Transcription
Anatta ('not-self', or 'no-self') is one of the Buddha's most subtle and profound teachings, and a full understanding of it involves seeing how not only the personal self, but also the entire world of experience, is empty of any intrinsic essence or existence. This talk explores some of the possible ways a meditator might work in practice to develop and strengthen such radical and liberating insights.
Tonight I would like to explore this teaching of the Buddha's of anattā, the emptiness of self, or no-self, not-self -- people translate it in different ways. And actually it's a huge area. It's a very rich and profound teaching. There's actually quite a lot to it, its ramifications, its implications. So I just want to take one approach out of a number of possible ones that the Buddha offers and the teachings offer, one approach and one kind of slice at it. And even then, there's quite a lot to say, so I hope it's not too much or overwhelming or confusing.
We hear a lot as practitioners about this teaching of anattā, about this teaching of the emptiness of self. I think it's really important to take a step backwards before we even get into it and kind of set a foundation, preface it in a way. And that is that it's very easy, when we hear about this teaching, to make it the kind of be-all and end-all of the whole practice, the be-all and end-all of the whole Dharma. It's like everything should go there, everything should be about that, everything should be seen in those terms. And to take a step back and actually see that wasn't the Buddha's approach. Out of his great compassion, really, practical compassion and skill, what's always fundamental, always the fundamental question in the Dharma is not "Self or not-self?" or this or that. It's actually "Suffering or not suffering? Suffering or less suffering?" That is a much more fundamental and important question, of which the question about self and not-self, or is there a self, blah blah blah, is kind of one part of that bigger question.
So the Buddha didn't really make a statement -- at least the historical Buddha of the Pali Canon didn't really make a statement, "There is a self" or "There isn't a self." He didn't make that statement, and we're not supposed to do that, either. He also didn't say that we should get rid of the self, that the self is something to kind of obliterate or explode or melt into some cosmic something-or-other. What he more points to is learning to not identify with different elements of experience, and rather to see them as not-self. That's his usual approach. It's very pragmatic and very practical. But even then, it's not that we always do that, okay? It's not that we always do that. The more fundamental question is: in this situation, in this suffering that's arising, what is it, out of all my possible responses and ways of looking, that would lead to less suffering for myself and for others, and what leads to more?
Now, it might be that looking at it in terms of not-self and disidentifying actually decreases the suffering, but it might be that what's needed in that situation is actually to step into the sense of self and to look at it in terms of self. That's what I mean by saying the fundamental question is about suffering; it's not about self. I think if we explore this as human beings and as practitioners, what we find is that the avenue, the way of looking of not-self, and the way of looking of self, the avenue of self, we could say, the view of self, they're both valuable at different times. And in a way, you could say they bring different kinds of freedom: different kinds of freedom available from one and from the other, different kinds of opening, different kinds of healing. I would say they're both important for us as human beings, and they're both available to us as human beings. The question is, do we have in our practice both available?
So it's quite common for a person to live a certain amount of years or decades and feel like it's actually necessary to go back into the past and look at one's story in terms of the self and actually recover and discover elements of that story, and kind of knit a healing through that. This is totally common, but just picking one example at random: I have a very good friend. When she was young, her father was very, very -- critical is an understatement: "You are this, and you are that." Extremely demeaning and a sort of constant barrage of put-downs and criticisms and defining negatively. Of course, you know, a child's sense of self, when a child is very young, when he or she is very young, is very fragile, very vulnerable, tender, open and malleable. Of course in its emerging, in that rawness and openness in emerging, it's going to be shaped by the influences coming in, and especially, of course, of the parents and the environment and the society.
Now, I remember in my practice, in the years of practice years ago, being in therapy and finding psychotherapy, and finding some of the approaches extremely useful, extremely useful. Picking up the language of self -- this is years ago in the eighties and nineties, and I'm not sure if this mode of therapy is outdated or not; I'm not really current with this -- but using the language of the inner child, which I'm sure some of you will be familiar with. And finding actually that it was a really helpful way of dislodging certain self-concepts that had got locked into place and that were very unhelpful, very negative and very painful. Actually dislodging them and replacing them, in a way, with different self-concepts, yes, but ones that enable me to really cherish myself in a very beautiful way, really see one's own beauty, nothing to do with ego. So using the view, the language, the avenue of self, but a lot of healing available in that. We see to set boundaries in life, where something's not appropriate -- that, in a way, can be a movement of self. Or to 'express oneself,' we say nowadays -- it's a modern thing. But this is all the language of self to an extent.
