Transcription
Okay. So to continue our exploration of this difficult topic. As I mentioned briefly, we can approach, begin to take this journey of the understanding of the emptiness of self, understanding what the Buddha was getting at with this self business, in a number of different ways -- certainly in the meditation practice, both through practices of cultivation, cultivating loving-kindness and compassion and calmness, and through practices of insight. I'll talk about that. Also by looking at our life, and I'll go into that. But as I said, we also move along this journey, begin to move along this journey very much in terms of our behaviour, our actions in the world. Of course it's not irrelevant.
So one of the qualities that very much, as I said this morning, loosens the sense of self and creates a fertile soil that we can begin to see deeply into its nature is the quality of generosity, of dāna, if you're familiar with this word, dāna. It really means giving, the practice of giving. So generosity. And I also would include service. Moving the heart out in its expression of care in the world further than this, this little, tiny, circumscribed area, or those few people around me that have come to be important to me. Of course that's an important part of life. But the aspiration to move it in a very wide way, to practise generosity and to practise service and giving. It really is a practice. It's not, you know, something like, "You should be generous." It's more like a lifelong willingness and commitment to explore what generosity means in one's life. What are the edges of that? What are the limits? What are the no-entry zones on that? What is the power of generosity? What's the effect of generosity on oneself, on others, on relationships? To really take it up as a lifelong practice, enormously rich, enormously powerful.
And what one notices -- and I think probably we all have a sense of this -- is that when we practise generosity, when we give, when the heart opens in that movement of dāna, of giving, there's a lightness of being and an openness of heart and mind that come in as an organic kind of by-product of being generous. We open, we let go to give, and that letting go creates a lightness, creates an openness of heart. We've had a little bit of a taste of that, as I said, in our lives. Probably everyone has. But the Buddha says don't underestimate that. Don't underestimate that. He says something like, "If you knew what I know about the power of generosity, you wouldn't let one single meal go by without giving something to someone." It's quite a strong statement. And Buddhas, one of their characteristics is that they see extremely deeply and clearly what the repercussions and the effects of our actions are. So someone who sees very, very clearly what it is that really has an effect. He's saying generosity, really pay attention to generosity as something that opens the heart and moves in a very real way on this journey into understanding selflessness, into letting go of this prison, this constriction of self.
So if we take generosity up as a practice in our life, we have that willingness, that openness to do that, it's very interesting, it's extremely interesting. We begin to see, one of the things we begin to see, is what are the areas in my life that I'm okay being generous with, and what are the areas that are "Hmm"? One quite common dichotomy is, say, between time and resources, usually money. Just to see where one is on this. There's no judgment. It's just knowing oneself a little bit. I know for myself when I have money I'm quite happy to give it, but time is a little bit, "Well, hold on." [laughs] It's a bit more precious to me. My brother is completely the other way round. So it's just personality types. But actually to know oneself and have a sense of, "Okay, this is the area where I need to kind of push my boundaries a little bit, where I just want to test the waters of my edges a little bit." For me it's around time, giving of my time to others.
We can give time. We can give money. We can of course give attention, which is a beautiful gift. How much loneliness and sorrow and pain in this world are actually the result of people not feeling seen, not feeling heard, not feeling attended to in a very deep and real way? When we give that to another, we're actually giving something very precious. I think it was Rilke, the poet, who said to give attention is to love. I'm sure he said it much more beautifully and poetically. And in German. [laughter] When we give attention, we give love. It's how we express our love. We can also give kindness. That's a wonderful gift to give. And the Buddha says when we develop kindness in the heart and we exude that and we give that, we are giving the gift of fearlessness to other beings. They know, they have a sense, whether it's human beings or animal beings, begin to have a sense. There's something in the vibration or something in the actions that they've seen. They know they can trust around us. They know they don't have to be on their guard. Tremendous gift to give that fearlessness to others.
