Chandrakirti's Chariot and the Unfindable Self

As I said last night, on Monday we'll be introducing a quite simple practice that, in many ways, for some of you, will be an organic evolution out of the work we've been doing with the three characteristics -- very simple, very non-conceptual in many ways. And as I said, I kind of wish that last night's talk, tonight's talk, and tomorrow night's talk, that I could kind of stream them, download them to you all at once. [laughs] Obviously that's not possible.

What I want to talk about tonight is Chandrakīrti's Chariot and the Unfindable Self. [laughter] Sounds like a children's book. [laughter] When we were introducing anattā practice, I made a subtle distinction that what we're doing there is that we're developing a way of looking at phenomena, looking at phenomena and seeing them as 'not me, not mine.' Okay? That's what we're doing: we're looking towards phenomena and seeing them as 'not me, not mine.' And sometimes people use a label for that, but the label -- it's not really a mantra in terms of just repeating it, repeating it, repeating it, focusing on the sound. It's something that helps to nudge or encourage the awareness to shift into a different mode of seeing and a different way of relating to phenomena.

This practice that I want to talk about tonight is subtly different in the sense that we're actually going to be looking for the self. We're actually looking for it. And what we find is we can't find it. We find that the self is unfindable, or certainly an inherently existing self is unfindable. Now, these two practices, if one takes them on, one will find they feed each other. So as one does the anattā practice and gets used to [it], one's getting very familiar with and less fearful of states of consciousness that have less self in them. The self-sense is less built up. It's much more open and more refined and light. And there's a lot of letting go, and one just gets very familiar with that. And that's like ... I was going to say money in the bank. It's not really like that. It's just very useful to be familiar with that. This practice that I'm going to talk about tonight also feeds the anattā practice in a way that it fills out the meaning of that and the depth of the meaning, what it is to say something is 'not me, not mine,' and also the sense of conviction in being able to say that. It fills out the reasons why we can say something is 'not me, not mine,' and have that sense.

So Chandrakīrti was a seventh-century Dharma monk and a scholar, teacher, yogi, etc., obviously a really remarkable person. I don't know if he came up with this, but he certainly is the person who kind of perfected it. He was the abbot of Nālandā monastery, and since his time, he's the widely acknowledged kind of king of -- it's like, "You don't argue with him," kind of thing. [laughs] Everyone kind of agrees that he set out, "This is the way it is."

Tonight -- and this is important -- I'm going to be offering this. It's a little bit involved. In fact, it's a lot involved. You can learn it as a meditation practice if you want to, but that's optional. Okay? If one does, and one develops it -- like all these practices, they're to be developed. They don't make much difference if you do them once or twice, da-da-da -- all of everything that we're talking about. But that's a possibility, is that one really takes this on as a practice and learns to develop it.

Second option, and I think I said this last night, is you can just file it for later. Just file it for later: "Sounds interesting. Not yet, not there yet, not ready to take it on. I've got too much on my plate. I'll file it for later." Totally valid. Third option, also very valid, is just to listen and let the seeds be planted, and let those seeds, in a way, for now, just come in and affect the other practices that you're doing.

I hope that as I'm speaking, you can bear in mind some of what I said last night in terms of the relationship, the attitude with teachings and all the rest of it. And I hope also that you can psychically guess what I'm going to say tomorrow night about that and bear that in mind too!

What we're doing with this kind of practice is we're using reasoning, we're using the logical reasoning to refute, to disprove, the inherent existence of the self. That's what we're doing in this practice. And remember, going back to Marika's question over a week ago, what does this word 'inherent existence' mean? It means something exists -- in this case the self; we're still working with the self for the most part -- the self exists in its own right, from its own side, independent of the way that the mind conceives or sees it. Okay, so it exists by itself in an independent way, a self-existent way. That's what 'inherent existence' means.

In the Prajñāpāramitā Sūtras -- and they're the sort of first texts on emptiness -- what you find is, "There is no this. There is no that. There is no other thing. There is ..." That's a little bit shock value. It's implicit: "There is no inherently existing this. There is no inherently existing da-da-da." But they're trying to stimulate something there.

(1) The first step in this kind of practice is, in technical language, called 'ascertaining the object to be negated.' Sounds very technical. And what that basically means is, what we're pointing this practice towards is the sense of inherent existence of the self. 'Ascertaining the object to be negated' means feeling that sense of inherent existence. When we feel the self-sense, almost always, and always for non-practitioners, we can have the sense of it as something that just exists by itself. It's just there no matter what I do, no matter how I see it. It's there. That's what it is. We want to get a felt sense of that. I sense it. I feel it. I watch it.

As Kensur Lekden -- I think he died in the early seventies; a great also scholar, teacher, and tantric teacher -- he said if that sense isn't clear, if that sense of kind of the inherent existence ... When I feel my 'I-ness' sitting here, when I feel myself sitting here, it feels to be self-existent. If that sense of the inherent existence isn't clear, he said, emptiness meditation is a bit like firing an arrow at a target and having no idea where the target is.^[1] It's very clear what we're aiming this particular approach at. It should be very clear.