As practitioners, we might want to ask ourself: what's my leaning, what's my tendency? Is it my tendency as a practitioner to want to kind of skip over the self stuff? Just kind of put that aside, get over it, deny it in a way, not really work through it, and veer more towards, want to be more in the emptiness all the time? Or is it the opposite, that I'm actually only kind of in the self, and the language of the self, and the construction of the self, and the view of the self, and I don't really want to go near this emptiness thing? What's my tendency? It's a really important question, for us to look at our practice and our lives and be honest with ourselves. A lot of integrity to see: where am I leaning, and why am I leaning in one way or another?
To me, a mature practice, if we can use that word 'mature' (it's not a great word, but), a mature practice actually envelops both ends of that spectrum. It's totally possible for a human being to reach a place in their practice where they can drop into the mode of self and are happy that way, happy processing things and dialoguing in that way and looking in that way, and come out of it and drop into the mode of not-self, of disidentification. There's actually a complete freedom there. It's just a matter of a sense of what's appropriate now. One can move freely between both. That's quite a tall order but definitely possible.
Sometimes, of course, we make too much of a dichotomy here, because anyway seeing things in terms of not-self and disidentifying, it's not that that produces a kind of grey, nondescript nonpersonality. It actually frees our self-expression. The less the stranglehold of self, the less the identification, the more possibility of self-expression. So they're not really at all pulling in opposite directions.
[10:31] Now, in one of the talks[1] we talked a little bit about the story and investigating the story. So I just touched on it briefly. I think I might have said this in one of the talks. But one of the gifts of meditation is that sometimes, just through attention to the present moment, the story, our storyline of who we are and what we did and where we come from and what we've been through, goes quiet. It just is drained of energy and just goes quiet. And then in the absence of that kind of narrative, in the absence of those kind of definitions, who am I then? So much of our sense of self is wrapped up (at one level) in the story. It's a real gift to just let that go, let it unbind, drop deeper than that. Who am I when the story is quiet?
I probably also said this, but I'll say it again just briefly. If we, again, honestly and bringing a real integrity to this, to looking at our story and what we tell ourselves and others as our story, what narrative we tell ourselves and others, we'll actually see that it's different at different times. Especially over decades, if you pay attention, it's quite different at different times, and even different in different moods. Which is the real story? What's the real story of my story, the real me?
So one possibility, and I think it's very important in beginning this kind of investigation in anattā, is actually to look, to kind of take a good look at the different ways that we define ourselves or make conclusions about ourselves, or the different concepts of ourselves that we have. A little while ago -- actually it was a year or two ago even -- I was working with someone in England about this. He was looking at the ways that he defined himself. So he took it away and he came back. He noticed that he was quite -- well, he viewed himself as quite a sort of sharp dresser, like he dressed well in his eyes. He said, "I'm the kind of guy who, my way of dressing is 'urban sophisticated.'" [laughter] This conversation took place in a retreat centre, so ... [laughter] which are never great sort of fashion ... and of course I was sitting there like this. [laughs] But why this thing was interesting for him was there was a little bit of judgment of others in it. It wasn't extreme; it was quite a light thing to play with at first. But there was a little bit of judgment: "I'm like this. Everyone else around here seems a little schleppy."
He was looking at this, and he said, "Okay, 'urban sophisticated.' I define myself as 'urban sophisticated.'" And then he explored it a bit more. He was about my age. And he said he wasn't quite sure if he could say "young urban sophisticated." [laughter] So that was a little bit of a question mark. Then he explored a bit more and said, "I'm urban sophisticated, maybe young, but I also wear organic cotton." So it was "ethical, maybe young, urban sophisticated." But the point was just having a bit of space and lightness in some of these definitions that can actually get very tight just kind of going by themselves. So lightening up, loosening it up. And in a way, there's a kind of liberation in that. We talked about, well, what would he dress like if it was 1969? Flowers and bell-bottoms or whatever. What if it was a hundred years ago, and we were sitting in, I don't know, Turkestan or Tibet or Tanzania? It would be completely different. It's a dependent arising based on the culture and what is seen to be kind of hip at that time or whatever.