So to explore generosity and all its kind of aspects and the angles on it. There's a huge range of the ways we can be generous and stretch what that means in our life, explore what that means, question what that means, feel what that means. To me, when I'm practising this and engaged in practising this, there's a real paradox here, or a seeming paradox. When there's generosity -- and I see this in myself and I see this in others -- when one is giving, giving away, letting go and giving, a feeling comes right there of having enough. One feels like there's enough in life. I have enough. It's a paradox. I'm giving it away, and yet I feel I have enough. Conversely, if I'm mostly or only interested in saving, and I'm a bit stingy, basically, with the giving, I want to just make sure it's going to be okay for me -- which is very human and very understandable -- just saving, saving, not too much generosity, maybe I'll have X amount in the bank or whatever it is, but I think there's always going to be some kind of gnawing anxiety: "What if? Maybe it won't be enough. What if da-da-da-da?" The very non-generosity feeds that gnawing anxiety, and the generosity feeds a sense of having enough. A real paradox here. We were talking earlier in the question and answer period -- Dharma is upside down, upside down. All the deep teachings of the Dharma turn the values of the world on their heads. There's something very radical about just a very basic teaching of generosity, which is what the Buddha put at the base of his teachings, generosity, right at the fundamental level. And already it turns the values that we have, that we live by, on their heads.
[9:53] There's this fantastic passage from the Buddha. I'm not sure where it's from. It might be from Mahāyāna scripture. It's very striking. He says:
What we give away is ours. What we keep at home is not ours. What we give away is of value. What we keep at home is of no value. What we give away we don't need to protect. What we keep at home we need to protect. What we give away causes no worry. What we keep at home causes worry. What we give away gives inexhaustible wealth. What we keep at home will be exhausted. What we keep at home leads to negativity. What we give away leads directly to enlightenment.
It's pretty ... [laughs] It's an odd thing. It's very radical, but it's also, "What exactly is he getting at? Very strange statements." So one half is perhaps a little easier, that what we keep at home we kind of need to guard, we need to protect it, we need to make sure it's okay, we need to watch out for it. "What we give away gives inexhaustible wealth." What does it mean? To me, I think one of the things he's getting at is this teaching of karma. We can scrap all that business about past life and reincarnation and "in another life I was Cleopatra" and all that stuff. In this life, I can see something if I pay attention. If I'm really honest, and the heart is open, I'm paying attention, I can see that through generosity, through giving, I am nourishing and supporting an openness of heart and a letting go and the freedom that that brings, and that is an inexhaustible wealth because nothing, no one can take it away. It's qualities of heart that one is feeding through one's actions and one's orientation, and they stay with you. They stay with you. It's like a real treasure in the heart.
What we tend to hold on to and look to for security, that's the fragile stuff. That's not the best investment. The Buddha's turning everything on its head. It is curious. To me, I think it's a really high level of maturity in the practice that actually really sees that, really understands it, and really lives by it. It's so tempting to put our sense of security in the material and building up and saving. But to actually see the power of generosity in one's heart, its power to bring a sense of freedom, sense of connection, sense of love, sense of happiness, to see that, to understand it to the depth that we're living by it, that's very, very mature practice.
I mentioned of course we have a responsibility to those near us, to our family and circle of friends. Of course we do. That's life. But, in a way, the movement of the Dharma, we could say, the spiritual kind of directionality of this, is to begin expanding the circle of care, of generosity, so that it's not small and contracted around me; it's actually very wide and the aspiration is that it's boundless, it has no limits. Which is quite a tall order. But we can very easily begin practising in this way. It's not so far-fetched as it might sound.
When I used to live in America -- you probably have it here -- I was involved in quite a number of different environmental organizations. They had projects where they sort of, for a certain amount of money you can buy a patch of rainforest somewhere in some country and know that it will be protected from logging and exploitation. Do they have that? Yeah? I used to love doing that. There was something about it, I realized, that I knew that I would never see this strip of rainforest, I would never enjoy it, I would never be there, I would never marvel at its beauty. In some instances, my ignorance of geography, I wasn't even exactly sure where the country was. [laughter] But there was something about it that it was a giving an investment in something that the self would never see or enjoy. And in that, in that movement, it felt as if this sense of self began to expand, just began to grow and be much more embracing. Very beautiful.
So the problem with the sense of self, or one of the problems, is that it's often quite tight and constricted, and we don't have a lot of say in when it feels tight and when it feels a bit more open. If we practise generosity, we're actually practising this kind of loosening of the sense of self, loosening and widening and opening.