Going back to that quote that I put out from Tsongkhapa much earlier in the retreat, it's not just that we're withdrawing the mind from the sense of self and kind of ignoring the sense of self, or going into, you know, samādhi, or a coma, or whatever -- especially not the grosser self-sense because, as I said, there's a spectrum of self-sense. And just to get rid of the big hullabaloo, palaver of the self-sense is not going to do the trick in terms of emptiness and understanding emptiness. So all that sounds quite intellectual -- inherent existence of the self, da-da-da. But remember, it's actually not intellectual, in the sense that this is a totally intuitive sense of self. We don't walk around thinking about our inherent existence. Well, some of us do. [laughs] But non-practitioners don't. It's a totally intuitive, innate sense that we have of ourselves, that the self exists inherently. So we're approaching it through reasoning, but we're not talking about some abstract, intellectual concept at all. We're talking about something totally palpable.

(2) And in this approach, what we're doing is we're questioning and probing into the relationship of the self with the five aggregates, which I introduced, I think it was last Monday. And just to review again, the five aggregates: (i) the body; (ii) the vedanā, meaning the feeling-tone of experience; (iii) perceptions; (iv) mental formations, meaning intentions, mind states, thoughts, moods, all of that; and (v) consciousnesses, meaning knowing, knowing this, knowing that, knowing.

What's the relationship of the self with that -- those five aggregates? What's the relationship? We're going to go into that. So, again, we don't -- how to put this? We don't naturally intellectualize or conceive about the relationship between the self and the aggregates. We don't walk around with theories about that. Most of us, as human beings, don't do that. But again, there's this innate way of conceiving of an inherent self, and it's more we're approaching this practice, saying, "Okay, I don't naturally conceive say, the self, to be the same as the aggregates, or the self to be different from the aggregates. But if the self existed inherently, it would have to be either the same or different than the aggregates." And that's what it hinges on. It's not that I'm walking around with a theory that it's the same or different. But if it existed inherently, it would have to be either the same or different.

Now, me saying that ... yeah, I'm seeing it on some of [your faces]; I'm not sure if that's convincing yet. For me it's also not. So what I'm going to do is, that's the sort of basic argument, and I'm going to expand that where Chandrakīrti's chariot comes in.

He goes through, actually, if the self existed inherently, it would have to exist in one of seven ways. And I'll fill it out in more detail, because for most people, probably that -- what I just said about it, that it would to be the same or different -- "Hmm, won't quite do it." And if we're not convinced, none of this is really going to make any difference. But what we're doing, then, is refuting, disproving the fact that it can exist in any of these seven ways, and that refutes the inherent existence.

And this seven ways gives much more of a sense of thoroughness in looking for the self, and much more chance, I find, in practice, of being really convinced that you can't find the self, because you've looked every possible place it could be, every possible place. It would have to exist in one of those ways. So Chandrakīrti uses this example of a chariot. I mean, in modern days, we'd obviously use a car or a bicycle or something. But he uses a chariot, and it's nice. Does everyone know what a chariot is? Yeah? Chariot?

Yogi: Is it like a cart? A fancy cart?

Rob: It's like a fancy cart where someone can stand in the back and get pulled by a horse. So it's got wheels, and the place where you can stand, and it's got to have an axle, and reins, and, you know, da-da-da. So he's saying, if (in this case) the chariot or the self inherently existed, it would have to exist in one of these seven ways. I'll run them through now, and then in a few minutes, I'm going to go into each one in detail.

(2.1) It would have to be either the same as its parts. Okay? So you look at a chariot or a car, and it's got a wheel, and a steering wheel, and wheels, and doors, and a bonnet, and windscreen, and windscreen wipers, and da-da-da. It's got all those parts. It would have to either be the same as the parts, or one of the parts, or some of the parts. That's number one.

(2.2) Or it would have to be different than the parts. It would have to be other than the parts.

(2.3) Or, number three, it would have to be findable in the parts. There's something in the parts that is the car, in the way we have the sense of something in the aggregates is the self; the self is in the aggregates. That's number three.

(2.4) Or, number four, the aggregates, or the parts of the chariot, the car, would have to be in the self. In other words, we have the sense of the self being something that kind of contains all of this. Okay? That's number four.

(2.5) Number five is a relationship of possession, that the car possesses its parts, or the chariot, or the self possesses its aggregates. So I possess my body; I possess my thoughts; they are mine.

(2.6) Number six is saying that the chariot/car/self is the collection of its parts. "Okay," you say, "Well, it's not all that. Okay. Good, okay. But it's all of them together, all of them together."

Yogi 2: How is that different from number one?

Rob: Number one can be individual ones.

Yogi 2: Oh, as all or some of its parts.

Rob: All, or some, or individual, or some. And then number six is all. So this sevenfold reasoning is actually an expanded version of what I said before -- it's either the same or it's different.

Yogi 3: Last one was, again, the chariot ...?

Rob: I haven't got to the last one yet. The sixth one was the collection.

Yogi 4: Is the collection?

Rob: Saying the chariot is the collection of its parts, or the self is the collection of the aggregates. What's interesting -- well, I'll say the seventh one first.

(2.7) The seventh one is, the chariot -- you say, "Okay, it's not the collection. It's the shape of the parts." Okay? So you're saying, "Ahh, the car is the shape. How's that?" [laughter] Similarly, you say the self is the shape of the aggregates, or -- I'll add something -- or the continuum.

What's interesting is in the spectra of Buddhist teachings, we talk about, as I said yesterday, levels of understanding of emptiness. And some of what they call lower tenet systems actually believe some of these to be the actual nature of the self. So Chandrakīrti's coming in saying, "None of it, none of it, none of it." It's a really quite radical and powerful way he's coming in there.

The chariot, the car, the self, has to exist in one of those seven ways. There's no other way that it can exist. Now, I'm saying that now. If you're taking this on as a practice, you have to really go away and become convinced of that. You have to really grapple with this, okay? You grapple with it intellectually. You grapple with it in your mind.

