The Sense of Self

All right. Last night's talk, a bit of an introduction to emptiness, and maybe, perhaps, I hope, giving some sense of the kind of extent of the depth of these teachings, of what emptiness means in its kind of fullness and in its depth. And so I want to begin tonight kind of wading into that ocean of depth, slowly. I talked yesterday briefly about, for convenience, the division of two kinds of emptiness: the emptiness of the personal self and the emptiness of phenomena. In a way, there's only really one emptiness, but I break it down for pedagogical purposes. And this is not my division; it's from the tradition. I want to start with the personal self, and that's actually mostly what we're going to be working on (you can't really separate them) for the first ten days, maybe, or a week or something. The personal self.

It can be kind of a truism, something that's tossed off in spiritual circles, in some spiritual circles, that the self is the problem, the ego is the problem, and very easy for people to kind of agree with that. And it's the ego that brings a sense of separation and a sense of duality, etc. But it's actually quite rare for a really penetrating investigation, a deep investigation of what that really means, and how it's a problem, and exactly what the nature of that self is.

In Buddhadharma, in the teachings of the Buddha, we're not actually trying to destroy the self, okay? That's actually really important. We're not trying to destroy the self. We're not trying to dissolve the self. We're not trying to merge it with some kind of cosmic goo or substance or something. We're wanting to understand the self, understand the nature of the self. And what that means, of course, is to understand that it's empty, and the fullness of understanding of what that means.

[2:33] Let's take a step backwards, actually, because for the Buddha, the primary thing was suffering and the end of suffering. As he always said, "I teach one thing and one thing only: suffering and the end of suffering."^[1] What that means in that statement is that the question of self and the ways that we relate to the self are actually secondary to the question of suffering. Suffering and the ending of suffering is the primary question, not self and seeing through self. So as I said at one point in one of the talks, emptiness is a tool. This practice we'll be introducing tomorrow of non-identification, letting go of the self -- they are tools, and one tool or a few tools among many.

The Buddha's question is, what gives rise to suffering? What increases suffering? And what releases suffering? Now, sometimes it's appropriate to look in terms of the self to answer that question. Other times, it's not to do with the self. Sometimes we need to let go of the self, and sometimes we need to pick up and use the language of the self. Okay? Sometimes it's totally appropriate and totally helpful to see things in terms of self and to use that language and that way of seeing.

If I'm a friend with someone here, or in a relationship of some kind, and we have a disagreement, we have an argument or a difficulty, and I say to this person, I say, "Oh, well, there's no self, so it doesn't really matter," probably the person will punch me on the nose. It's not an appropriate -- it's not even a very compassionate response. That situation needs to be addressed on the level of self: "How do you feel? How do I feel? What's happened here between us as two selves?", for the most part. So in communication; in taking responsibility, as well, which is an interesting one. It's like, to feel in life that I am responsible at some level for my choices, for what I cultivate, for what I let go of, for my ethical choices in particular -- that takes a sense of self. And it's totally appropriate at a certain level. And to discard that completely would really be a mistake, because then one would or has the danger of discarding ethics and discarding the sense of responsibility in life. Okay?

[5:20] There are many, many situations and times in life where the language of self and the view of self is really, really appropriate and the most helpful view in terms of that question: "What's going to lead to suffering? And what's going to free us from suffering?" Remember, that's the overarching question that overarches the whole of the Dharma. And so nowadays, many psychotherapists -- and there are many different kinds of psychotherapy nowadays -- often talk in the language of self. Not all of them, but many of them do. And that can be extremely helpful, and I for one have felt very helped by that process and that languaging in the past. And if I reflect on my process in therapy years ago, there was a real learning about what my needs were in different situations that I'd been unaware of. That took a sense of languaging in terms of self, a sense of seeing in terms of self. And again, in terms of communicating, in learning to communicate one self to another self. Learning, in a way, what you could say, to re-parent oneself. Oftentimes we need that. We emerge into adulthood with a need to -- I mean, not to blame our parents overly, but sometimes we need, there are aspects that need re-parenting inside. This is all within the realm of seeing in terms of self.

What is it to be able to give oneself tenderness and kindness, to offer that to oneself, to hold oneself in tenderness and kindness? What is it to address the emotions and hold the emotions, learn to work with one's emotions in the language of self? What is it to cherish oneself, to celebrate oneself, to celebrate one's uniqueness and one's beauty? To me, that's actually a really, really important skill, if that's the right word -- it's not really the right word -- for a human being to be able to do. Do we see our beauty, our unique beauty, our unique manifestation? Do we cherish ourselves? We need to learn how to do that, and that's in the realm of self -- some of it at least.