Now, of course, when we look at this, how we define ourselves in different ways, oftentimes it's not that light. A lot of the definitions that we bind ourselves with and constrict ourselves with are actually very painful. This, too, we want to really uncover. What are the ways that I'm defining myself at times? And really have a good look about this. What are the conclusions and the assumptions I'm making about myself? And just be clear what they are, and be clear, also, when am I believing in them? What they are, and when am I believing in them. One finds when one does this it's a whole kind of unexplored bag of assumptions and conclusions and definitions and bindings. It's really, really worth identifying, exploring.
In his case it was also interesting because some of this, when one disidentifies, when one drops that identification or sees, "Oh, it's just an identification," and drops it, it doesn't necessarily mean that we stop making those choices or acting in those ways. So for example, mindfulness. Very easy in this kind of retreat situation to identify with mindfulness. When mindfulness is there, we feel good about ourselves. We say, "I've got a good practice." But actually mindfulness is not something to be identified with. When I disidentify with mindfulness, it doesn't mean that I stop practising mindfulness. I just don't identify. Same with something like generosity, etc.
So in this practitioner's case, it doesn't mean that seeing all this and loosening the identification that he then dresses like a monk or whatever. In fact, even if one did dress like a monk or a nun, there can still be identification with that, of course. One of my teachers was a monk in Thailand, and he was recounting this incident. He was outside, and a monk was riding a bicycle and got his robe caught in the chain, and it ripped the robe. Within a few seconds, a sort of little swarm of other monks had gathered around him wanting to swap their robes with him so they could wear the torn robe and appear ascetic, very ascetic. [laughter] Identification has no pride in terms of what it will latch onto.
One of the functions of mindfulness, and particularly the continuity of mindfulness -- so when we stress that a lot, it's like just paying attention throughout the day -- one of the gifts of that is because of the continuity, it exposes the gaps in these definitions of ourselves. It exposes, "I'm an angry person or I'm a fearful person or I'm this or I'm that, I'm a great meditator, I'm a lousy meditator, I can't concentrate, blah blah blah blah blah" -- all that, the continuity of the mindfulness as much as possible, we begin to see times when that, whatever that is, that definition, is just not true. It's not taking place. With the continuity, this question with the definitions: if I'm defining myself that way, am I always x? Am I always y? Or are there times when I see that actually I'm not that, that's not present, it's not happening? Really, really powerful to just puncture holes in these definitions.
[19:02] Sometimes a person practises for a while and then just kind of comes to the conclusion, "Well, I see I've got some good and I've got some bad." And then they look at other people and they say, "Everybody's a mix of good and bad." And, you know, that's good. That's better than being locked into a negative self-definition, or a positive one. But it's still not the kind of deep freedom that the Buddha's talking about. It's still not that kind of deep freedom.
So how else might we explore this? One of the things that I want to emphasize in this talk is how we're building the sense of self, because the sense of self is constructed, and that's what we really want to understand. It's something built. It's built. And we want to expose that. We see, "Ah, it's not something real. It's just something that I've built." One of the ways we build self is through past and future. You've seen this. It's like we remember backwards in the past and we project forward into the future something difficult, something fantastic, whatever, and kind of congeal all that together. And in that continuity, we feel, "There's the self." So again, one of the gifts of mindfulness is to come really sharply into the present moment, and almost deliberately sometimes, kind of snip off the past and snip off the future. We assume mindfulness is always about being in the now, being in the present, but sometimes it's almost more deliberately snipping off the past, snipping off the future. And then in this moment, with the attention to the moment, in the moment, it's like it's a sliver of experience; it's paper thin, this moment. Who am I in that moment? There's barely anything there. Who am I? The sense of self as a construct needs the kind of elongation in time to make it substantial, to make it feel like it's really something weighty. With the sharp, really alive attention in the moment, really cutting off the past and the future just for a moment or two, you see, who can I be then? There's barely anything there. So these are practices and strategies for freeing up and loosening the sense of self at times. The Buddha's not giving us definitions of the self. He's giving us ways to loosen the view of the self.