That's the second step, and in technical language it's called 'ascertaining the pervasion' (you don't have to remember that), meaning the pervasion of the totality of options and the implications. And what's really important is the conviction, that we really need to be convinced, absolutely convinced. And that takes time, or for most people it will take time. And then we're investigating and looking in these seven ways, and seeing that we can't actually find the car, the chariot, the self in any of those seven ways.

Now I'm going to run through briefly what happens if you're going to take this on as a practitioner and you develop it, the key word being 'developing.' It's really a practice. It's a very, very powerful practice if you want to take it on, and if you find it helpful, and if you develop it. I think about this, I think about it, and think about it, and become convinced, and then I kind of have a way that, with a little bit of samādhi, I bring in the reasoning into my practice. So I start thinking about it in a light way, without disturbing the samādhi too much, in the practice. And I think about it in relation to my car, or in relation to my self, or actually in relation to anything else. And I see that I can't find the self. I have this feeling of not finding the self. But all the time, I'm starting by holding the sense of inherent existence of the self, and I'm connecting with that sense of inherent existence. And I'm holding it there, and I'm looking at the sense of the thing or the self at the time that I'm doing the reasoning.

And what happens is, one finds that one can't find it, and the sense of the thing, the sense of the self, the perception of the self begins to fade and get replaced with a sense of vacuity, emptiness, a non-thing. Okay? This is a meditation experience I'm talking about. If one's, again, developing this, what one then does is steadily focuses on that emptiness, that kind of vacuity that appears, and kind of concentrates on that -- but it has to have a meaning to it. In other words, it's not just a kind of blank nothingness. It actually means there is no inherent existence to this thing. It means I can't find this thing inherently existing. It's not a nothingness. It's not taken to mean that nothing exists, a kind of nihilism. It's also not a kind of agnosticism in the sense of, "Oh well, we can never really know how things exist anyway. Oh well." It's not that kind of agnosticism either. It's pregnant, that sense of emptiness, with a very specific meaning, which is: I can't find this thing as inherently existing. It lacks inherent existence. So it actually has a kind of tone, a feeling to it.

I'm just outlining how this develops as a practice before I go into the reasonings. What you get is, you're looking at the sense of the self, or the sense of this object -- a car or whatever it is that you're looking at. And then you develop it, you're staring at it, you're doing the reasonings, and the thing begins to fade. But not only that -- as it fades more and more, the sense of the mind being over here, the awareness being over here, and the sort of vacuity or emptiness being over there, they begin to kind of melt into each other. This is a gradual process. It's not like an on/off switch. It's a gradual process. They begin to melt into each other. There's a fading of the object, and a kind of fading of that sense of separation, a kind of fusing, as one develops this. But pregnant in that fading and fusing is the sense of what it means, what that emptiness means. So there's awareness there, an awareness of what it means. But the meaning of it is more and more implied. It's not conceptual. It's just kind of there. It's not particularly verbal, like, "Aha, I realize this thing da-da-da." It's implicit.

Eventually, in the spectrum of fading, what happens is -- to borrow a phrase from the Tibetans -- the mind and the emptiness mix like water in water. There's a total kind of fusion of the mind and dissolving of the mind and emptiness, of subject and object. And that's called a direct cognition of emptiness.^[2] Okay? That's just briefly running through. I'll return to the process a little bit at the end, but I want to go into this reasoning, the sevenfold reasoning, in a bit of detail.

(2.1) First one. Now, we can divide the human being up into five aggregates. We could also divide it up into two: we could say body and mind. We could say a person is somehow within or has that relationship with body and mind. Let's look at that first. We're looking at sameness, sameness now with some of the elements. If the body was the self, that would mean the self is not conscious. So it doesn't really fit. And we couldn't really say, it wouldn't make sense, then, as we do, to say, like, "I am thinking," because the body's outside of that. If the mind were the self -- the other bit of splitting the self into two now, body and mind -- if the mind were the self, you couldn't say, "I ache all over." You couldn't say that. You couldn't say, "I kick the ball." You couldn't say, "He hit me," you know? Because these are bodily things.

So as I said, you could split the self up into two, body and mind. You could split it up into five, five aggregates. You could split it up into smaller parts. But no matter how many you split it up into, when you look at each one, you cannot find the self there. So, for example, let's split everything up into really small pieces, and I look at my liver. Is that my self? My kidneys?

Yogi 5: You mean the whole self. It's part of the self, isn't it? Is that what you mean?

Rob: I mean, is it equivalent? We're looking for a sameness in one of these parts, or some of these parts with the self, okay?

You could look at different body parts. You could go into the cells. So I go into a cell. Is that cell me? Is the atom in the cell me? Clearly, none of these are the self. The same if we take the car and we take the steering wheel -- is that the car? Are the wheels the car? Are the windscreen wipers the car? Are the doors the car? None of these are really car.

With the self, again, we take vedanā -- is that me, this sense of experiencing pleasant/unpleasant? Are my perceptions me? I have a moment of perceiving the bell, a moment of perceiving sound -- is that me? Are my intentions me? Or any one intention? You look, you stare at each one of these -- is that me? Is that the self? Is a thought me? Is a mood? Or a consciousness, a knowing of this, a knowing of that, an awareness of this and that. When we look at each one individually, we see that it can't be. There's nothing personal in any of those, in any of those at all. You've seen, a thought blips into the mind -- is it me? There's nothing personal there.

