hers was after all.

So she gave them these very dense bodies and this neural wiring and incorporated into it fright and fear.

And she gave them all kinds of names for it,

Like survival instinct and self-preservation,

Because they were confused after all and they thought preserving the form was the same as preserving the essence.

And this was great.

These creatures would run around and they would do silly things.

They would dance and kill each other and make love and draw pictures that hurt one another.

So there was lots of good material for comedies and tragedies and all kinds of entertainment.

But despite the extraordinary lengths to which she had gone,

They would still fall out of form because these complex bodies were so far from what their nature was that they just couldn't hold together for much longer than 50 or 100 years.

They had invented time now,

So we could talk about time.

Now to you or I,

We might think that 50 or 100 years is a long time,

But we're talking about the universe here.

To her,

This was just a blink of an eye and then they were gone.

So she needed another ingredient.

So what do you think the next ingredient might be?

Give a hint.

He was onto it.

She put into him a very strong reproductive instinct,

So if she could get them just to reproduce themselves before their form fell apart,

Then individual beings might disappear,

But there might be something going along for a long time.

And so that's what she did,

And it worked.

And the individuals disappeared,

But she could still watch the masses moving around and individuals would wink in and out like stars,

And it was great fun.

And when she finished her labors,

She was tickled and thought,

Well,

These are her humor ones,

So she would call them humans.

And she opened up her recipe book,

And under H for Humans,

She wrote,

How to make a batch of humans.

Ingredients.

Me.

After all,

What else is there to work with anyway?

Instructions.

One,

Take pieces of me and make them a bit more fun-loving,

Adventurous,

Curious,

Or the like,

Cause them to become as confused as possible as to their true nature,

Surround them in fear.

There seems to be no other way to get them to cooperate.

Since they are at least partially ignorant,

Give them many different names for the fear,

Self-preservation,

Fight or flight,

Self,

Soul,

On and on and on.

Build a physical nervous system and anatomy that reinforces the fear and sense of separation as much as possible.

Five,

Give them a strong reproductive instinct so they will procreate before their natural wisdom leaks through and spoils the show.

Six,

Half-bake them for nine months and other humans.

Seven,

Sit back and watch them.

Watch me.

So I,

Of course I don't actually believe in an anthropomorphic universe,

But this little vignette points to a truth that eludes us.

Many of the qualities that we dislike,

You know,

Greed,

Hatred,

Fear,

Struggle,

Agitation,

Depression,

Dismay,

All contribute to helping us have a sense of a substantive separate self that we hope will stay around for a long time.

And all the qualities that we like,

Lightness,

Mellowness,

Peace,

Love,

Oneness,

Harmony,

Ease,

They all make our sense of self seem kind of ephemeral and insubstantial.

So the wisdom and the harmony that we seek actually destroy the seeker.

And the Buddha was quite,

Quite blunt about this.

He said if suffering is the illness,

Then his prognosis was really quite sobering.

He said the disease is incurable.

You know,

In this relative world,

Suffering is just part of what happens here.

So his solution was really quite radical.

If we can't cure the disease,

Let's just get rid of the patient.

That's essentially what this whole project is.

So if we can just get rid of the patient,

Then there is no suffering.

So the solution about getting rid of ourselves is probably not what most of us signed up for.

So we have this tendency to want to look at that as something that's esoteric and far away hopefully and impossibly distant and just kind of shy away from the whole topic.

But it is actually one of the real core teachings that the Buddha had.

So tonight I'd like to focus in on that,

Which is to say that our lives are not personal.

We're just all part of this natural process,

Just natural forces playing out.

And I raise the theme not just because I think that meditative and mystical states are cool,

Which they are,

But I also want to bring it because of a sense of urgency,

A real deep sense of urgency.

We are in deep trouble down here on the planet at the beginning of the 21st century.

Think about it.

The extinction rate has skyrocketed.

We are burning through the earth's resources.

The last estimates I've seen were burning through them at about one and a half times the earth is capable of replenishing those.

It just is not sustainable.

Our economic system looks to me like a Rube Goldberg machine kind of held together with chicken wire.

Our political system is locked up in gridlock.