Similarly, two or three years ago, I led a work retreat in the highlands of Scotland, and we were working on reforesting the Caledonian Forest. Scotland used to be one huge forest, basically. Now it's very beautiful, but it's completely environmentally degraded. So we were up there in Scottish rain, basically, seven days of it. [laughter] Planting trees and working on other reforestation aspects. And I was talking to the people organizing it -- it's called Trees for Life, this project -- and they said, this one guy said, "It will take us 300 years to know if what we're doing is working." [laughter] 300 years! How can self get wrapped around that? It can't. No one was putting a plaque on any little sapling, "Rob planted this. This is mine." There was something in it, in the fact that I will be long dead. I won't know how it turned out. Something in it that's just beyond the limited scope of self. So the heart is moving outwards, expanding, expanding. The movement of generosity unbinds -- that's the Buddha's word -- unbinds the sense of self. It's moving towards unbinding the sense of self.
With generosity, I also mean service, the movement of service, of giving in all kinds of ways, as I said. And it's interesting, too, if we really do take this on as a practice -- sometimes we look inside and we see that there's generosity or service but the motivations are a little bit questionable. This is very human. Sometimes we're giving because there's fear there. We're afraid of appearing stingy or appearing unkind, or we want others to think good of us, or sometimes there's a sense of unworthiness, we somehow feel like our very existence is not worthy unless we're earning it by giving, by the movement of generosity, seeking praise or approval or whatever it is. Extremely common. Sometimes a person begins to see that and they think, "I'll throw the whole thing out." That's an understandable reaction. I don't know whether we need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. It's possible that motivations in practice purify, they purify over time with consciousness, with steadiness, with questioning. Just in the process, one keeps the service up, one keeps being generous, but begins looking into the motives.
[19:05] So I sometimes tell people, you know, this business about motivations purifying, we can hear about the motivation that we're just practising for the sake of all beings -- very beautiful, beautiful intention, that actually one is doing this practice, the difficulty of it, for the sake of the welfare of all beings. But it's not that realistic when we start. I remember, going back more than twenty years, when I started I was in college. I saw this poster and it said something like, "Come and meditate" or "Learn meditation at these classes. Calmness, stillness, power of mind," or something like that. I thought, "Great. Right. I'll go along to these classes and I'll get some of this power of mind business and then I'll be able to study quicker at university. I'll be able to study quicker, which will leave more time for drinking." [laughter] Which, at the time, seemed to be the main sort of purpose of university life. Of course, over the years, there's a purification that goes on. It just goes on naturally. But the point is, it's okay if the motivations for giving, for generosity and service, are not quite 100 per cent clean. Just keep practising. Just keep looking and questioning. So the movement is not from self-centredness to other-centredness. Usually other-centredness is wrapped up in this kind of wanting approval or wanting others to see us in a certain light or to owe us something or not feeling worthy. It's more like self-centredness to a kind of openness, to a consciousness of interconnection, interbeing.
Okay. So in a way, that's just to pick out one or two strands from how we live, generosity and service. What about another angle -- how we're actually looking at our life off the cushion, outside of meditation? How are we actually looking at our experience? So one practice that I've found very useful over time is sit in your home, your house, apartment, whatever it is, and just sit on the sofa. It's not a big meditation. No lotus or anything like that. Just sit on the sofa and look at the living room, what you have in the living room. Look at your so-called possessions. If you just keep the attention there in a kind of relaxed but sustained way, what you might notice is that after a time the sense of them being 'mine' just begins to die down a little bit. One can do this with one's apartment, one's house, one's furniture, stereo, all that, the property. Can even do it with your hand. If you just -- probably not a good idea to do it on the tube or something, but you just sit and look at the hand, and keep the awareness there in a gentle way for long enough. After a time, there's a sense of, "It's not really mine." One can also -- if one is feeling quite adventurous -- do this with one's spouse. [laughter] Or partner, or child, or parent, or lover, whatever it is. Just see something -- there's a shift, or can be a shift, after a certain point, seeing them as not mine.