Certainly if I look at, you know, a cell in the lining of my lung, one cell, where's Rob in that? You know, there's nothing personal there. There's nothing also when I split the self, or what could possibly be the self, and I look at each one individually. There's nothing there that I can find that's lasting. We've touched on this before. And that's really important. There's nothing that can be seen as me, can be seen as personal, nothing that is lasting. I might look at just my mind states, for instance, be looking for the self in my mind states. Which mind state is me? I go through so many during a day. Does that mean there are many selves? Or does it mean that all mind states are somehow one, because the sense of the self is one, is unitary?

Again, if you're taking this on as a practice, it's important to look at each part very clearly and really see -- there's definitely not me there. There's definitely not self there. So, like if you take the car door off the car and you look at it, is that the car? No, it's clearly not the car. You take the steering wheel off -- it's clearly not the car. If you're kind of very clear that each part is not the self, later, when you come to the sixth one, you can't really accept the collection, because how could a collection of stuff that doesn't make a thing suddenly make the thing? But we'll come back anyway to the collection.

You can do this with other people too. You find yourself angry at someone. Something's happened between you and another person. They've said something, or they did something that upset you -- who am I angry with exactly? It's a really, really useful meditation when you're feeling angry: who exactly am I angry with? Am I angry at their index finger? Am I angry at the nail on their ring finger? Am I angry at their spleen? Their pancreas? Am I angry at their vedanā, you know, those individual moments of feeling like this is pleasant or unpleasant? Am I angry at their perception -- perceptions -- this perception or that perception? Am I angry at their consciousnesses, their knowings? [laughs]

Yogi 6: You can be angry at their decisions.

Rob: Okay, I'm coming to it. [laughter] I'm coming to it. This is good. I'm coming to it. That's why I switched the order around.

So can I be angry at their consciousnesses? Can I be angry at the fact of their knowing? Then, as Hannah points out, "Huh! Well, what about ...?" And this, again, if you actually are not too bothered by the intellectuality of this, as I talked last night and I will talk tomorrow, you'll be bothered in another way by all this. The mind will naturally throw up objections: "Yeah, but ... Yeah, but ... Yeah, but ..." [laughter] And so, what's more likely that you'll be angry with is their thoughts, their intentions to do or say something, or perhaps maybe their mood out of which it came.

But again, if you stare long enough at those things, you will not see the self of that person there, because look at it -- an intention to say something. Look at that clearly enough -- where did that come from? And as we talked earlier in the retreat, either you have a sense of it coming out of nothing, or you have a sense of it coming out of the web of conditions. All of these things that you could possibly look at are dependent arisings, dependent on inner and outer conditions, past and present. And an intention to say something horrible -- you can't actually find it there. Remember what I said? It was actually before you arrived, Hannah, in another talk. Sometimes -- you've heard me say this -- pick up the language of self. Someone says something, you're upset -- talk to them in self terms. Sometimes you can't, and then you need to let go of the self as a way of defusing the anger. That's number one.

(2.2) Number two -- we say, "All right, the self exists as something other than the aggregates, or the car exists as something other than the parts." Okay? And it's somewhere -- it's not in the parts. But that would mean, that would imply that the car could, or the self could be apprehended, could be perceived separately from the aggregates, separately from the parts. In other words, I take away all the parts of the car, and somehow I'll be left with the real car after that. I take away all the doors, take away all the wheels, take away all the hubcaps, take away all the engine, take away da-da-da-da, and left is the essence of car. Left is absolutely nothing at all if I take away all the parts!

[28:28] Same deal with the self. In the meditation, one actually mentally clears away the aggregates, clears away all the instances possible of the aggregates. And then, is the self perceivable, apprehendable without them? No way. It's not found. It's not, cannot be found. So the intuitive sense of self, the feeling of self -- it appears to have its own kind of basis. Sometimes it feels like it's separate from the aggregates. It just feels like it's just by itself. But it cannot be found outside the aggregates, cannot be found. And we could never perceive such a self. We could never perceive it, because it would be beyond perception, one of the aggregates. As consciousnesses, we can only perceive, see, and know the aggregates. They're the totality of our experience. Such a self would be completely unknowable. It would also, in itself, be a complete kind of blank non-entity of nothingness. It would be completely blank, completely pointless, and completely useless, such a self. [laughter]

The kind of self that we care about, and suffer over, and struggle with, and are invested in, is one that we know and can know. That's the kind of self that it needs to be. Also, if the self was something separate, you'd have to ask, "Well, what exactly is the relationship? If it's something other than the aggregates, what exactly is the relationship between the aggregates and the self?" It becomes almost like a total mystery. What is that relationship?

We've said that kind of self would be unknowable. But it also kind of means that the journey, the manifestation, the fate, or what happens to the aggregates of body and mind and senses, what happens in the realm of the senses, what happens in terms of memories -- all that is kind of irrelevant to the fate of the self. Like, what happens to the aggregates is somehow independent of what happens to me. Clearly, that's a kind of ridiculous situation.

(2.3) So a person, again, sometimes has this intuitive feeling or says intellectually, "All right, next step," like a chess game. "Next step: the self is in the aggregates." Somehow, in this, like a little homunculus, or a little being somewhere, the self is in there.