The greatest perils that we face are not natural disasters but are all human created.

And they all grow out of a hyperdeveloped sense of self,

All of them.

Just think about it.

Ecological crisis?

I want more from me right now and a failure to see the larger holes that we're a part of.

The political difficulties,

Just too many childish egos.

I'd like Nero playing his violin as Rome burns.

Economic inequality?

It's just greed.

It's just greed.

So selflessness actually arises quite easily and quite naturally out of our true nature,

Quite easily and naturally out of the human spirit as it matures,

As it opens up.

Making things less personal is not going to,

In and of itself,

Is not going to solve our problems but it does create an environment in which solutions are a lot easier to find.

So the Buddha captured all this in a single word,

Anatta,

Anatta.

In Pali,

The language of the suttas,

Ata means self and anan is negation.

So anatta literally means non-self.

We have no self.

He said anatta is one of the three characteristics of all things along with a sense of flux and impermanence and suffering being a part of it.

And anatta is actually the key to… it's called wise perspective,

Wise understanding,

The first aspect of the eightfold path,

Seeing things as impersonal.

On the face of it though,

Non-self seems like nonsense.

I have a self that's right here.

I've known it all my life.

I have fed it.

I have bathed it.

I have exercised it.

I have trimmed its toenails and cut its hair once or twice a year anyway.

I put it into classrooms for 20 years to educate its mind.

I paid therapists thousands of dollars to untangle its emotions.

I have sat for countless hours trying to soothe its spirit.

So I have a self.

It's right here.

And the Buddha would agree with this completely.

He used the word self in the ordinary sense all over the place.

For example,

I want to read to you from… this is the Sutta-Napata,

Which is one of the very,

Very oldest texts that goes back before the language became codified.

And this is from book four,

Which the scholars think is probably the oldest of the whole collection of four books of the Sutta-Napata.

This is called the… I'll just read the beginning of the Ata-Dandana,

The Sutta.

It begins,

The response to violence is fear.

We usually put that the other way,

The response to fear is violence.

But he's saying the response to violence is fear,

Right?

I'll tell you about the dismay I felt when I saw people hurting each other.

They struggled like fish fighting in a drying creek.

And I was scared.

This is the Buddha talking.

The world's not stable.

Everything's in flux.

I wanted a place to be safe from the change.

But there was nowhere.

In the end,

I was disgusted by their hostility.

That's when I saw a barb worked deep into the tissue of their hearts.

When the barb pierces someone's heart,

She runs first one way,

Then another.

When the barb's drawn out,

She neither runs confused nor falls down weary.

So you can hear the language in it.

The wording is very personal.

He uses I.

He describes personal feelings of dismay,

Fear,

Even disgust.

You don't find those in the later sutas where it's been cleaned up by the monks as they were passing along orally.

And he's not saying there's no self or even that the self is empty.

What he's actually saying is we just take the self way too personally.

His passionate and gentle concern is always with suffering and how to release suffering and increase well-being.

And what he's saying is we just need to lighten up,

Lighten up these overcharged egos.

So to extract the barb,

He recommends to continue the sutta.

This is what he recommends.

This is how you go about relieving the deep suffering in your life.

Tell the truth.

Be modest and open.

Speak kindly to people.

Don't yell at them.

Be wise.

Avoid grief and selfishness.

Overcome lethargy,

Weariness,

And apathy.

If you're intent on freedom,

Don't be mindless.

Don't be proud.

It's really very simple human things.

The sutta napada,

There are about,

I don't know what it is,

20-25% of the sutta start with him saying,

I wish you guys would just stop fighting.

And instead he encourages us to speak and act in ways that soften the sense of self.

Speak the truth.

If you speak the truth,

You don't have to worry about what you said.

You don't have to worry about trying to remember it.

So you can just relax.

Be open,

Kind.

Don't yell.

Later sutta in this collection,

He takes this even further when someone asks him what a monk is like,

What an ideal monk is like.

And he says,

He avoids thinking of himself as better or worse or equal to anyone.

So the better or worse we know,

But he says better or worse or equal.

He's really encouraging us to just drop the comparing mind.