In that 'not mine' -- and it's just a temporary shift; of course it comes back. It's just a temporary shift. But we begin to sense a kind of freedom in it, relief: "All this stuff is not actually mine!" There's a sense of just unburdening, potentially. Or a sense of preciousness, of freshness and newness that can come into seeing those that are near to us, that we love. So the freedom of not fully believing in 'I have' or 'mine,' not fully believing in it. It doesn't bring in, or it shouldn't -- let me put it this way, it shouldn't bring in a sense of disconnection, alienation, weirdness, coldness, aloofness, lack of love. It shouldn't be doing that. What actually happens -- again, it's quite paradoxical -- when there's this non-ownership of something, it actually allows love in. It's very curious. We might wonder why is that. It actually allows love in. So looking at one's so-called property or ownership that way.
Another area in our life that the sense of self kind of constricts around is around our roles. This is very important, especially -- well, it's important for everyone. I was going to say especially for lay people, but it happens with monks and nuns as well. We get into a certain role in life, our job or this or that that we're doing, and somehow the sense of self wraps itself around that and there's not much breathing space. Then someone shows up and says, "Sorry, end of role. We're going to let you go," or whatever they say. Or a partnership dissolves or whatever it is. Some role ends, and because the self has wrapped itself round it, it's a problem. Or in the role, in the job, there's a sense of constriction. Something comes in and the suffering comes in then because of our identification with roles. We don't see they're just a kind of conventional reality. There's nothing inherently real about our roles. So right now, I'm teacher, the role. You, student. Me, speak. You, listen. Me Tarzan, you ... [laughter] That's just the role. There's nothing inherently real about it. Same with our jobs, same with everything. It's just a conventional agreement of society. And yet we can have so much suffering around this.
A little while ago, I was teaching somewhere else, and there was a man who had been a lighting engineer in the theatre for about twenty years. He was probably in his fifties is my guess. Twenty or thirty years he had been working in this. He had to stop because he had to actually care for someone. He felt very unhappy in the years since he stopped because he wasn't a lighting engineer. Everything he felt that he got from that was no longer. And so we just had a bit of a dialogue, and I asked him, "Well, how old were you when you started being a lighting engineer?" And he said, you know, twenty-something. I said, "So you weren't a light engineer before that, but was it okay?" "Well, yeah." "When you were a light engineer and you were sleeping, are you still a light engineer then? Or when you're on the toilet, are you still a light engineer then?" So we take this concept and we kind of whitewash the whole of our life with it and we say, "That's who I am." And we get a certain amount of self-worth or self-definition out of it. We don't see all the holes in it. We don't see that it's just a convention that we stretch and then put this stamp on.
So the property, the role. Another way that this whole self-sense becomes very painful is the kind of views we have of ourselves. It's a normal human practice, so to speak, to define ourselves in certain ways: "I am like this. I am like that." To see situations in terms of self, so to see what happens in a situation in terms of self or other: "This happened because I did it in a certain way," or as if "Everything's up to me." I'll explain what I mean. Dharma practice, the teachings, are about seeing what comes out, what manifests in a certain situation, seeing it in terms of all the conditions that are coming together to seed that moment. So right now, this talk, it seems very clear I'm up here giving a talk, okay, and hopefully you're listening. It seems like what's coming out of the mouth, the texture of the talk, the feeling in the room, that's all kind of dependent on the speaker. But it's interesting to do this over and over. One really gets the sense that how the talk is, what's said, how it's said, the feeling in the room, the whole thing of it is a complete -- what the Buddha would call -- dependent arising. Some of you in any kind of performing art, if you do any of that, you'll know this, or hopefully you'll know this.
What happens in this moment depends on everything in this room -- the quality of everyone's attention, how sleepy or not, how interested, all that, what we all had for lunch and whether a bit groggy. All of it is coming into this. So what comes out of this mouth is a dependent arising. If I view every Dharma talk that I give in terms of depending on me, it would be a nightmare. It would be an absolute nightmare. Imagine the stress of it -- I have to sort of come up with the goods all the time. This situation, I don't know, sometimes it's less obvious when you're listening (but sometimes it is obvious), it's a completely co-dependent arising. But the programming, the very deep habit of programming of human consciousness, is to see in terms of self: I did a good job. I didn't do a good job. I said a stupid thing. I said a great thing. I, I, I, I, I, or you, you, you, you, you. So if we're not seeing in terms of my self, we're seeing in terms of someone else's self. We really need to train ourselves to see this situation in terms of the web of conditions that are feeding it. It might sound, intellectually, like, "I get that. I get that." We need to do this over and over until the habit of seeing in terms of self just doesn't have that kind of strength any more.