[7:44] And if we follow on, a lot of psychotherapists, a lot of the time, talk in terms of stories, and the story of my life, and my journey, and where I've been, and where I've come from, and where it's going. This is very interesting. Oftentimes in insight meditation, we talk about letting go of the story, and the encouragement with mindfulness is to let go of the story and to come into a kind of bare relationship with the actual felt experience of our existence. But again, story can be helpful, or it can be not helpful, and this is a question we need to ask ourself, rather than totally dismissing story, which is perhaps not helpful and unrealistic. When is the story helpful, and what kind of story of myself, of my life, is helpful?

Sometimes it seems we're imprisoned or locked into the story of ourselves and our life. But actually, one begins to get a sense that it's malleable. The story we tell ourselves, the stories we tell ourselves about our life are actually shapeable and malleable. They're not set in stone. So it's interesting, reflecting a little while ago on the Buddha, and he could have set out on his journey and told himself the story, and other people the story, "Yeah, it's really sad. My mum died when I was a week old, and my father was really controlling, and he wouldn't let me follow my desires. He kept wanting me to follow in his, you know, the family business, and be a king. And then I was practising with some other yogis, but they couldn't keep up with me, so I was kind of on my own. And now I'm really lonely, and ..." [laughter] He could have voiced it that way, but interestingly, he didn't. Or at least it hasn't come down in the tradition. [laughter] He didn't. But he does at times voice a story, and he voices it, in his words, in terms of the "noble search."^[2] And he places himself as a hero, a seeker, sometimes, oftentimes, as a warrior. That's not a language, in our times, we're that comfortable with, but he places -- the seeker, the warrior, the hero, you know. And at times, and in communication with others and the way he saw himself, that was obviously very helpful. It gave a sense of real motivation and journey and inspiration and direction, aspiration, etc. And then he was able to let go of that at times in meditation, let go of the story, and enter into another mode. And I'll come back to that.

[10:31] We can, to a certain extent, choose the story, to a certain extent, and also choose our identity. So this is interesting too. I was talking to someone the other day, and she's giving up her job, and quite a prestigious job, and da-da-da, and seeing the identification with the role -- we're talking about self-view and identification -- how easily we identify with the roles we're in, whether it's a job or whether it's a parent or a spouse or a this or that, identification with roles. And she was immediately thinking about letting go of all identification, and actually she's wanting to do a lot of long-term practice. How about picking up another identity as a seeker, similar to the Buddha? Instead of jettisoning it all, maybe there's something in the identity of a seeker that's provisionally very helpful. And having an identity like that actually begins to reorder a lot of stuff in the life -- priorities, in particular. Very easy, when the identity is of a certain kind, for certain kind of priorities to fit around that identity, for example around security and money issues, etc. If one re-chooses the identity, it may be that, for instance, having less money means a different thing. Maybe success and failure begin to mean a different thing because we're actually identified with something different.

Anyway, if I look at my story, the story that I'm believing, and I watch it over time -- often this takes decades -- you actually see that the story one tells oneself about a certain time in the life changes dependent on the mood of the moment, for a start, and also dependent on what, in the present moment of time, we're considering significant or important. So, it's interesting, for myself -- I've done a few different sort of jobs and work over the years, and that begins to colour how I'm seeing the past and what I extract from that as part of the story. I could never extract my whole life as part of the story. To construct a story that's tellable to others and myself, I need to take this part and that part. I need to be selective. And I'm selecting dependent on a number of factors.

[13:15] But the real question, or another real question with all this is, how much am I believing the story? And if we take it at a slightly more subtle level, how much am I believing or stuck in the self-definitions that I have of myself, in my self-definitions? This is something we really want to investigate as human beings, as practitioners: investigate the conclusions, the definitions, the assumptions, the images we have of our self. A lot of the times, they're fully conscious. A lot of the times, they're just on the edge of what's conscious. And we need to actually shine the light of awareness and actually expose what they are. What am I believing, concluding, seeing about myself? How am I defining myself? Because, to the degree that I define myself and believe it, I'm binding myself and my sense of self, my sense of possibility, my sense of growth, my sense of creativity. We do this to ourselves, and we also do it to others. We define ourselves, and we define another: "He/she, like that, that's how they are." Or in the sort of co-defining of self and other, we measure ourselves: "How do I measure up with you? Oh, he/she's way ahead of me, much better than me, much prettier, this or that." Or "I'm better," or "We're the same." And jealousy comes in, and fear comes in, and infatuation with another, projection, competing, the whole competitive mind. This is all bred out of this attachment, this being stuck in self-definitions. And when there is that in the self/other dynamic, gestalt, whatever you want to call it, that breeds a climate of fear and threat, a felt threat, almost inevitably.