We evolve from scavengers and comparing things all the time and maybe finding food in the primeval forest was helpful,

But when we start comparing ourselves to other,

It just reinforces this sense of separateness.

He avoids thinking of himself as better or worse or equal to anyone.

When into contact with various things,

He doesn't embellish the self.

The monk looks for peace within himself and not any other place.

For when a person is inwardly quiet,

There is nowhere a self can be found.

When a person is inwardly quiet,

There is nowhere a self can be found.

There's the secret,

The whole thing.

But he goes on,

Where then can non-self be found?

There are no waves in the depths of the sea.

It is still unbroken.

It is the same with the monk.

It is still without any quiver of desire,

Without a remnant on which to build pride and desire.

So to know anatta in our experience rather than as a concept,

We must simply quiet down and release the desire,

The pride,

And just be simple.

Very simple thing to do.

Not very easy,

But very simple.

And if we do this,

Then the sense of self becomes a little ephemeral.

It doesn't last.

The body disintegrates in a hundred years or so,

But as we lighten up,

Just even day to day,

You notice the sense of self will get waxes and wanes.

It gets stronger and weaker.

It comes and goes.

So what he's talking about is not making a metaphysical pronouncement about self or non-self to be or not to be,

Existence or non-existence.

I see this whole thing as a psychological statement,

Psychological proposition.

It boils down to we take ourselves way,

Way too seriously.

Life isn't about us.

We can just lighten up.

Life is a lot easier.

The Ata Dandana Sutta concludes,

An unselfish person doesn't think,

This is mine,

That's hers.

This person doesn't wail,

I haven't got one of those.

If you ask me,

I'd say the advantage of being unshakable,

The advantage of being unshakable is feeling merciful,

Free of greed,

And perfectly balanced all the time.

And again,

He says,

A wise person considers herself neither superior,

Equal,

Nor inferior.

She's calm,

Unselfish,

Without likes or dislikes.

That's what the Buddha said.

He's saying when we take things personally,

We suffer.

When we don't take things personally,

We're free.

So the question becomes,

How do we lighten up?

How do we move towards that?

One of the strategies,

And one that he used a lot,

Was to look and see if we could find the very roots of the sense of self.

So I want to read you some passages from another sutta.

This is from the Majjhima Nagaya.

So these were passed along orally and kind of codified for about 300 years.

You feel a difference in the language,

But there's still,

You know,

If you can hear what he was saying,

You can hear this ringing through.

This is actually,

It's called the shorter set of question and answers,

Majjhima Nagaya number 44,

And I just want to read the first six verses.

Once the Buddha was staying in the bamboo grove near Rajagaha,

A place called the Squirrel Sanctuary.

Why would someone want to live in a squirrel sanctuary?

Oh my goodness.

Yeah,

They're really nice from a distance.

I don't know if I want to have them in my bedroom.

At that time,

The layman Vasaka went to visit his former wife,

The wise and accomplished nun Dhammadina.

After paying his respects and sitting down on one side,

He asked her a question.

What does the Buddha say about self-identity?

Let me pause for a minute.

There's a very sweet story behind this.

Vasaka and Dhammadina had been married and Vasaka had been a lay follower of the Buddha and he went off on a retreat and he came back as an anagami,

Junior year in the school of awakening.

And he was so much at peace with himself that he wasn't interested in a sexual relationship any longer,

Wasn't interested in living as husband and wife.

So there's this whole funny scene where he lies down on the floor rather than on the bed and she wondered what's that about and she lies down there and back and forth and she says,

What's going on?

And he says,

Well,

I've become an anagami and I'm not really interested in a husband and wife relationship anymore,

But I want to do anything I can to support you.

And she says,

Well,

Actually,

I've always wanted to be a nun and I want to be an ordained follower of the Buddha.

And so he says fine and so she goes off and ordains as a monk and within a couple of months she becomes an arahant,

Fully,

Fully completely awakened.

And in fact,

The Buddha talks about Dhammadina as the person of his followers,

Of his disciples,

Who is most skilled beyond anyone else about explaining the Dhamma.