(2.4) Or -- we'll take the third and the fourth together -- or somehow the aggregates are in the self. Somehow the car-ness is in the car somewhere, or the parts of the car are somehow in the car. We have this intuitive sense with things. But if you think a little bit about those two, they're actually kind of instances of the second, of the self being something other than. Okay? It's a bit like, for example, if we say that the self is in the aggregates, it's like a person in a house, say -- the house being the aggregates and the self being the person. And the house could fall down, we could demolish the house, and the person could still be there. So it's in the instance of them being separatable and apprehendable separately. Do you see that?

Yogi 7: Could you say the house example?

Rob: If we say the aggregates are kind of like the house, they're housing a self, okay? The aggregates are this, and somehow, in that is where the self is. Well, if we had a person in a house or a thing in a house, we could demolish the house, brick by brick, take away all the house, and the person's still there. So again, these are special conditions of the second case, which is that we can actually separate, we can take away all the parts and still have the self, all the parts and still have the car. But we can't.

The fourth one is -- an example for that would be like if you have muesli for breakfast, and you've got muesli and you've got milk in a bowl. The self is kind of the container of the aggregates. And again, we have this intuitive sense, sometimes, that we're somehow containing all this. Or again, we take it as an intellectual position. But again, you could take away one and separate them. You can separate the bowl from the muesli and the porridge and the milk or whatever. They're separatable, which goes back to the second reasoning.

Yogi 8: I don't get this.

Rob: Okay. It's similar to the house one; it's just the other way around. So, if I say the aggregates are in the self, it's a special condition of ... It means I can somehow, like muesli in a bowl, I can separate the muesli and the bowl. I can pour out the muesli, put the bowl over here, and put the muesli over there. But I can't do that with the self and the aggregates. If I put the aggregates over there, I can't then look at another self over here. So they're not separate. Okay? Doing okay? Yeah?

(2.5) Fifth one. This is a very -- they start to get a little bit more interesting. We say, "Okay, the self is the possessor of the aggregates, or the car somehow possesses its parts." But actually, again, for the most part this implies a kind of difference. So I possess this pair of jeans, in the sense, when I go to bed tonight, I'm going to take them off, you know. And I have my jeans draped over the chair, and I'll be in bed. Separate. Okay? Or I own my mobile phone. I possess my mobile phone. I can lose it. I can leave it over there. I'll still be here. So the notion of possession, again, implies this ability to separate and put them in different places. Yeah?

Yogi 9: Is it just, in the meditation, just a case of kind of working this through in your head and seeing that you can't separate, like ... [?]

Rob: Yes, yes, yeah. And it might be, again, go back to what I said at the beginning of the talk, some of you -- this is going to be landing in very different places. I'm aware of that. Some of you are not going to like this at all: "When is this talk going to be over? When is he going to shut up?" [laughter] Some of you might be completely intrigued. [laughter] Some of you will take it on as a practice. Some of you will completely ignore it. For others it will just plant seeds. Okay? And that's just how it is, and it's okay. Please bear in mind what I said last night. And tomorrow I'll talk a little bit more -- partly tomorrow -- about our relationship with conceptuality. It's one of the things we have tomorrow night. But yeah, if one was to take this on to some degree, it would be both thinking through it, even outside the meditation, and also in the meditation, just playing with it. Can I actually take this, looking at things, actually separating them and seeing, "Well, actually I can't. I can't do that"? So playing with it in the meditation, with some degree of calmness in samādhi.

So for people who want to take this on, this is very, very powerful, potentially, but not everyone's going to want to do it. I'm totally aware of that. And if you're from an Insight Meditation or Zen background, which most people in here are, this is going to sound completely alien as a way of going about meditation, completely like, pffft, you know, very, very strange sort of way of doing meditation. I'm aware of that. I mean, if you're from a Gelug background, it probably sounds quite familiar. Maybe you've even heard it all before.

Yogi 10: I'm finding it hard to sort of keep up with -- because the objects [?] ...

Rob: Car or self.

Yogi 10: Yeah. And if you're just using self [?] ... So, I'd like to use it, but I don't think I can keep making sense of it -- writing it down. I was wondering, is there any way it could be written down, somehow, for us to look at?

Rob: I'll try and write it down in a very, very short form. And from now on, I'll just use the self. Okay? To simplify. And this is difficult. This is not an easy -- it's not easy stuff. I'm not ...

Yogi 10: You don't have to do that. You can use the objects too. I just, if I can reference it afterwards, it'll help me, so I can go over it a few times.

Rob: Okay. So mostly, possession implies a difference. It implies a difference. Or we can say, "Well, the tree possesses its trunk." Sorry, different object. [laughter] A tree possesses its trunk, and there's a kind of sameness implied in the possession. Or you say, "This house has eleven rooms." Let's take that example: the house has eleven rooms. What house is there that could possess the eleven rooms? All there is to this house that I'm looking at is just eleven rooms. But take away the eleven rooms. How is there a house that possesses eleven rooms? So the word, in that instance, 'possession' actually comes to kind of be equated with 'being.' This one of possession is very, very interesting. Mostly it will fall down because of it being a difference, and again it's a special condition of number two, of the separatability of self and the aggregates.

Let's take, with the self -- this is a little bit involved now. Let's take, for example, the self. And we have a sense of, which we do sometimes, this self -- "I possess my perceptions. I perceive a lamp. I perceive a carpet. I perceive a sound. I perceive this, that." And we have a sense, like, "There's a self somehow here that possesses these things. They are mine."