There's a sutta where the Buddha talks about the possible ways of conceiving the self that there are.[2] This is moving just a little bit more subtly now, a little more subtle level. He says in regard to the body, a person may regard the body as the self. Or they may regard the self as something that possesses the body, it owns the body. Or they may have a sense that the self is somewhere in the body. Or they may have a slightly more mystical sense of the body being in the self, in the sense of it's in a cosmic consciousness, or it's in awareness, or in God, or in the Self with a capital S, or the Soul with a capital S.
So regarding the body as self, the self as possessing the body, the self in the body, or the body in the self. This is something to really explore. It sounds like an intellectual kind of categorization, etc., but actually it's something that we do inadvertently all the time -- either deliberately or unconsciously. Oftentimes we regard the body as a self. But actually beginning to question that: if the body was a self and I have a haircut or I lose my hair when I get older, what happens to my self then? If the self possesses the body, then that would mean that the body is totally in the control of the self. But it's not. As the Buddha said, I can't say to this body, "Don't get old." I can't say to the body, "Don't hurt," or "Don't be in pain," "Don't be diseased."[3] If the self were in the body, which is the third potential possibility, where is it in the body? I can look for it in the body. Where is it in the body? We say our brain. But if you opened your eyes and you just saw a brain sitting here giving the talk... [laughs] And the last one takes a bit more looking, but one realizes it's something we can go beyond in meditation; it can't be an ultimate truth, the body being in something called a Self.
He says that in regard to the body, but then he goes further and says it's the same in regard to feelings, our vedanā (pleasant, unpleasant, neutral). It's the same regarding perception, all these four possibilities. Same in regard to mental formations (thoughts and moods and mind-states) -- are they the self? Does the self possess them? Is the self in them? Or are they in the self? And also with consciousness, which is the most subtle one. So this is really important. Again, it sounds kind of intellectual and a bit picky and complex, perhaps, but it's something that we really want to, in a way, go through these categories and really see: it can't be that, it can't be that, it can't be that. That's one possibility.
The Buddha goes on to say a practitioner who is skilled in the Dharma, skilled in Dhamma, does not regard the five aggregates in any of these ways, does not regard form, body, feelings, perceptions, mental formations or consciousness in that way, in any of those ways. Does not regard them in those ways. So this is something to check out. Am I regarding them in any of those ways, either as a philosophical position or in a moment? Because one reaction to this kind of teaching will be like, "Yeah, I mean, that sounds good, but I'm really not the intellectual type. I don't have that kind of theorizing about the self." What one will find in one's experience is that in some way or another the self-view is moving between one or other of those categories, inadvertently, unconsciously, whether one considers it intellectually or not. So really, really important to see that.
The Buddha is talking about, he's pointing us to practising a view in meditation. It's a different thing than holding an intellectual theory and saying, "I've got the right theory. I'm on the winning side." I'll say it again: the Buddha is pointing us to practising a view in meditation. That means in this moment checking out these possibilities and letting them go, letting them go, seeing that they can't be right. Really important. It's not an intellectual thing he's talking about.
Another response is to get agitated: "Well, if it's none of those, what is the self, and how is it, and where is it? Where am I? And how is it that karma -- that this self that doesn't seem to exist anywhere can reap the benefits of old actions?" Now, these are important questions, but oftentimes they're coming out of agitation and a kind of insecurity. I think they're necessary to answer at a certain point in practice, but for most people the first step is actually practising the view of letting go of those ways of seeing the self.