And at the very end of the sutta,

Just to reinforce that,

The sakha goes back to the Buddha and says,

This is what Dhammadina told me and he says,

I couldn't have said it better.

So it gives that support to it.

So knowing that history,

Just listen,

It gives a kind of a sweetness for me to what these conversations are about.

He comes back,

The sakha comes to her,

Looking for guidance on this stuff.

Back to the text.

After paying his respects and sitting down,

He asks her a question.

What does the Buddha say about self-identity?

She responds,

And I'm translating this a little loosely.

I think it's quite accurately,

But I'm trying to flesh out some stuff that is a little too codified,

Although it will sound that way anyway.

The Buddha says that self-identity can form around any experience that we hold onto or push away.

It can form around sensation,

It can form around feelings,

It can form around perception and labels that we put on things,

It can form around ideas,

Concepts and stories,

It can even form around awareness itself.

So do you recognize those five?

We talked about last night the khandhas.

And the Buddha,

When he was talking about these,

He's always talking about,

This is the full range of what we can experience.

And he's saying he identifies the five of these,

Or Dhammādīna identifies the five of these and says that we can form a self-identity around any of these.

So this is my little demonstration.

Some of you know what this is about,

And that's okay.

So I have here this little origami bird.

It looks kind of small because it's actually flying very,

Very high up there in the sky.

So what I want you to do is to take just a moment here and imagine what it might be like to be this bird soaring up very,

Very high.

Allow yourself to become this origami bird.

So what happened for you?

When I do this with groups of people around meditators,

I get gasps.

You can see how easy it is.

I mean,

You know darn well that you're not this origami bird.

But with just about 15 or 20 seconds of just imagining that,

It becomes very,

Very personal.

It's like yourself.

You feel that?

And how many of you knew I was coming and just sort of held back a little bit?

I rest my case.

So what the Buddha is saying here is that we humans have this incredible talent for imagining that we are what we aren't.

We can imagine we're an origami bird.

People imagine that they are their cars all the time,

Right?

You know,

There's a car accident.

Somebody says,

Well,

Somebody hit me.

Well,

It didn't hit you.

It hit the car.

We can identify with our jobs,

With our roles.

We identify with these memory traces that we call my life,

My history.

They're just memory traces.

We identify with families,

With our thoughts,

With our ideas about soul.

There is,

If you take everything that we can experience,

Somewhere there are large groups of people who have identified that as self,

Everything.

And I just think it's remarkable to think about that.

We have this capacity to project our,

To identify,

Project ourselves into anything.

And I call it a talent because this capacity to identify I think is very closely related to both empathy and compassion.

Dalai Lama said that the foundation of ethical behavior is empathy.

So this capacity to imagine ourselves as something we're not is not necessarily evil or bad.

There's this whole positive side to it.

But the problem is we overshoot the mark.

When rather than just empathize,

When we literally take it as ourselves,

Things get very,

Very difficult.

And we suffer needlessly.

So back to the sutta.

Vāsaka understands this and is curious to know more.

Thank you,

He replied.

Can you say more?

How does self-identity get started?

How does it get started?

She replied,

Tanah forms the seeds of self-identity.

Usually translated as craving,

But I like to use the poly.

Tanah forms the seed of self-identity and the renewal of our sense of self.

Delight or aversion in this and that.

More specifically,

The Buddha talks about the desire for pleasant sensory experience,

The desire to exist,

And the desire to not exist.

So in the core of her response here are these three desires for sensory pleasure,

The desire to exist and the desire to not exist.

And I think the one about sensory desire,

As we've talked about a lot with the hindrances,

How when we want something or want to get rid of something,

That it creates a sense of a self who wants something or wants to get rid of something.

So is that part clear or do I need to?

So in this particular case,

When there's that desire,

The whole process that we have here is the six R's of recognizing,

Releasing,

Relaxing,

Re-smiling,

And returning.

And he can six R whatever it is that we wanted or the desire.

We can also,

As you've seen,

Six R the sense of self.

We can locate that.

The second thing,

According to Dhammaditta,

And the Buddha would agree,

Is called Bhava Tanah,

The desire to exist.

And this is a little subtler.

And it's also one that is deeply,

Deeply embedded in us.