Now, if the self possesses the perceptions, it either means the self doesn't perceive -- because, again, they're separate: if I possess something like my mobile phone, I have to be findable separate. So that means that the self is different. And again, if the self doesn't perceive, it means it's some kind of mindless blank. Is that who I am? Maybe you think that. [laughter] Is that who the self is -- a mindless blank? Okay? Or, we could say, "All right, it's not quite that." And again, you can really play with this in meditation. It can go very, very deep, if you can find a way of working with it. Or we can say, "Maybe the self perceives the perception." Now I'm getting into tricky territory, because then there are two perceptions. And you say, "Well, okay, maybe the self possesses both." Or you could say, "Maybe the self is the same as the second perception. That's what the self is: it's the second perception that perceives the others." But then every time I perceive something different, I'm going to have, again, many selves: "I perceive this. I perceive that." And you'll have a self that's actually many and not one. Or we say, "Okay, that second perception that perceives the initial perception is different. It's different than the second perception." Then you say -- again, you get into this thing of, okay, "Well, then, the self doesn't perceive." And you get an infinite regress.

Are the perceiver, the perceiving, and the perception the same or different? The perceiver ("I am perceiving"), the process of perceiving, and the perception that actually, "This is a bell, this is a sound, this is I don't know what it is, but whatever" -- are they, those three, the same? They can't be the same, because every time I look at the bell, it would mean I'm a bell. If I look at an elephant, I would be an elephant. If I look at, you know, whatever, a vegetable, I'd become a vegetable. Are they separate? They can't be separate, because then you could actually find one without another. You could find a perceiver without a thing being perceived. Or a process of perception -- you could find a process of perception without a perceiver and a thing perceived. Or you could find a thing perceived without a perceiver and a process of perception. No?

Yogi 11: Can you?

Rob: Well, you could if they were separate.

Yogi 11: Oh, right.

Rob: Yeah. That's what I'm saying. [laughter] Good, good. That's what I'm saying. They're actually not separatable. So there's something in there -- not the same, but they're not separatable. This particular strand right there goes very, very deep if one can get the mind around that in meditation. Very, very powerful. What we see -- perceiver, perceiving, and perception -- they're unfindable, unfindable. There's nothing separate here. The sense of the mind perceiving and the world -- nothing separate. No separate self perceiving a separate world. We're going to return to that later in the retreat, because that's actually something very powerful to work with.

(2.6) We'll take the sixth one. And we say, "Okay, okay, okay, it's the collection." My car, my chariot, my self, is the collection of the car parts. In the case of the car, that would be equivalent to taking all the car parts, you know, the wheels, the this, that, the bonnet, the doors, etc., and dumping them all on the ground and saying that's the car. Obviously it's not the car. It's just a bunch of parts kind of piled up together. And we could do that with the body. I take my foot, I take my hand, I take my nails, I take my hair, and separate them all, and I dump them -- is that the body? Just a pile of body parts? It can't just be the collection.

(2.7) Then that's where we go then to the last one: the shape. Say it's the shape. There are many reasons why it can't be the shape, but just to throw out one, which a little bit we'll come back to, and I've already mentioned it: imagine the body shape changing. So imagine my nose slowly moving around to the side, and my ears slowly coming around to meet at the top of my head and fuse into one, and, I don't know, my mouth coming down here, and my legs sticking out of my head up here -- slowly morphing towards that. At what point would you say, "That's, that's, that's not ...!" [laughter] "That ain't it any more!" At what point? Now, the key thing that helps there is this "at what point?" Because you see that the mind is imputing something, in the sense of it's arbitrary when the mind decides, "It is this," or "It isn't this." Okay? That's where this playing with the movement helps.

Yogi 12: Can you say the sentence again? What means 'arbitrary'?

Rob: 'Arbitrary' means you can't say, "At exactly this point, when my ear reaches this point, beyond this point, you will say it's no longer a body." So it's dependent on your point of view at any time, you know?

Anyhow, in terms of a self, the mind is not the shape. Okay? The mind has no shape. You can't give it a shape in space. But where a person will go with this is saying, "It's the continuum, the shape in time." So saying, "The self is, the true nature of the self" -- and, again, you hear this in some Buddhist teachings even -- "The true nature of the self is the continuum of aggregates in time," so moment to moment, this stream of arising of the aggregates in time. And this one is very interesting. If I say that, I say, "Well, okay. But the past has gone, and the future has not yet arisen." So I'm saying it's this continuum. Most of the continuum doesn't even exist in a conventional sense right now. Where is it? It's just the present. There's no kind of mass of aggregates, of mental aggregates, for example, that you can kind of pile up there as a continuum. If I take that further, and I say, "Okay, it's just the present moment," how long does the present moment last? Anybody? No? [laughter] How long is the present moment?

Yogi 13: Short. [laughter]

Rob: I would say so! It's pretty short. It's actually an infinitely small sliver. It's an infinitely small sliver. It barely exists. The present moment barely exists. We're going to go back into this later in the retreat -- the emptiness of time and the emptiness of the present moment -- later in the retreat. But just this notion of the present barely existing, it's so (as Justin poetically put it) short. It's such a practically non-existent sliver, paper-thin. Paper. [holds up sheet of paper] Paper-thin. This helps, also, when you're contemplating -- you can do all this with, say, an emotion. So, say, sadness -- you can actually do all this, intellectual as it sounds, with sadness, or with anger, or with fear. It's not there, and even the present moment is barely there.