[15:27] As practitioners, we want to start noticing, like I said, really exposing very clearly to consciousness the ways we define ourselves, the images, the conclusions. And then begin puncturing that, those definitions and images, as much as we can, puncturing them, making holes in them, seeing through them. So to notice, notice the kind of thoughts you have when it's "I am ..." or "I'm always" or "I'm never." Beware those words particularly: "always" and "never." But the "I am" thoughts: "I am da-da-da-da-da." Sometimes a very nice way of practising is, you notice an "I am" thought, whether in practice or just walking around about the day, turn it around: "Am I? Am I ...?" So just begin to bring either a gentle questioning or a quite probing questioning, challenging of the "I am" thought: "Am I that?"

Second possibility -- one of the beautiful things about being on retreat is, we can begin to see the gaps in the definitions we have of our self. I might have a definition of "I am an angry person," "I am a fearful person," "I'm a cold-hearted person," "I'm a loving person," "I'm a passionate person," "I'm a this," "I'm a that," "I'm a" whatever it is. Because a retreat is a time where we've actually got nothing else to do but watch inwardly, and over the days, more continuity of mindfulness comes, just by virtue of the continuity of mindfulness, begin seeing gaps in the self-definition, and seeing that it's not always the case that I'm angry. It's not always the case that I'm fearful. It's not always the case that I'm passionate, warm-hearted, cold-hearted, spaced out, whatever it is. If that was really who I am, which is what the self-definition often has, that implication, it would actually always have to be the case. I would have to be that way all the time. Looking in this way with the continuity of mindfulness, and seeing it's not always the case, puncturing it, putting gaps in it.

[17:46] It's a little bit like -- and this is a theme we'll be returning to -- it's a little bit like the mind loves to ... Did you play these, do these drawing games when you were a kid, dot-to-dot? Did you make the drawings? You have these dots, and you draw, and then you say, "Oh, wow, it's a ..." You know, who knows what. [laughs] The mind does that with experience. You get a bit of a moment of this and a bit of a time of that, and it connects the dots and gives whatever it is some solidity -- in this case our sense of self or our definition of self. And we want to expose that practice and expose the seeming solidity for something that's actually not that solid.

We notice as well how, let's say, for instance, a person thinks, "I'm a passionate person. My nature is I'm passionate," or "I'm cold-hearted," or whatever it is. And with this dot-to-dot process, it can seem that -- let's say I feel passion, or whatever it is I'm defining myself, or coldness. If that's the case for 10 per cent of the time, through this distortion of perception, it actually seems like it's that way 70 or 90 per cent of the time. You actually have to notice how the whole thing gets magnified and distorted.

We also notice with self-definitions that we tend to have different ones at different times. And even opposite ones, which, how could they both possibly be true? They don't even agree with each other. And yet when we're in one, we're totally convinced that's how we are, who we are. Which is the real one? Now, we do this, interestingly, socially as well. We're sitting a lot, obviously, in the silence here, but we do it socially. Sometimes we repeat these definitions not only to ourselves but to others in social contexts: "I'm so da-da-da-da. I'm always da-da-da." We say it out loud to others. Or if we're not saying it, we're kind of presenting it in some way, which might be quite subtle. Now, sometimes, amazingly, we even do that with negative self-definitions. Sometimes people have a kind of endearingly negative -- it's a very English thing, this, to have an endearingly negative self-definition, as if somehow ... [laughs] It's a strange thing. "I'm hopelessly unspontaneous," or "I'm this," or whatever it is. And it's kind of got a cuteness to it, but one wonders, why is that going on? Sometimes, unfortunately, people even do it with very painful self-definitions. They keep putting it out there. There's nothing endearing; it's actually very painful to the person and to everyone. Maybe it's partly because of the familiarity, the familiarity of a self-definition and the familiarity of the context. A lot about the self -- we're talking about the sense of self -- a lot of it's -- how to put it? -- it's contextual. It's relational. It's social. So a self is a self in relationship to other selves. And then somehow the self, the sense of self, is embedded socially. It's embedded in a context.

[21:11] What we notice, as practitioners, very early on in practice, is that we bring a lot of this to the meditation. We bring a lot of it to practice. How easy it is for the sense of self and the kind of agendas of self to hijack the practice a little bit. And we're suddenly, or maybe not even suddenly, but wanting to improve the self through practice, or wanting to make the self -- to get a more perfect self in some way. In a way, practice is a microcosm. It's looking at our life patterns under a magnifying glass. Now, of course we see, a lot of the patterns we see in life, we see them in practice. The same patterns are going to show up -- a lot of them, anyway -- in meditation as they do in life. It was interesting -- Abby's question this morning was really beautiful, I thought, in highlighting some of what self can do in relation to this. There's a sense of, let's say, bliss one time in meditation, or well-being, etc. And it's not to pinpoint Abby at all. [laughs] It's just to say this is what selves do, and it's a really, really beautiful question. Here's some bliss, let's say, or joy or whatever it is, and it's almost like we could just enjoy that, or we could take it to mean something about the self. And somehow, we'd rather take it to mean something about the self, often, than enjoy it. It's interesting.