So years ago when I lived in America, I worked with a psychotherapist for a while, and she had some kind of black belt in confrontational psychotherapy or something. [laughter] It was actually really good for me at the time. I was quite young and it was very good for me. Or some aspects were good, put it that way. [laughter] After a while, something became clear to me. It took me a while to become clear. I would go in there, and because she was quite aggressive with her challenging, I would often be quite fearful. And then because of the fear, there was a kind of stuckness that came into the interaction -- a stuckness in terms of my inner process and the dialogue with her, etc. And then the conclusion would be, "You're stuck in your life. You're fearful. You're like this," or I would say the wrong thing or not say da-da-da, and it became quite a -- some aspects of it, it was a very painful situation, not seeing that her aggression was a factor very much feeding the situation. Maybe now that sounds completely obvious, but we get into these kind of situations, and interactions with others, or in our work or whatever it is, and we're not seeing the conditions that feed it.
[32:12] Similarly, again, with the definition of who I am. We're not seeing how the mind is in a certain moment is also dependent on a whole web of inner and outer conditions, a whole web. So right now what we had for lunch, what you did or didn't have for lunch, is actually affecting the mind state right now, what happened this morning, what happened yesterday, all of it, the input from the talk, all of it.
So the mind state is, again, affected by many, many things, from the present and from the past. And yet, what do we do, oftentimes? We take one thing out, either inner or outer, and we say, "That's the cause of my mind state." Or, even more troublesome, "That's how I am." If we have a difficult mind state that seems to appear, like depression or anger, we say, "I'm depressed. I'm a depressed person. I'm an angry person. I'm this or I'm that." Again, we define ourselves based on something that's coming and going, not there all the time -- nothing can be there all the time. And what's more, it's coming and going dependent on conditions, inner and outer. And yet we just see it in terms of self and self-definition. Any time we do that, suffering is not very far away. It's either right there in the moment, or if we've wrapped ourselves around something positive -- "I'm wonderful and brilliant and radiant" and all that -- just a matter of time before we meet someone who doesn't agree with us. [laughter] The self in definition, wrapping itself around any definition, suffering comes, to use the Buddha's analogy, as sure as the wheels of the cart follow the ox that pulls it. Not a very twenty-first century analogy, but. [laughter]
So there's how we act in the life, the generosity, the service. There are the cultivation practices, loving-kindness, calmness, compassion, etc. There's how we look at our everyday life. How are we looking? Are we looking in terms of self? And then there are what we call insight practices, using the meditation itself to begin looking at the self in a different way. So after a certain point in practice -- not really a point; after a certain time in practice, put it that way, a certain time spent looking in, one may ask oneself: where is this self? Where is my self? Where is it? And begin, with a sort of steadiness over time, looking at the flow of inner experience. If you're new, that's what this practice is heading towards. It's actually moving towards encompassing everything in the inner and outer experience. One brings mindfulness to it all. One doesn't just stay with the breath. Everything -- body, breath, feelings, emotions, mind states, sensations, thoughts, all of it. And when I look inside in a sustained and interested way, in a careful way, with sensitivity, what I see is I can't find anything that doesn't change. Cannot find anything that does not change. Not the body, not the feelings, not the emotions, not the thoughts, not the sensations, nothing. If I say, "Where is this self?", the sense I have of self is of something fixed, lasting, and independent. We feel ourselves to be the same person we were twenty years ago, ten years ago, two years ago, two months ago, two days ago. But when I look inside, I can't find anything that stays. I really can't find it. If I really look for it, I can't find it.
This can be very striking. If one actually goes looking for the self in one's meditation, you realize you cannot find it. And one reflects or may reflect, one spends one's life -- which is limited; our life is limited in time from birth to death, however many years that is, it's limited; we have a limited life -- one spends one's life and one's energy -- which, again, is limited; we only have a limited resource of energy as human beings -- I spend my life and energy basically at the whim of this self, but when I look for it, I can't find it. It can be very jarring, even. Can be. Shakes things up -- that's a better way of putting it.