So the Pali Canon Buddha shies away from defining the self in any way. It's quite popular nowadays in Dharma to define the self as, "The self is the continuum of moment-to-moment arising and passing of the aggregates. That's what the self is." Actually the Buddha never said that. I don't know one instance where he said that. He really shies away from definitions. And very pragmatic, very practical, he says, is it possible for you to look at experience in the moment -- actually phenomena, not just experience; it includes consciousness -- and actually see it as not me, not mine, in the moment? Learn, practise to see it that way. And as such, he's teaching a kind of strategy. He's teaching an approach that leads to freedom. As I've said before, it's practising ways of seeing, practising ways of looking that lead to freedom. This learning to disidentify -- "not me, not mine, just happening, all this stuff is just happening" -- that's a way of looking that leads to freedom, and it's something that the Buddha encourages us to practise.
[29:13] Often when I talk about not-self, I actually explore that avenue of practice, and kind of fill that out more in the details. It's a beautiful, beautiful way of practising, and really an art that can deepen. But I want to take a different tack in this talk. Another approach that the Buddha took is actually present in the original teachings. This has to do with seeing the way that we conceive the self -- and by 'conceive,' I mean 'sense' the self or 'view' the self or 'feel' the self. Again, I don't just mean an intellectual concept. The way we conceive the self and the way we conceive the world -- those two arise together. The way we conceive the self and the way we conceive the world arise together. This is a slightly different angle now.
For example, I might have woven into my story, "I am the victim. I am a victim" of whatever. And in that, a certain view of the world is also woven into that view of the self. They go together. To see myself as a victim means I'm seeing the world in a certain way. To see myself as powerless also means I see the world a certain way. To see myself as having power over -- again, this self and this world, they have a mutual relationship there. Or power in the world. But even more subtly, something like, "The self is irritated. I am irritated" -- there is the one who is irritated, and the thing in the world that I am irritated at, arising together, mutually dependent.
A very normal, common, almost unnoticed way of being in the world and conceiving the self in the world -- and we don't often realize that we do this -- is the self is a centre of getting. It's a centre of acquisition, and the world is a field of things to get and things to avoid. If you think about that for a while, oftentimes that's how we see the self in the world. We don't deliberately say to others that we see -- well, sometimes we do -- but we don't deliberately say to others that. But that's the kind of feeling we have. It's like this thing here somehow is a centre of getting stuff that I want, all different kinds of stuff, and avoiding that which I don't want, and that out there is the field of acquiring or avoiding all that. But even more subtle: the self is the experiencer, the world is the experienced. The self is the knower, the world is the known. Self is subject, world is object. All of these ways of conceiving of self, whether they're gross or subtle, they arise together, mutually dependent.
Again, if we go back to the story level of the self, the story of my self must include a kind of sense of how the world is or how others are. That could be explicit in the story, conscious, or it could just be implicitly woven in there. So this is something we really want to explore. It's another avenue in to the whole anattā question. It points to something extremely profound to explore here, this mutual arising of self and the world. It also begs the question: if there are all these different ways of conceiving the self and the world together, which ways of conceiving them -- conceiving the self's relationship to the world -- which ways are helpful? And remember, going back to what I said right at the beginning, that's the fundamental question in the Dharma. That's the fundamental question. Which ways of conceiving the self and the world lead to suffering, and which ways lead to freedom?
So we could see the self as giving to the world. Beautiful. We could see the self as healing the world, we're healing. We can serve the world. We can, again, take pleasure from the world. We could see: "I am connected to the world," or "I am a participant in the world," or again, "I'm a victim" -- whatever. All these are views, and they arise mutually. The view of the self and the view of the world, they arise mutually like that. And the question is, out of all the available ones, which ones are helpful? Which ones do we want to encourage? Which ones lead us to more beauty, to more openness of heart, to more freedom? Because we actually can have a choice in this. That's the fundamental Dharma question.
And then another level of question is, which are true? Which are true? If there are all these different possibilities, what's the true reality of self and the world? I feel that it's a very beautiful question for a human being to ask, a really deep question, a lovely question: what can I give to the world? What can I give to the world? There's something just so precious in that question, to really deeply ask oneself: what can I give to the world? It might be and it often is the case that asking that question and acting on that question takes a level of cherishing the self, takes a level of needing to really love oneself deeply -- and I don't mean that as a platitude -- before we can give deeply.