We see this more commonly with the opposite, with the hindrances, and I said that in the talk about samādhi. Here it is, not going well. "What does it mean about me?" We make the self-conclusion out of something, self-conclusion. Now, oftentimes it's negative, but it will be positive too. And it's almost like we're infatuated with, addicted to making things mean something about the self. A characteristic quality or activity of the self is that it's always self-referencing, it's always self-referencing everything. Everything has to mean something about the self. Not everything, but a lot.

[23:30] Now, in Dharma practice, with all that, what I've just been talking about, it's very, very common to encounter the inner critic, this sort of inner voice or inner personality, almost, that is always haranguing oneself and harassing oneself, and it's never good enough, and always finding fault, and being picky, etc., judging. This is so common now. It's so common in our culture. And it's not that everyone has it, but it's incredibly common. I actually don't feel I have time to talk about it tonight, but just to highlight, just very briefly. When you open the original discourses of the Buddha, the original suttas, you come across a lot of language in terms of striving and, you know, really going for it kind of thing. We don't often use that language nowadays in Western culture, at least in these Dharma circles, because oftentimes it just bumps straight into the inner critic. It just goes completely into the programme and the domain of the inner critic, and it's interpreted that way, and we never see ourselves as doing enough. Very, very common.

I just want to spend two minutes on this. I actually think it's very interesting, but it's ... not really a tangent, but it's interesting. This is something endemic to our culture. As I said, not everyone has it. It's actually endemic to our culture. I don't know if it was always that way in Western culture. Something happened around the time of the Renaissance, actually, that the personality, the individual became more important. So we live now in a culture of the individual, in many respects. And so the sense of self, the sense of this personality self, is very much at the forefront of our consciousness, very much at the forefront of what we consider important. The roots of that are actually in the Renaissance and the rise of the individual in the collective consciousness, and the decrease of religiosity and sacredism in the culture, and the rise of secularism. It's actually very interesting. I don't have time to get into it, but.

[25:55] So we live and breathe a kind of air around personality and individual, the culture of the individual. And we, all of us, were born into that, so much so that we barely question it. It's interesting -- again, when you look at the original discourses, not only is there a lot of emphasis on striving, there's a sort of standard dialogue that the Buddha has oftentimes with seekers around the nature of the self. And it goes like this: here's this seeker in front of the Buddha, and he says, "So, whatever your name is, what you might be taking to be self -- could be the body, or consciousness, or this and that -- is that thing permanent or impermanent?" And the person would have to say, "Well, it's impermanent because everything's impermanent." And then the Buddha would say, "Okay, if something's impermanent, is it suffering or not suffering?" In other words, can it totally satisfy you, or can it not totally satisfy you? Now, if it's impermanent, it can't totally satisfy you because it's not there all the time. Then the Buddha would say, "If this thing is suffering, then, not satisfactory, if it's dukkha, how could it be the self?"^[3]

And this is interesting, because we would follow, we would trace a different line of argument. The self that a lot of seekers were looking for at the time of the Buddha was the Self with a capital S, the Ātman, the Soul, or Inner Essence, or Higher Self, or True Self, or whatever. So when a person was seeking that way, the Buddha would take them through that line of argument. (Did you follow that? Yes?) Because they were actually looking for a different self. We are in a different culture. Some people are looking for the True Self. Most people are struggling already with a sense of self, and it's like, how can I have some freedom from this personality self, which is felt as a problem? So we come at it from a different angle.

Something very important as practitioners: there is a continuum, a spectrum, of the experience of the sense of self, okay? I'll explain what I mean. In other words, the self, our self-sense, is not always the same. It doesn't always feel the same way. On one end of the scale, you have a very built-up sense of self. Now, we usually think of that being someone having a very big ego, and very grandiose, etc. But this inner critic structure, when that's up and running, and when that's really going, that's actually a very, very built-up, very marked sense of self. It's a very exaggerated sense of self. Now, it's interesting -- oftentimes a person going through that, or with a lot of that in their patterning, feels like they don't have much of a sense of self. They don't have much. They don't have a self. Now, oftentimes you hear, "Well, shouldn't I have a self, a sense of self, or shouldn't this other person have a self before they let go of the self?" But it's very rare for a person not to have a sense of self. That's actually a kind of psychotic fragmentation. It's actually fairly rare. Mostly, that's referring to a sense of self that's actually quite exaggerated and quite tightly bound around negative self-imaging. It's not that we need the self before we get rid of it. That person actually needs to let go of that self-identity, loosen that self-identity. Yeah?