To talk more about the meditation practice, the way that the Buddha favoured -- and it's also the way that I like to teach it more often -- working with this in practice is, as I said this morning, not so much to make statements about "there is a self" or "there isn't a self" or "I shouldn't have a self if I'm a Buddhist" or whatever. It's rather to see the present moment experience and see that I don't need to see it as self. So sensations happening -- we were talking about this in the question and answer period earlier -- sensations are happening right now in the backside, wherever, in the feet. Typical, without even realizing it most of the time, we see it as my sensations. Very normal, very understandable. And of course they're mine and not yours.
The Buddha says practise seeing if you can see them as not-self, not me, not mine. They're just happening. It's just happening. So right now, sensations in the feet or in the backside, in a way, they're just happening. They're not me, not mine. And this is a practice. We practise looking at the experience of the present moment as not-self, as not me, not mine. Okay? So we're not making any big metaphysical statements, any philosophical this or that. Practise in the moment, can I regard this moment's experience as not-self? It's a practice. The Buddha said it's a way of looking, one practises a way of looking that leads to freedom. So body sensations, feelings, thoughts, emotions, mind states, the whole shebang of what we can observe -- can we regard it as not-self? This is really a practice. Usually, for most people, it's a practice that one takes on once there's some degree of calmness, and then begin looking in this way. Say I'm aware of body sensations or an emotion, actually to see if I can very lightly view it as not me, not mine, not-self. For some people it's a very quiet label: it's just happening, not me, not mine, not-self, as a way of unhooking the identification that we usually have, whether we're aware of it or not, with the objects of our experience.
[40:42] So it's really a practice that one gets skilled at. As the practice deepens, one can get skilled at this practice. And we understand we don't need to see anything as self, anything at all that we conventionally take as self, including awareness. So that's a whole other level of this practice. Some teachings say, "You are Awareness. That's your ultimate nature. You are the Witness," with a capital W and a capital A. It's tempting to feel that, because if one has let go of identification with the body and the emotions and the thoughts, very nice freedom, what's left is the awareness. One can think, "This is my true nature." I'm talking about very deep levels of practice now to create a map for you a little bit. When one is able to let go of identifying with the objects of experience -- body, sensations, feelings, thoughts, emotions, all that -- then one has to unhook the identification with awareness. It's a very, very deep level of practice, and it's much more subtle and, in a way, more difficult to do, but possible. So we practise seeing all this is not-self -- breath, body sensations, thoughts, all of that.
So it's really a practice. It's an avenue of practice. Again, for some of you relatively new to practice, one may feel, "I just need to be in the present moment with mindfulness." Maybe that's enough, but maybe not. At a certain level, other kind of options open up. I'm just painting a picture for you maybe of future feature presentations, I don't know. We can see, though, the identification with this stuff, with body, when we're identified with the appearance of body or the feeling of the body -- illness, discomfort, pain. When there's identification there, there's suffering there. When there's identification with thought, how much suffering there? "I had a certain thought. It means I'm a bad person." Or with the emotions. The identification brings suffering, as I said right at the beginning. If we talk about thought for a few moments, certain kinds of thought, how much problem do we have with those in our life? How much pain and suffering is bound up in the area of thought? One particular genre of thought is the judgmental thought, particularly self-judgmental. How much pain in that?
When the practice -- again, just to paint a picture -- when the practice goes deeper, there's some calmness, one can begin regarding even the thoughts that happen as not-self, not me, not mine. It's harder to do when there's not a calmness and there's sort of a thicket of thoughts. As the calmness comes, a certain space opens up in the awareness. It can almost be like the thoughts are like fireworks appearing in the night sky, and they just come into being in dazzling colours, and it's like, "Woo! Look at that!" And then they disappear, and they just disappear into the night sky, and they're not taken as me or mine or saying anything about me. They're just something arising and passing in the space of awareness, ephemeral, 99.9 per cent of the time insignificant. Just a thought. Not me, not mine, not a problem. When, with practice, we are able to have this non-identification with thought, then that whole mass of structure, that painful kind of edifice, that cliff rock of pain that comes from judgment, particularly self-judgmental thought, measuring ourselves, comparing -- how am I doing, am I okay, am I good enough, I'm a this or I'm a that -- all that begins to crumble. Seeing it as not-self is the most powerful thing for ending this kind of tyranny of self-judgment.