It's called an anussiya,

Which means a latent tendency.

It's something that's deeply wired into all of us.

But it's really hard to put a finger on.

So this is my understanding of how I came to think of this.

When I first learned where babies came from,

When I was,

I don't know,

Five or six in a row,

I remember afterwards thinking,

Wow,

So what if my mommy and my daddy never met?

What if they never got married?

What if they weren't in the mood for sex at that particular time?

I could think of a million contingencies in which this sperm and this egg would not have gotten together,

And then I would have never come into being.

And nobody would have known.

You know,

They might have had a second,

A different second child and given him my name.

Nobody would ever know.

So I began to get this sense of what a fluke our existence is,

What a statistical improbability it is.

And not only that,

But it disappears so,

So quickly.

When I was a senior in high school,

It was the first time that somebody in my close circle of friends died.

Larry was killed in a car accident.

He wasn't a close personal friend,

But he was in this group of people that I spent a lot of time with.

He was smart,

He was kind,

He was really a good guy.

And then he was dead.

And I remember the next day when the lunch bell rang in school,

I thought,

The lunch bell rang and Larry's not here.

Everything was just going on.

And I remember at a graduation exercise,

You know,

Throwing our caps up in the air and thinking,

God,

We're all celebrating and Larry's not here.

And I began to get this sense that,

Which is true,

I think,

That when I die,

99.

999999% of the planet is not going to notice that I was here or that I left.

And within a few months,

I will be little more than a sad memory to all but the people who are closest to me.

Within a few generations,

There's going to be hardly any sign that I was on this planet at all.

Maybe a few digits on some computer disk somewhere,

Birth certificate.

But within a couple hundred years,

All those will be gone.

So our existence here is really,

Really very fleeting and very ephemeral.

And yet,

Inside,

I feel eternal.

I think I matter despite lack of evidence.

I think I'm important in some ways.

And I think this is what the Buddha actually meant by bhava-tanah,

The desire to exist.

It's not so much the desire to exist,

But it's the inability to imagine that we might not exist.

So even right now,

As you're listening to this,

You can get that sense of it,

But you see how quickly that thought,

It just sort of slips away.

It's very hard to hold on to it.

And it's really easy to see why this is true.

Just evolutionarily,

Those people who thought they were very important and had something to do were much more likely to pass their DNA along than someone who didn't care whether they existed or not.

So this desire to exist,

This difficulty in seeing the truth of how ephemeral and short our lives are,

Deeply distorts our perception and thinking.

And it's one of the roots of the sense of self.

Any thoughts on that?

I rest my case.

Right.

And I will be out there and there will be statues and yeah,

Right.

A lot of people identify very strongly with their work.

And some people when they die,

When they stop working die.

I mean,

I've known a lot of people that they retire and within 18 months they're dead.

They just fade away.

Yes,

You're over the hump.

And he doesn't do any work at all in the world.

You're just not paid for it.

So I think it's easy to understand why sometimes our minds produce a lot of static and sometimes we would rather struggle with the static in our mind than to actually just relax into the peacefulness which causes our sense of self to fade and become a little sort of whisperish.

Again to quote the Sutta Nipata,

When a person is inwardly quiet,

There is nowhere a self can be found.

We long for tranquility but when it comes to solid sense of an independent self just fades.

Perhaps we'd rather complain about hindrances than actually get rid of them.

I don't know.

It's interesting to think about.

The oblivion of Nibbana seems really unappealing.

I don't think we make this choice willfully.

It's just bred into us.

So sensual pleasures,

The desire to exist and the third one was the desire to not exist and I don't think that's talking about suicidal tendencies but it's just what we all feel in embarrassment.

And when you're embarrassed the sense of self gets really,

Really strong and we'd really like to get rid of it.

So back to the text.

Vāsaka continued,

How then can we become free of the burden of self-identity?

Dhammādida answered,

Freedom comes from,

I fleshed this out a little bit,

Freedom comes from recognizing and releasing and relaxing the very tension that creates the self-identity.

It's actually talking there,

It's actually releasing the tension and craving but we know what that process is.