[29:55] On the one end, you get things like the inner critic, something like a tantrum -- something's gone on, and we're totally upset about it, totally consumed with this thing. At that time, the sense of self, the felt sense of self, is also quite exaggerated. You really feel this sense of self. Or when there's a lot of fear, you really feel the sense of self. Or someone's really criticizing you in a big way or something like that. Other times, we might just be identifying with our story, but it's not so charged. Other times, it might be that we're just quietly having a cup of tea, and the whole sense of self is there, but it's a lot more quiet. It's less exaggerated and built up. Other times we might be really in nature, letting go, or in a quite peaceful meditation. It's got even more quiet, even more refined, even more light, the sense of self. Go deeper in meditation, even more light, even more refined. The whole thing, the sense of self is moving along this continuum from very solid, very heavy, very tight, very exaggerated, very built up to very, very, very light, refined, etc., and eventually no sense of self.

As long as there's some sense of self, we want to be interested in what it feels like and what it is we're identifying with, because a person can be sitting, very peaceful meditation, feeling like, "There's no self here." But it might be that we're identified with the witness, the consciousness, the awareness. There's nothing of the stories around, there's no big problem, there's no big personality present, but there's just a quiet, subtle, oftentimes taken-for-granted identification with consciousness. There's still a sense of self, but it's very light, very delicate.

I think recently, in Dharma circles, the word 'selfing' has become a little bit popular. Some of you might, may have heard it and used it, and it's actually quite helpful to think of it as a kind of verb. When is the mind selfing, and when is it not selfing? It's selfing when it's making a big deal out of something, or there's a big storm about something, a big mindstorm about something, or there's a lot of ego-sense around, or a lot of that inner critic. It's selfing then.

But the danger with that is, a little bit, it implies, and I think people can get hold of the sense from that, that when there isn't a storm, or when there isn't a big ego thing going on, or when there isn't the inner critic, then I'm not selfing, and therefore, there's no self, and there's no problem. As long as there is a sense of a subject, even in the most subtle way, and an object, a world, in the most subtle way, there's still, in this language, we could say, selfing going on. It's a spectrum. It's a continuum. And that's really, really important, because as long as there is even the lightest, most delicate, most refined sense of self, that will be the seed of dukkha. It will be the seed of dissatisfaction -- in the moment, subtly in the moment, but also for future.

And this is important. Actually, I remember years and years ago, when I lived in America. I went to an evening talk. And the teacher was a very wonderful teacher, someone I really love and respect. And I mentioned this to him: "Well, it seems like there's a spectrum of self, and you know, da-da-da." And I remember him saying, "Well, you know" -- there was a pillar between us in the room, sort of keeping what was actually a floor, because we were in the basement, keeping the floor up, and he said, "Well, you know, I see the pillar -- fine, no problem. It's only when the self gets charged with identification, with roles, and with this and that, that it's a problem." But I would really question that. I would really question that now.

So yes, we are interested in the self of the ego and all the games -- you know, what's that phrase? The games people play, and the ego-games, and the grandiosity, and the hype, and the denigration of others, and the denigration of ourselves, and the self-critic -- yes, we're interested in all that -- and needing to look good. Definitely. But we're actually interested in the whole spectrum of the self-sense, the whole spectrum. This is really, really important as practitioners.

Oftentimes, on other retreats, like when we do mettā practice, a person will write a question in a note, or say, or ask me or another teacher, "When I do the mettā and it goes well, it seems like the 'I' is gone. So who is this 'May I be well'? It doesn't seem to make sense." Actually, the self-sense is there. It's just much more light and much more refined. So we're not just interested in the gross sense of self.

Interestingly -- this is a little bit of a sidetrack -- someone asked recently with the mettā, "When I say, 'May I be happy. May I be peaceful,' is that not reinforcing the self-sense?" And it's a good question, but actually one finds that as one goes deeper into the mettā, that's not the case. There's something in the quality of mettā -- we'll talk more about this -- the quality of mettā itself that softens the sense of self. It lightens and expands the sense of self.

[35:35] Recently I was talking with a teacher who's very new to teaching. She's just beginning to teach her first retreats, and she was telling me about an interview she had with a retreatant, who was also very new to practice. I can't remember what the retreatant was going through, but the new teacher asked the new retreatant when they reported whatever it was, "What was the sense of self like at that time? How did that affect your sense of self?" And it was just, the new retreatant was just like, "Huh? What do you mean?" So this is not actually that obvious for non-practitioners, I would say. It's interesting -- meditating a long time, one becomes very used to, sensitive to certain, picking up on certain qualities, aspects of experience that a non-meditator would have very little sense of. But what we want to do is really get familiar with -- this is really important -- really get familiar with, watch and get familiar with that range, that whole range of the felt sense of self: when it's a tantrum and a big deal and very exaggerated, inner critic, whatever it is, all the way through the middling areas, to when it feels much more open and expansive and subtle and refined and spacious.