What's more, if the self was this continuum, you would actually have a self which changed in time, because you're always kind of adding to it in time. You're adding different things in time. But the notion of the self is something unitary, and inherent existence means it is what it is. But we can go further with that and say, "Okay, it's the continuum. This is the continuum. Does that mean I need to add certain experiences in a certain order in order for it to be me?" Is it still me if I do [snaps fingers, sniffs], perceiving two sounds, a finger click and a sniff? Am I still me if I perceive this [snaps fingers] before this [sniffs], as the same as if I go [sniffs] before that [snaps fingers]? Do you understand? A continuum implies an ordering of the continuum. But who would say the self depends on something so trivial? So ... do you get that?

Yogi 14: I didn't get ... We were on ... shape?

Rob: No, we've moved on to the last -- sorry, yeah. So shape -- when we talk about the human being and the mind, the mind has no shape. So what a person might place in place of that is the shape in time, which would be the sense of the ordering in time of the aggregates arising, the continuum in time. Okay? That's what I'm taking to mean 'shape.'

What happens if you contemplate a friend and contemplate taking some of their mind moments away from them? Okay, here's your friend, and you take away a few of their mind moments. Are they still them? Just take away an instance of them hearing a twig snap or something. Is it still the friend? What if I take away more? Is it still them? If I take away all their mind moments, they're obviously not them, because there's nothing there; there's no sense of their mind at all. But again, somewhere on that spectrum you get the sense of the mind is imputing it. You can play these little games. It's actually fun to play. How many do I have to take away, and it's still them? (We're almost through, okay?) How many can I leave out of someone's mental continuum and still have a sense of it being their self? A few, a lot, all of them? Again, the self is imputed on the basis of the aggregates.

If I say the self is the continuum of the aggregates, and the aggregates are the totality of experience -- that's another way of looking at what aggregates are, the totality of our experience -- it then implies that the self is not [independent of experience]. If the aggregates are the totality of experience, and the self, I'm saying, is the continuum, it means that this self is not independent of experience. The aggregates are experience, experience, experience. We have a sense of the self being independent of experience. Again, this is the intuitive sense of self: "I'm independent of my experience." But if the aggregates, we're saying the self is a continuum of aggregates, and the aggregates are the totality of experience, it means the sense of self is not independent of experience. And therefore, the self as inherently existing, as something independent, is not there.

The felt sense of self, my felt sense is, "I'm the same me two seconds ago as I am now -- same me. Two months from now, I will be the same me." We have a sense of the self existing as independent of experience. But if the self is the continuum, it means that the I, the self, depends on the experiences in the past, the present, and the future. And that's not the felt sense. We only do that with what we take to be really significant experience: "Oh, I had this really profound experience, or this really healing experience, or this really traumatic experience, whatever." We take those as being significant in terms of who we are. But what about all the insignificant ones?

So the present moment is actually inseparable from the object of consciousness, from the experience. This is something we're going to return to because it ends up being one of the deepest hinge pins for the understanding of emptiness. The present moment is inseparable from the object of experience, from the perception that I'm perceiving in that moment. And so the self, then, cannot be separate or findable separately from the world. Okay? We have a sense of a self being separatable from our experience, separatable from the sense of the world, of the world of experience, and actually you can't find it separate from that, because that's what the aggregates are: they're the world of experience.

Okay. So one goes through all these seven, and you can't find it. You can't find it. That unfindability doesn't mean that the self doesn't exist. It means that it doesn't inherently exist. That's a big, really important difference. If one is taking this up as a meditation, as I said earlier, you focus on that void, that voidness, that emptiness that comes up there, keeping the meaning alive of its unfindability, of its lack of inherent existence. And if one gets a little bit practised, or quite a lot practised at this, you can actually, then, at the end of a session, let the self-sense come back. You just loosen, you let go of that sense -- it comes back. But at that point, it's coming back with a sense of its emptiness. It's qualified by emptiness. So it appears again, but you feel that it's empty. Really, really useful.

When it disappears, you want to keep that disappearance, that vacuity, that voidness, that emptiness meaning -- keep remembering its meaning, okay? In a very deep state, when it totally fuses, like, as I said, water into the water, that meaning is implicit there. It's implicit. It's not like you're thinking anything at all -- you know, "subject, object." It's implicit.

I have no idea how many of you will get on with this, or even it will appeal to, now or later. But if one does it, it's not that you would race through this. In other words, "Oh yeah, it's not that, it's not that. Right, right, done." [laughter] "Next!" It's actually that one wants to be quite thorough and really take your time, really, really convincing yourself. And let it really mean something to you, and let the whole sense of the whole thing really impress itself upon you. At times, the sense of emptiness gets lost, or the sense of lack of inherent existence gets lost, you slip a bit, and then you can just re-rev up the reasonings a little bit, and it comes back

So in this kind of practice, it's not that we're searching for emptiness. You're not looking for this experience of emptiness. That's actually important. Or you're not looking for something called 'emptiness.' What you're actually looking for is the inherent existence of the self. You're looking to find the self, which is a different, a different orientation -- of the self, or a thing, or the car, or the feeling, or whatever it is.

Cerebral as all that sounds, we want, if you're going to do it, you have to actually feel it. You feel, as I said at the beginning -- first step, you feel the sense of inherent existence of the self. You feel that, and you feel the sense of not being able to find it. You feel the sort of emptiness. It has an impression on the heart.

Again, just to throw out for practice: at first, one kind of does a bit of samādhi, then does a bit of kind of reasoning and analysis, and then does samādhi, and reasoning, analysis. Eventually what happens is the reasoning itself brings a kind of samādhi. The mind just goes shoooom, like that, and really settles down into the kind of -- the reasoning brings this sense of emptiness, and the mind kind of really settles with that. And as I said, you can do this not just with the self or with your car or with external objects. You can do it with anger, with sadness, with fear. Again, is the fear the same? Is it findable in, you know, the butterflies in the tummy, in the thought, in the sense of the mind shrinking? Is it findable separate from that? You go through all the same things. Is the fear something that possesses that? It can have a very powerful impact.

