I'd like to start the morning with a poem.
It's a Chinese poem.
I don't know the author,
But it's very simple.
We sit together,
The mountain and me,
Until only the mountain remains.
We sit together,
The mountain and me,
Until only the mountain remains.
In these teachings of the Buddha,
The idea of self,
Any kind of self,
Is seen as a concept or a perception,
And sometimes it's accurate and sometimes it's not.
And as our practice,
As mindfulness grows stronger,
We begin to understand on some level that we are not this body.
We are not the thoughts that arise.
We are not the emotions that are felt.
We begin to see that the whole idea of self is a mental construct.
It's a mental fabrication,
And we're making up these ideas of who we are.
And when we begin to see this,
It can occur for us as a big relief,
No longer having to prop ourselves up in a way.
The Buddha was really a psychologist in a way.
He was interested in being aware of the activities of the mind,
What the mind was doing,
And to begin shedding those activities that cause suffering.
He was interested in seeing the process by which the mind operates,
Basically seeing how we hold on,
How we cling,
And how we let go of clinging.
That process.
The process of how we can be in the world,
Act in the world,
Speak in the world skillfully for benefit,
And how we can avoid unwholesome and harmful ways of speaking and being.
And one of the ways we cling relates to this concept of self.
The term,
The modern interpretation of self is kind of selfing,
Not like selfies,
Like taking the photos,
But selfing.
The self is not a noun,
A thing,
But rather it's an activity.
It's a verb.
It's something we're doing.
We're selfing.
We're making up a self.
We're actively involved in creating a self.
And it's not a big surprise if you begin tracking the content of your thoughts that what you're actually thinking about,
Chances are for most people,
A very high percentage of our thoughts have to do with moi,
Ourselves,
Have to do with us.
What happened in the past,
What plans we have for the future.
The self is the main character in the mind.
So to start noticing the activities of the mind,
You know,
That's called selfing.
How we're making ourselves,
Imagining ourselves,
How we defend ourselves or apologize for ourselves.
Starting to notice the thoughts of self aggrandizement,
Or the delusions of grandeur,
Or the delusions of being miserable,
Or being bad or awful.
These are all ideas that we glom onto as self.
Another idea is to have a certain philosophy that we have deemed the right philosophy.
We love to glom onto ideas,
You know,
Philosophically and psychologically,
Like even the idea of Buddhism,
Like this is the right practice.
That's an idea.
And we glom onto these ideas.
And then we organize our whole being around these ideas.
There's a short little story that illustrates this.
So in a classroom,
The teacher asks her students,
What color is an apple?
And all of the students,
They say it's red.
But one boy says it's white.
The teacher says,
No,
You're wrong.
Sometimes they're green,
Sometimes they're yellow,
But mainly they're red.
And he insisted.
And then she insisted,
And it became kind of this unpleasant debate.
But when you cut open an apple,
It's white.
The boy was talking about the apple from the inside,
Not the outside.
So it's not the usual way we would respond.
But it's actually a deeper way,
Right?
We limit our experience of the world through our attachments to what is really just surface recognition of some object.
You know,
Our perception recognizes the surface appearance of things.
And we create concepts like an apple is like this.
Or we curate a concept about my car or my body or my house.
And they're just products of our conceptual thinking.
In practice,
We begin to see how we are actually creating these concepts of I and me and mine.
And all these other concepts we have about our self image,
You know,
The idea about ourselves that we've created,
Let's see them.
Because if we don't,
We get caught,
We get caught into them.
That's how we respond to the world as this self concept.
And I want to look at just a little bit how to unhook from the the stickiness of the self concepts and self perception,
The selfing.
And one way to start recognizing this happening is to tune into when you use the phrase I am.
And we use this phrase all the time.
You know,
We use it as a description of ourselves.
I'm a teacher,
I'm a mother,
And we use it to describe our emotions.
I'm tired,
I'm afraid,
I'm anxious.
We use it to describe our mental constructs,
Our mental understandings,
The formations of the mind,
Like,
I'm worried about this,
That I am,
You know,
I have anxiety.
How are we holding these ways that we identify?
Like,
We wear them,
We talked about this,
We sometimes they're like coats that we wear.
And sometimes they're actually like identities.
You know,
We become our illness in a way.
If we have chronic illness,
We become it.
We live into it.
So what hats are you wearing?
And what's the relationship to them?
You know,
It's so subtle.
We don't really see the selfing in our busy life.
But when the mind gets quiet,
Quiet enough in practice,
Then we can start to see more clearly.
You can see the movement of the mind and how views are born,
And how they appear and then how they go away.
And we're able to watch the projections and the ideas and the concepts of self appearing,
Really out of nothing more than conditioning.
You know,
Where did this idea come from?
You can maybe ask yourself that.
Where did this come from?
This concept of of me in this way?
And is it true?
So our practice is learning to recognize that the things we take ourselves to be,
They don't seem to work very well to define ourselves,
You know,
By these things.
Like,
I'm not this,
I'm not this.
And maybe we don't need to understand who we are.
So these characteristics,
These three characteristics that we've been exploring,
There's change,
There is pain,
And it's not self,
It's not personal.
They have these supports,
These opposites,
That are like three legs of a tripod,
Kind of holding a telescope.
And it's hard to hold a telescope in your hands and look at the stars or the moon,
Because you can't hold it still enough.
But with a tripod,
You can hold it still enough to observe what's happening with steadiness,
Right?
Steadiness is the support for change.
Steadiness is what we begin to cultivate in practice immediately,
The steadiness,
A sense of well being is when there's enough well being,
We can actually look at what's difficult clearly and not get overwhelmed by it.
So steadiness is one leg,
Well being is another leg.
And the support the third leg of this sort of tripod is that supports this teaching of not self is ironically confidence,
Self confidence,
Right?
And by that I mean a strong capacity to engage,
To look at with confidence,
Knowing we have the capacity to meet whatever we find,
To have some confidence that we are getting to know ourselves,
That we know ourselves,
That we're studying ourselves,
We have confidence that we can do that.
And maybe we've learned some things about wise ways of responding to challenging situations.
I've heard of many wise responses to challenges from from you on this call,
On the zoom room,
Maybe you've learned how to be stable,
And how not to be reactive.
Maybe the confidence that you have is,
You know,
How to keep your mouth shut,
You know,
For many people,
That's a good thing.
So understanding the self,
And then forgetting the self,
Like that's,
It may be a slow,
But it's also part of what this practice is developing.
So I'll pause here.
And thank you for your,
Your kind attention on this exploration.
We'll take questions.