In the Gelug tradition, they talk about getting used to this sense of the self as something inherently existing, getting used to the self-sense. And what they suggest is kind of pointing to something quite gross. Imagine that you're in a room, and suddenly -- or you're in a big crowd of people, and someone suddenly points at you and says, "That guy's a jerk," or "He stole my whatever," or something. Suddenly all these people are looking at you, blaming you for something or thinking you're an idiot. Then the sense of self is usually quite prominent. [laughter] For most people, that's quite exaggerated, and it helps [as an example] if, through meditation, one hasn't got familiar with the felt sense of self. But as I say, what we want to do is get really used to that whole spectrum. It's very important.

Now, how long have we been here already? One day, two days? It's like ages. [laughter] At some point earlier, I said -- it was yesterday in the talk with that Tsongkhapa quote that I put on the board -- withdrawal, or ignoring, or a kind of oblivion from the sense of self is not sufficient. It's not sufficient. And that's absolutely true. We need to understand the emptiness of self, and look at this felt sense of self and see it as empty. But I'm going to qualify a little bit that statement, and say something again about samādhi.

I would say samādhi is actually very good in lots of ways, but one of the ways is because one is totally awake and conscious, and then getting used to, consciously used to, times and inner environments when there's actually very little sense of self -- or less sense of self, put it that way. When the samādhi begins to go deep, or at times when it goes deep -- it's going to wave, remember that, it's going to wave -- when it goes deep, who am I when I'm not thinking so much? A lot of the self-definitions we have are actually necessarily propped up by thinking. They need quite a lot of scaffolding of thinking to sort of hold themselves in place, these elaborate self-definitions we have. In the samādhi, that goes quiet, and I'm still very conscious and very present. Who am I when I'm not thinking so much? When I'm not thinking at all, perhaps -- who am I then? What's happened to that self-definition? Who am I? And some people define themselves often around their emotions and their felt emotional sense. Who am I when the emotional life gets quiet in samādhi or in equanimity? Who am I then? And again, with samādhi or deep states of meditation, occasionally the body itself can begin to dissolve or blur its boundaries and just kind of disappear a little bit. Who am I when the body dissolves? So, consciously we're actually learning to let go of the defining of the self to whatever degree, whatever degree. That's actually very important and very, very helpful.

[40:11] Now, there's a whole other aspect of the relationship with samādhi and emptiness that we probably won't even get to on this retreat, but I'll just very briefly say something. What to say very quickly? We typically build a sense of self, and we build a sense of the world, and that's what we're going to understand, move towards understanding in this retreat. We fabricate a sense of self. We fabricate a sense of the world. In samādhi, what's happening, as you go deeper and deeper in samādhi, is we do that less and less. We build the sense of self and we build the sense of the world less and less. Just to dip in and out of samādhi without understanding that process is nowhere near as helpful in terms of understanding emptiness as actually going into the samādhi and out of it and understanding how it's fabricating the sense of self, and how the world, the sense of the world, is also being fabricated. There's something very deep to understand there. I'm just throwing that out as a little titbit, really, for now.

As human beings we have a range, a continuum, as I said, of the felt sense of self. We have a range of that experience of self. We also, you could say, have a range of ways -- it's not really a continuum, but we have a range of ways of conceiving of the self. I conceive of myself in this way or that way. The Buddha talks a lot about this. For instance, let's take three things: the body, the mind, and consciousness. We could conceive of the self as being the body: the self is the body. We could say the self is the mind, or the self is consciousness. So the self as something like that. We could conceive of the self as something that possesses: the self possesses the body, or it's my mind, I possess it, or it's my consciousness.

Now, when I say "conceive" -- I'm going to talk in different ways a lot about what I'm talking about now, different aspects of it -- that conceiving, it could be a theory of self that I have that I can explain to other people and to myself. More often than not, it's just a way of conceiving that I don't really even notice when I'm doing it. I talk about my body, my mind, my this. I conceive in those moments, and I feel the self to be the possessor. It's not a big, elaborate theory. I'm not even consciously conceiving. Do you understand? But it's important because they are conceptions of self, okay?

Yogi: I didn't understand.

Rob: Okay. I talked about a range of experience, felt sense of the self, and then there's a range, too, of the ways we can think about the self or view what the self is, conceive of what the self is. Okay? I'm going to run through the list, and then I'll explain something. (1) We can conceive of the self as the mind -- let's take the mind right now. Self is the mind. I am the mind. (2) Or I could say the self possesses the mind somehow. It's like it's my mind. We often talk like, "My mind is this." (3) Or we could say the self is in the mind somewhere. There's a little, you know, homunculus in the mind somewhere. (4) Or we could say, in a more mystical way, the mind is in the self, and then it's more of a big, cosmic self, a cosmic awareness, or a big capital S Self, or something. Or God -- we're in God, or something. Those are four ways of conceiving. What I was saying is that sometimes a person conceives deliberately that way, like they hold a certain doctrine or religious theory or whatever, or view. And sometimes it's just we do that habitually, without even realizing that we're doing it. We think we're not being -- like, "I don't go in for conceiving. I don't have any theories about anything." But we do it anyway.