And it's interesting how it happens. Sometimes it goes like those huge chunks of the Greenland ice shelf that just have been falling recently into the sea. Sometimes it's much more gradual. Sometimes, through this non-identification that we're practising, it's almost as if the habit of the thought is still there. I remember, for instance, having quite a self-judgmental little monster in my head, and practising in this way. After a while -- it was actually years, but after a while, the thoughts would still go. There would still be, like, "Rob, you're an idiot," or you're whatever. But they had no power to them. It was just completely empty, vapid, just a sort of running out of batteries, running out of steam. And then after a while even that went. Even that went.
It's not that one moves from this kind of climate of harshness with oneself, of self-judgmentalism, putting oneself down, that one moves from there into "I am now fantastic" and all of that, and one inflates oneself. It's more that one just loses interest in the whole kind of up/down thing. One loses interest in judging oneself and evaluating oneself and believing in that. The energy has just gone out of it. I don't know, when I say that -- sometimes I think for people it just seems like, "Well, maybe for some people, but not for me. You don't know what goes on in here." I would say that it's possible for everyone. It's really possible for everyone to let go of that whole painful structure of self-judgmental thought, self-view, the constriction of that, the tyranny of it. It's actually possible for everyone, everyone in this room to have let go of that, either gradually or suddenly, whatever.
This morning I said something, that what we're interested in is an understanding of this self ... [audio cuts out] Many different approaches to practice are possible. What is it that we need to understand? In Dharma language, we need to understand that the self is empty. It's empty of inherent existence. It doesn't exist in the way that it appears to as something real. So what that partially means is the self is kind of dependent. The sense of self is something that gets built up or relaxed. It's always -- we were talking about this earlier in the question and answer period: you can have different degrees of self. Sometimes the self is completely raging. It's taking up everything. It's really full of thought, and there's a lot of energy involved in the self. The self is quite big. Sometimes it's just what we would call a normal sense of self, so I'm just sitting around with a friend or whatever or on my own. Sometimes it's quieter, and then it can get quieter and quieter. What we want to understand is that this whole experience of self is something that gets built up, again, by conditions. If it was real, if self was real, it would always be a certain way. It would always appear a certain way independent of the conditions.
[49:23] When one asks, "What is it that builds up the sense of self?" This is a very deep question now, a very deep sort of Dharma question. One of the things is this measuring and comparing that we do. So the food, you could say, the self feeds on measuring and comparing and evaluating. More measuring and comparing there is, the bigger the sense of self, the more active the sense of self, the more busy the sense of self. But, conversely -- and you often get this mutual dependence with things -- what do you think one of the favourite activities of the self is? Measuring and comparing. So more measuring and comparing, more self. More self, more measuring and comparing. They kind of feed each other. To see this in our life. You can't completely not measure and compare, because it's actually fundamentally entwined with our perceptual process. But just to see how much energy we give that will be how much energy there is in the self.
Another thing, or a similar thing, a different angle. Grasping. When something, either outer or inner, is a big deal, when we have made it a big deal through our relationship with it, then the sense of self is big. When the sense of self is big, it goes out looking for something in the world to be a big deal. So the sense of self depends on some thing it's making something of. It's making a big deal. You can see this at a very gross level. When something is really a problem, there's a lot of sense of self there. When nothing is really standing out in experience -- maybe sometimes in meditation, or just walking in nature -- the sense of self gets quieter. The self and the world, so-called, self and things, are dependent on each other. They feed each other. They're mutually dependent. This is very -- I'm talking about a very deep level now. Why not go there? When we begin to see this, the self and the world are kind of dependent on each other, they arise together, self and the world arise together, when we really begin to see that, there comes a love, because there comes a sense of a knowing of non-separation. This self, the sense I have, is of something separate from the world. Here's me, there's the world. It's separate. I end here. We begin to get a sense of self and the world being somehow mutually dependent, mutually penetrating, in a way. Very profound, very beautiful, what opens in the heart then.