Okay. That's it. I know, for some people, not your cup of tea. As I said at the beginning, leave it, leave it. Right to go back to the opening talk -- too many practices on this retreat. Different people will be drawn to and find different ones helpful. And if you want to explore this alongside what you've been doing already -- great! If you explore this and you find, actually, it's more powerful than anything else -- great! If you want to ignore it -- great! If you want to file it for later -- great! So it's all good. It's all good, and I'm certainly not bothered at all. And if you hated it, it was just an hour out of your life. [laughter] And it's all over now, and you can breathe again.

Yogi 15: Rob, I want to ask, is it good to kind of start with something like a car, or ...?

Rob: Good question, yeah. Usually they do, I think, in the Tibetan tradition, but you have to -- if you have quite a lot of samādhi and this kind of cushioning that I was talking about when I talked about samādhi in the opening talk, just cushioning the whole practice in terms of mettā and a sense of well-being, if that's around, and if you have a little bit of sense of the self-sense getting quieter and more refined and more light through the other practices, then I would say go right into it. Starting with, let's say, a chariot or a car, you know, that's more when those other things aren't there, and it would be too shaky to do that. Sometimes it can be helpful for you to practise on that. But I would say, probably, for everyone in here, can go, if you want to, go straight ahead with this, because you've got enough foundation for it. Absolutely, yeah. That's important, thank you.

Yogi 16: What's the monk's name [?] the chariot, Rob, again?

Rob: Chandrakīrti. Seventh-century Indian monk. Very, very smart guy. [laughs] Yeah.

Yogi 17: [?]

Rob: Well, remember, it's a practice. So I think John has said to you already, there are different traditions with it. I'll talk about this tomorrow night. I'll get into it more tomorrow night. But if this remains just a kind of intellectual curiosity, kind of playing with ideas -- forget about it, you know. It's just pointless. What a waste of time! But as a potential meditation practice, if you develop it, it's very, very powerful. And that's always how he meant it, and as I think I said in the opening talk, when he offered this, as part of one of his treatises, Supplement to the Middle Way, he begins that whole treatise, which is quite lengthy, he begins it by saying, you know, this is about compassion.^[3] As I said in the opening talk, it's for compassion. It's from compassion. It's all about freeing beings. It's not intellectual games. Are there people in the tradition who get into it in a way that has no impact, it's just kind of mind games? Yeah, absolutely. I trust that no one here will do that. My sense is that's not what will go on for people at all.

Yogi 18: It's all recorded, too, so we can ...

Rob: That's what I was going to say. It's all recorded -- hopefully. [laughter]

Yogi 19: The machine's gone, what?! [laughter]

Rob: It's all recorded. A lot of you will be thinking, it sounds really -- I don't know what some of you will be thinking. Probably you'll fall into different camps with this, and I'm well aware of that. Some of you will be thinking, "I want to come back to this, but I can't, I can't take it on right now." And that's totally, totally valid. You know, it was many years before I took this particular practice on. And it has been recorded, and you can also find literature on taking you through this stuff. I went in quite a lot of detail tonight. Mostly when you find the literature on it, it doesn't go into so much detail. And if you were taking it on as a practice, you would probably go into more detail. You'd have to convince yourself of stuff that I didn't really get to tonight, and really grapple with it, make it really convincing and very alive. And then it's like, when you practise, you're kind of plugging something in that has a supercharge to it. It's like it can really burrow through the seeming reality of things, of the self -- of all things, really. But you need to kind of charge it up with making it mean something for you.

Yogi 20: It's a really good tool.

Rob: It's a very good tool for some people, and other people might try it and not get on with it at all. It might take, you know, working with a teacher a little bit to refine it. It's going to be very variable, just like all the practices we've thrown out so far. Some people will gravitate towards some, and some towards others.

Yogi 21: Do you think that we shouldn't really bother doing it unless we're going to do it and get going? Like, how much time ...? I'm just kind of wondering, with all the different practices, like ...

Rob: Yeah, it's up to you. I mean, you might -- if you feel really attracted to this, I would go for it. Or, as I said at the beginning of this talk, you could also use it just a little bit, reflecting on the reasonings as a way to shore up the anattā practice and fill out the kind of certainty with which you can look at something and say, "Not me, not mine." So you could also do it that way, and postpone this as a sort of major practice in itself for later. As I said at the beginning, there are lots of ways of using what I went into tonight, and many of you, it will be just filling out the other practices.

Yogi 21: Because I suppose it could be a practice that you actually do, like, for a whole year, or something like ...

Rob: Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, really focus on it for, you know, people who are here a long, long time go into it for a month or something, or have it as an ongoing part of your practice for a longer time -- yeah, yeah. When you get good at it, it's something that you can do quite quickly. So it's not like you spend an hour going through all the reasonings. It's like you've figured it out, you've got that conviction, and you just ... And in a matter of seconds, sometimes, you can just file right down to that emptiness and then stay with that emptiness, and then you just shore it up a little bit from time to time. But to get to that place will take probably a while for a lot of people. As I said, on Monday I'm going to be introducing a very non-conceptual practice, very simple practice that's going to feel like it comes more organically out of what we've done so far. So that will be available too. Okay?