The conceiving of self can get very sophisticated, actually, and in Buddhist teaching it gets very sophisticated. What's quite common, and if you've been around insight meditation circles enough, you will hear something like, "The self isn't anything real. What the self is is the continuum, the moment-to-moment continuum of the components of mind and body" -- what's called the 'five aggregates.' We'll go into this tomorrow. In other words, the continuum of arising of consciousness and experience, and feeling, and perception, etc. And you often hear that as a teaching put out: "There isn't a self in terms of a solid self in the way we think about it. What it is is a continuum." Or again, in Buddhist teaching, you hear the self is awareness: "Be the witness," "You are the knowing," and "Be the knowing," and all kinds of stuff like that. Or, "The self is actually the result of an infinite web of conditions coming together and giving rise to the self in the moment." So every, all my personal history, everything I've read, all the music I've listened to, all the teaching I've had, all the interactions, all coming together, and the self is that.

Now, some of these conceptions are very useful, very useful, and they have a degree of truth to them. They're around very much even in Buddhist circles. But the Buddha would actually reject them all, and reject even notions of the self as a oneness, a cosmic oneness, that the self is actually all one -- that's also not endorsed by the Buddha. Why? Because all of them have implicit in them the notion of inherent existence. All of them are kind of saying, "This is the true nature. This is the actual way the self is." And that is what the Buddha is objecting to. That is what the deep, deep Dharma teachings are objecting to. So this is what we're after, kind of seeing through. To say what I said in the beginning, it's not that we're wanting to get rid of the sense of self or the sense of 'I.' It's only we want to get rid of the idea or the belief of the self, the 'I,' as something self-existent, as something established -- we say "established from its own side," like I talked about yesterday, inherently existing.

[47:26] So, you know, there is thinking, and in a way, at one level we could say, "There can't be thinking without a thinker." What we typically do, though, is say that implies, we have a sense, a felt sense of it implying that the 'I' that thinks, the self that thinks, is permanent and independently existing. We say, again, it's imputed on the thinking. We'll go into this more.

Backtrack to the beginning of the talk. (I'm going to have to leave some out. That's okay.) I said sometimes it's actually useful to see, to talk, to conceive, to view in terms of self. But are there other ways of seeing? And yes, there are, and we're interested in other ways of seeing. It's partly through the other ways of seeing that we begin shaking up the whole view of self and actually freeing ourselves. One way that we're going to go into at probably the end of next week (I'm not sure), is actually going deliberately looking to find this self, hunting for it, trying to find the self, and actually realizing it's unfindable. I cannot find the self. I feel like I have it; when I go looking for it, I can't find it. And yet it functions. Yet here I am, talking, going to sleep, eating, etc. It functions. And somehow this sense of self is somehow here; obviously it's not over here, my sense of self. It's functioning, but when I look for it, I can't find it. We're going to go onto that as a specific approach to practice later. One of the practices I'm going to introduce tomorrow is what I call anattā practice. It's learning to not identify. Typically -- I'll explain this tomorrow -- typically we see things, and we see experience, we experience experience, and we identify with it. I have a thought: it's 'me,' or it's 'my' thought. I have an emotion: it's 'me,' or it's 'my' emotion. My body is 'me' or 'mine.' Everything is 'me' or 'mine.' And one learns to just not do that. Just look at something and see it as 'not me, not mine.' I'll explain tomorrow.

[50:11] I'm going to throw a little one out. It's just a little one, and it may or may not be helpful to different people at different times. But when you feel unhappy, in a moment of unhappiness or a period of unhappiness, in your practice, what would it be, try if it's possible at times to just not define yourself, to just drop, let go of any kind of definition. We actually see the unhappiness is dependent on defining yourself. Just experiment with letting go of any sense of definition of yourself.

Another one -- and this is actually one of the things that made the Buddha such a genius, one of his strokes of genius, if you like: looking in terms of actions rather than self-view. I'll explain what I mean. Typically, we look a lot in terms of self. We interpret a lot in terms of self-view. But the Buddha, when he walked out of the palace in the mythological story, walked out, and he encountered a world of seekers and teachers and this and that, and most people were hunting for the Self with a capital S. That's what was going to do it. That was the idea. If you found this Soul, Self, higher existence, Ātman, whatever, that was what was going to do it. And the Buddha kind of had a look at that and thought, "I wonder if I have to be locked into that way of seeing." And he kind of took a step back from the whole scene, and he said, "What if I just look in terms of actions, outer and inner actions, and movements, mental actions as well, that lead to suffering, and ones that don't lead to suffering, and I actually just put aside this whole question of Self, just put that aside, and I look in terms of actions?" And that was quite a radical move.