Recognizing,

Releasing and relaxing the very tension that creates self-identity.

Following the eightfold path cultivates this freedom.

Vāsaka was inspired by her wisdom.

After reflecting on what she said he asked her for clarification.

You say the Buddha says self-identity is formed around the five khandhas,

The cluster of experience,

Sensation,

Feeling,

Tone,

Perception,

Concepts and awareness.

Are the khandhas,

The aggregates,

Are the khandhas the same as self-identity?

She replied,

They are neither the same nor are they different.

The five clusters of experience exist in the world.

When they are surrounded by tension,

Holding on,

Pushing away or confusion,

When they're surrounded by tension they can become the core of a sense of self,

A seed of a sense of self.

But without that craving and clinging there is no sense of self.

So in these lines he's talking in a very general way about how to free ourselves from this self,

From the burden of self-identity really.

But I thought it might be fun a little bit to just look at some ways of doing that.

One of them that I already alluded to is that the sense of self,

I look at it as just a psychological state,

The psychological phenomena,

The emotional phenomena.

Psychological states they have feelings,

Emotions,

Thoughts,

Ideas,

Attachments,

All kinds of stuff collected around them but that's all it is.

One of the things that we can do is that rather than see the self as black or white as I mentioned before,

Just observe it coming and going through the day as it strengthens and weakens.

And what happens when the sense of self is very strong,

It's very obvious.

And when we're feeling mellow and at ease,

After a long day of hiking up in the woods and sitting by a lake watching the sunset go down and it's so mellow and the sense of self evaporates,

But it never occurs to us to look for it and actually see that it's gone.

So you can set this little intention to just every once in a while kind of look and see is your sense of self strong or weak,

What is it,

What's going on there and let it come and go.

Another way of working it is what we talked about the other day of just relaxing that tightness in there.

And here's an even more direct way of doing that,

Of looking at that sense of self.

I invite you to close your eyes and count from one to twenty silently inside and when you get to twenty open your eyes so I know you've gotten there.

Okay so now I would like you to do that again,

Close your eyes and count from one to twenty and just notice where the numbers come from.

Other comments,

Observations?

Strangely they were like in a cluster and I had to go pick them up.

Yeah some people find a whole collection of them there already and for other people they just come out of nowhere.

So what is it that was creating those numbers?

So we can know that sort of scientifically but sort of in your own experience,

Where do those come from?

What creates them?

Why does the four come after three?

He's got it.

And so a lot of what we think of as self are just these sort of patterns that arise out of basically nowhere.

And if we were to go on with this we could do it again and then look and see if you can see the self in the midst of all that.

You want to try that?

Okay.

Count from one to twenty and this time look for the self in this whole process.

Yes.

It seems to come from something pinching together,

Something converging,

Like tension or something.

And then we use it,

Tension,

Release.

It felt like something,

Yeah,

Tension and release.

So he's saying the experience is a tension and release.

Other comments?

Well,

Looking for a solution to get in the way,

I wasn't sure the next number would come up.

It's interesting,

A lot of people have that experience.

It tends to bog the process down.

Myself was very delighted with how clear and predictably the numbers were arriving.

Oh,

You did it so well.

Such a good theme.

Mine was very directive,

Not going fast enough to pronounce some voice inside of it.

Right,

Right,

Right.

I was just watching the numbers go by.

Myself was a little girl learning to count and I keep being proud of how we learned to count.

So a lot of us really identify really strongly with our thoughts.

But if you really look at them,

Bring your awareness to the thoughts themselves,

The whole project of identifying with them starts to go a little haywire.

It starts to just shake apart a little bit.

Other comments?

Myself knows it's a theoretical construct.

That's right,

That's right.

And it's proud of it.

It's proud that it's not there.

And so the pride then becomes just another number that comes out of nowhere.

It becomes a form of selfing.

Yes,

Selfing.

There's a lot of people talk about self as a verb,

Something you do.

Okay,

So what's another strategy that you all should know very well by now for how to lighten up the sense of self?

Yes,

That's one.

And another one?

Smile,

Smile.

It's a selfie.