So with this investigation into non-self comes actually very deep love. We begin to authentically have a relationship with life where we're really treating the happiness of others equal to our own. And it's not kind of forced. It's simply coming into the being out of that understanding. Going into the sense of self, the emptiness of self, it also frees our love, whatever love we have, it frees it from inhibition. How often in life -- again, the pain of this -- how often have we felt love and felt an urge to express love to someone, to those close or whatever, and we've just been a bit shy or a bit inhibited or a bit scared with it? And it's because of the self. It's because of the self-sense. So it frees our love to flow and to grow. It also frees our self-expression. So, paradoxically, when we see the emptiness of self, when we let go of our constriction around self or the constriction of self, we're actually free to express more of who we are, more of the fullness and the range of who we are, because there's no problem in defining ourselves or being constricted by a definition or worrying about what others think. The self-expression, at every level -- creatively, in relationship, in whatever -- is freed in the life.
I'm aware of time, so I'll just say a couple more things. With practice, when we begin to be able to let go of the agenda of self more and more or from time to time -- the agenda of self is basically "What's in it for me?" So we open a door to go into a room and without even being aware of it we're going into that room, "What's in it for me? Something threatening? Something bad? Something I want? Something I don't want?" Or in a meditation experience or whatever. We're mostly going through the life with the agenda of self: "What's in this next moment for me?" This is very deep. As we begin to let go of that, and sometimes just for little snatches of time, something else begins to kind of be seen. The more we let go of this agenda of self, it's like the more the radiance and the mystery of life, of all things, can begin to shine through. Because we're not pushing one thing away and pulling something else towards us, we're not elevating something and deflating something else, something more fundamental to being, to things, begins to shine through. It's like the peace of all things begins to shine through.
This is hard sometimes when we hear about this, because we have a sense in our life mostly that the excitement or our sense of life itself is actually associated a lot with self, with what I'm going to get or what might come my way that I don't want -- that whole excitement/fear, and what am I going to get. It's associated with self and the self choosing. So it can be almost like we can't really imagine that there could be a juiciness, a beauty to the peace that's there when we're not doing that.
In practice, if one goes into this in practice -- and it is really a big project, as I said -- one notices some things. The self-sense comes and it goes, and it comes and it goes, and it comes somewhat strongly or very little and it goes, as I said, dependent on conditions. Sometimes it's very light. Sometimes it's very heavy. Sometimes it's normal. Sometimes it's not there at all. But it comes and goes. We begin to get a sense that the sense of self is not a problem. It's coming and going, and it's not a problem. It's just the appearance of things. It's just the appearance of self. We don't quite take it as seriously as we habitually do. Can take the whole sense of self very lightly. The more that we take the sense of self lightly in our life, the more we do that, the more and more it's like some other truth can begin to shine through in life. That truth is something that brings very profound freedom, profound opening of the heart.
I was going to end there, but I'll just tack one tiny little bit on. [laughter] Which is this. We touched on it in the question and answer period before, but only a few people were here. Self is empty. That means it's not real in the way that we think it is, which means that we are free to take up a view of self and to let go of it. What that means is -- sometimes people ask, "Well, what about, you know, I'm in psychotherapy and I'm working on my self, and I'm looking at my self and my history and my story, etc." That's fine. It's very valid. There's a lot of healing and freedom that comes out of looking at one's life and experience in terms of self. In a way, that's what psychotherapy does a lot -- it's looking at that level and hopefully bringing healing and bringing a certain level of freedom.
What I've just described as well is letting go of that sense of self, which, I would say, brings a whole other level of healing and freedom. It's not that one is good and one is bad. It's rather that, as human beings, we are free to move between the two, free to take up one and put it down. Mostly human beings are not capable of putting down the self; it's not an option. But to see, where does the fear come in? Am I afraid of self? Afraid of going into the self, using the language of the self? Afraid of identifying? Or am I afraid of not identifying? And practising so there's this fearlessness and freedom to move between the two. So I'll put that out there. It may be something that -- it was part of the question and answer period, but.
Okay. Enough talking. Let's just sit quietly for a minute before the next walking period.