[52:13] Let's take something like guilt, okay? So, something we've done in the past or said, or not done or not said, and it haunts us in the present, we feel bound up with that. We feel the mind keeps going back there and blaming oneself about it. Okay, we feel guilty, and somehow we're locked in that, in that cycle of guilt, that circle of guilt. What is it to actually look at it not in terms of self, but in terms of actions? Take the self-view out of things, in the past but also in the present, and look, instead of blaming the self for something, look in terms of, "What action do I want to do in the future based on that? What action will lead to suffering, and what action will lead to freedom?" Taking the self-view out of things. That's a practice, and I'm aware as I'm saying that, it sounds like -- well, it doesn't sound very sexy, as I say it. It's a practice, like all of this, and one gets used to a different mode of looking at life, looking at it in terms of actions rather than in terms of self-views. And the more we practise that, the freer we can become.

We do this with self. We also do it with other. We see someone else doing something that's not good or whatever, and we make a definition about themself, we make a self-view of the other, we make an other-view, versus just seeing that that action was not helpful for themselves and for others. Looking in terms of actions, rather than in terms of self- and other-view.

[54:16] Okay, I'm going to leave one for tomorrow, but the last one I want to mention today, and it's one I'll come back to anyway, has to do with seeing the nature of the self as a dependent arising. If I pay attention to this sense of self in my life, and the coming and going, getting stronger, getting weaker, getting more light, more heavy, what I see is (and we need to notice this) that when there's a lot of clinging or a lot of wrestling with some thing, either an inner thing or an outer thing, and some thing in our world, inner or outer, has become a big deal, or we're making some thing a big deal either through thought (oftentimes we make things a big deal through thinking a lot about them; we build it up, as I say, with thought) or just in our relationship, our reaction to it. When that thing, when some thing is a big deal, the self-sense is strong. When there's clinging to some thing, either wanting it or pushing it away, the corresponding felt sense of self is built up, is strong.

Of course, we can do that with meditation. We can do it with meditation. We make a big deal of our progress or so-called 'progress' spiritually in meditation, and then the sense of self gets built around that. This morning in the question and answer period, we were talking about how the self-view gets built. To say something is built is also meaning it's a dependent arising. How does it get built? By focusing on some thing in particular, by drawing out some thing in particular from the inner or outer experience, drawing it out from the totality of impressions. We draw it out, we wrestle with it, we focus on it, we make it a big deal, whatever it is, and then the self-view gets built on that thing. This morning, we were talking about, if I draw out all the times, all the places where I'm not doing well enough, where I'm not trying hard enough, where I'm falling short, then that is building the self-view. The drawing out and what I'm drawing out builds the kind of self-view. But whenever I draw out anything, I will build some kind of self-view. And then based on that self-view, my perception will lean towards and incline towards drawing out something in line with that self-view. It's a vicious cycle. It's reinforcing itself, and it's almost like it happens -- it's not even that it happens so much in time. It goes round and round like two sides of a whirlpool.

[57:28] Based on the self-view, I focus on certain particulars that reinforce, let's say, my negative self-view: my shortcomings, my not trying enough, my this or my that, my depression. Also based on other conditioning from the past, cultural, all kinds of conditioning, and the vicious cycle gets established.

Just to end now, we are learning ways of looking. And I said this already at some point: that's what, to me, insight meditation really is. It's learning ways of looking that bring freedom. To me, that's a very nice definition of what insight meditation is: learning different ways of looking that bring freedom. So yes, I can look with the self, and the language of the self, and the view of the self, and yes, I can learn -- and this is something that most people can't do, most non-practitioners can't do -- I can learn to let go of the self and look in some of these different ways, and others we'll go into, learn to look not in terms of the self. Different ones at different times bring freedom. But something in that movement, the different ways of looking and the different kinds of letting go of the self, I actually learn -- the conclusion, the insight that I draw is that the self lacks inherent existence. That's what I really want to get at, deep down. It begins to get clear, deeper and deeper and sort of more and more fully, what it means. And I know it sounds puzzling when I say, "It exists, but it doesn't exist," and all that, and "It lacks inherent existence." But that begins to get clear through this movement of different ways of looking that we engage in as practitioners.

When that, as that gets clear -- I keep saying this -- something very beautiful about this balance comes out. And it's like the self exists conventionally, exists as a dependent arising, and it doesn't inherently exist. We can talk of the self functioning and doing stuff, and we can talk in terms of cause and effect and actions in the world and the results.

Again, another quote from Nāgārjuna, who actually wrote many texts on emptiness. He says:

Relying on actions and effects within knowing this emptiness of phenomena is even more amazing than the amazing and even more marvellous than the marvellous.^[4]

There's something very, very beautiful in there that we can ... Through this manoeuvring that we'll be learning to do, it becomes clear. And freedom comes from that.

Let's have a minute of quiet together.