There's just one other that I want to suggest and that I've spoken to a lot of you individually about but I'm increasingly finding really helpful is to watch the language that you use even in your own head to talk about what's going on so that you would say something like,

Confusion arose in the mind heart.

Or confusion arose in the mind,

Depending on how you like the language of that.

As opposed to,

I got confused.

My mind was very excited.

It puts you in a place where you end up observing what's going on rather than identifying with it.

And it's actually much more objective and you're much less likely to get caught in the hindrance.

Fear arose in the mind heart.

It's actually a little easier to see that clearly than to say,

Oh,

I'm frightened.

Because when I say I'm frightened,

Then there's an emergency.

There's something that has to be solved or fixed.

But oh,

There's fear.

Well,

That's curious.

Let's see what that's about.

It's almost like putting it into the third person,

Right?

It's like putting it in the third person.

As we all know this trick,

That if you have a problem you can't figure out,

Just imagine a friend comes to you with that problem and what advice would you give them?

So it's a capacity to sit back a little bit and see that.

And it is much closer to objectively what's going on.

So that's enough from me for tonight.

Thoughts,

Comments,

Observations,

Questions?

So when you've been talking,

You've been talking about it from the,

Didn't go from the individual person living out into the world feeling,

But a lot of our sense of identity comes from other people's perception of us.

And you're in a struggle with,

They tell this about you so therefore it must be that.

I'm just interested in,

You know,

Is that something you just six are if you don't agree with it?

Everybody's entitled to their opinions.

I mean,

This is another one of those distancing.

In the introduction to the final section of Buddha's map,

I do a whole thing about hypnosis and this whole thing about how when you tell some,

Particularly with kids,

You know,

You're a good boy,

You're a good girl or something that really reinforces that identity.

I don't think the Buddha got into talking about that so much because what's really operative in all that is what we do with that.

And so he's,

You know,

Encouraging us to see that objectively,

See what we take on or see because it's always,

It's in the Tanah.

It's in how we respond to it.

It's the same thing with the five aggregates.

The five aggregates,

They just exist.

You know,

They're not a problem,

But when we tighten around them,

It's a problem.

So when somebody says to me,

It's a long story,

I won't tell you that,

But somebody says to me,

You know,

Doug,

You're a jerk,

And there's a place inside me that goes,

Yeah,

Sometimes I'm a jerk,

So what's your point?

You know,

Of just not collapsing around that because there's a little bit of,

You know,

All these qualities inside us.

So I'm a jerk,

Yeah,

That's obvious,

But what's the point?

With the bird image,

It's so easy to identify with something that feels good.

But,

You know,

One assumes that,

You know,

For all,

We're sitting here now,

We're having this discussion as adults,

But I think,

You know,

A lot of the fighting in the world right now comes through generations of fighting and,

You know,

Somebody in the family has been killed by the other side,

And there's this green that just,

This identity that goes generation to generation to generation,

And so you don't have that opportunity to just 6-R it in such an easy way.

Right,

So what this whole project is about is actually freeing ourselves up enough so that we might become,

You know,

The ones that might become instruments for this in the world,

But we have a limited amount of control over what other people do.

And you look at what that history is,

And it's really just a memory trace and a storyline.

It's just a whole bunch of concepts that are strung together that they identify with.

But somebody killed my grandfather,

You know,

And here we are right now,

It's all conceptual,

And so what happens out in the world is people are just walking around basically in a cloud,

In a huge,

Huge delusion.

They're just looking at their thoughts.

You know,

I look at you and I see you as someone who's related to somebody who killed my grandfather and therefore I'm supposed to blah,

Blah,

Blah.

You know,

There's a whole storyline,

But it's all just,

It's just figments.

But when we identify and hold onto it,

And a lot of you have probably seen that,

You know,

At some,

You get these little points when you're sitting where something just sort of breaks free a little bit and says,

Wow,

There's that thing,

When you have been really just sucked into it for a long time.

Solving the world's problems is another whole big thing.

That's in the real world,

You know.

The real world.

Where's the real world?

I call it the daily living,

Okay.

Some people call it the consensus trance.

It's bringing this,

What we're doing here,

Into the daily life.

It's sometimes so opposite to what's out there around us.

How we operate,

How we operate a business out there,

How we move around,

And how people around us are not aware of what has worked.

Yeah,

So can you hear in that there's a whole storyline and a concept and a whole lot of ideas about what's going on out there?

And I would suggest that that's just a storyline and a bunch of ideas.

I was talking about,

I think I mentioned this,

Leaving Damasuka for the first time,

And walking through the airport,

And looking at all the people that were smiling at me.

The world was always hostile,

And all these people are smiling at me.

It was just because I was smiling and didn't know it.

We never really,

We create these fantasies.

I have some teachers who didn't want me to teach in a particular town because they wanted to teach there.

And I looked at that and I said,

You know,

It's a huge population in town,

But there was this whole kind of concept about territoriality and ideas and who does what that's just that.

It's just a bunch of ideas.

And if we can,

So what this project is about with the meditation is loosening those up enough to at least see that those ideas are ideas rather than reality.

And then it's a training to actually see more clearly what's actually going on,

To see if we can see through our ideas and thoughts and just see what's really here,

And to allow ourselves to be surprised.

And that's not to say we need to be naïve or want to be naïve.

You've got to be yourself,

But if we don't at least have some place,

Somewhere,

Where we can step back out of our own trance.

The fact is called waking up.

It's not accidental.

We walk around on this trance of thoughts.

Can I answer that?

Okay.

I heard it said that the sort of work that we're doing here,

You can master at some point.

Like you become an arakh,

Right?

You become a Buddha.

But the work that you do in the world,

There is no end to your mastery there.

And you can look at the Buddha as an example.

He got enlightened,

And then he failed many times to communicate himself.

And it took him a long time to sort of learn how to speak to people in a way that he could be understood.

So I think the question you asked is a very good one.

How do we bring this back?

I don't know.

There's a lot of interesting things to learn there.

But the most important thing,

I think,

For bringing it back is to get cleared enough of our own delusions so that we can see clearly.

Because if we can't do that.

.

.

And Thich Nhat Hanh has this lovely image.

It's a metaphor.

It's a gruesome situation.

But the boat people,

When they were escaping out of South East Asia during the war,

And they would pile hundreds of people on a boat that was designed to carry 25.

And a lot of them sank,

And a lot of people died.

And Thich Nhat Hanh was saying that he suspected that what probably happened a lot was people in those boats would panic.

And they'd all move to one side and it would capsize.

And he said,

What would be the effect of one person,

Just even one person,

Who's sitting in the middle of all that,

Who is completely tranquil and with a tremendous amount of equanimity,

And that that too is contagious.

And that too,

As you're alluding to,

Can have a calming effect.

It doesn't guarantee anything,

But at least it has an effect,

Which is the most that we can really do.

Is that enough for the night?

So,

The rabbi came down to the altar,

Kneeled down,

Started beating his chest.

I'm nobody,

I'm nobody,

I'm nobody.

The cantor came to kneel down by the altar next to him and started beating his chest.

I'm nobody,

I'm nobody,

I'm nobody.

The janitor came and kneeled down next to the cantor and started beating his chest.

I'm nobody,

I'm nobody,

I'm nobody.

The cantor looked at the rabbi and said,

Look who thinks he's nobody.

Watch out for the delusion.

Knowing that we are all just specks in this larger flow of life.

And feeling how deeply we all affect one another.

And the ease that comes from just relaxing out of that over-personalizing of one little speck.

With that sense of relaxation.

In the Buddha's words,

Monk looks for peace within himself and not any place else.

For when a person is inwardly quiet,

There is nowhere a self can be found.

Sensing all of that and just gently radiating outward.

May all beings know their real essence.

May all beings know that deep quiet,

That deep stillness.

May all beings feel safe and comfortable.

May all beings be free.

May all beings have sweet dreams.

May it be so.

Chime Chime Chime

Reviews

Excellent, thank you for helping me better understand not-self .

I enjoyed the talk. But could not hear many of the audience comments- but maybe hearing them wasn’t necessary

Resonated beautifully. Thank you!

❤️💛🤗😍😍😍😍😍

Thank you!! Loved your laughter 😌