Taking a step back again, it's not that in the Dharma, in our practice, we're trying to get rid of all concepts. That's actually not what we're trying to do, just kind of jettison or demolish all concepts. With concepts -- again, picking out what I've just said about self and the world -- some concepts lead to entanglement, to dukkha, to dis-ease, to suffering, to complication, and some concepts lead to compassion, lead to peace, lead to joy, lead to freedom. This is really, really important. So for example, sitting here, and you have a pain in your back or your hip or your knee, or a sadness or whatever: "Only I have this kind of suffering. Only me." That view, that concept, will lead to a tightening and an increase of the suffering, versus -- and I think I said this in the reflection the other morning -- seeing the commonality, the commonality of suffering: "Others share this, too." That concept, that view, actually leads to an opening, a lessening of the weight of the suffering.
Things like the Four Noble Truths or this idea of seeing things as 'not me, not mine,' they are concepts. They're definitely concepts that the Buddha introduced. But they're concepts that lead to freedom, to unbinding. This is really important. If we say in our practice too early, "Concepts are the problem. I'll just get rid of concepts," what tends to happen -- and I see this over and over again with people -- is all that happens is one thinks one's got rid of concepts and one just goes back to the kind of default strata of concepts in one's life. One may not use the language of self because one is a little bit carefully avoiding it, but still the notion of the now, or a present moment, or a world, or awareness -- all that, concepts. One hasn't actually seen through and kind of untangled these more subtle default concepts if I jettison the idea of concepts too early. Again, when I say 'concepts,' I don't just mean intellectual theories. I mean views and ways of seeing, ways of relating, that are actually going on all the time. Right now, in every one of us in this room, the mind has concepts going on -- not just because I'm talking; even if I was silent and we went into meditation, concepts, concepts, concepts, ways of seeing.
So 'bare attention' is a concept. Bare attention is interesting because it's a concept that has the tag to it: "I'm not a concept." Actually it's a concept. I've said this before in here but it's really important. I'm going to say it again. When we feel like we're just looking and just being with things, actually there are a whole bunch of concepts that are fabricating that experience and holding it in place. We need to discover how that's operating, what it is, and to free that up.
I said what's a useful way of seeing self and the world, what's a useful way of conceiving that? At another level, any sense that the self and the world are two things that are really real, or something that is really real, that brings with it some sense of dis-ease, some sense of dukkha, some sense of threat. I have a self and I have a world, I have an other, and this self is at the mercy of the other, with any sense.
[39:39] If we just pay attention to the sense of self in our life and our practice, it seems completely obvious and completely intuitively true that the self -- we have this sense of a self moving in or through the world in time. We have a sense -- almost everyone would agree with this -- a self moves in or through the world in time. It seems so obvious. I get up, I walk over there, I go to the bathroom, I whatever -- I'm moving in or through the world in time. Is that true? Is it really true that the self moves in and through the world in time? And that view, that conceiving -- does it have some dukkha with it?
Or, when we're meditating and just watching and just watching and just being with, we can have the sense of the witness sitting, almost like watching the river of experience flow by. Things and phenomena are just arising and passing, arising and passing. A witness sitting, watching phenomena go by. Or we might get a sense of the world, the world of experience, phenomena, being in awareness. It's almost like awareness is expansive, huge, embraces all phenomena, holds everything, and remains in itself unperturbed, unfazed, untouched. The world is in awareness. Now, both of those -- watching the river flow by, and the world being in awareness -- are beautiful openings in practice, openings of consciousness that we want to explore, want to get to know, want to stay with and be with. Really beautiful. A lot of freedom possible there, a lot of freedom. I want to cultivate them. I want to deliberately cultivate those ways of seeing, those kind of stationings of that sense of things. But there are problems with that in terms of what's ultimately true. There are problems with both of them.
The first one is that it's very easy to identify with the witness, identify with the watcher or awareness or consciousness or whatever we might call it, and we might give it capital letters or whatever. And again, we might do this consciously, or we might do it unconsciously. Really, really important because the Buddha said that's actually not the truth of things. You are not awareness. We are not awareness. And we need to learn to unhook that identification. That's a skill and an art and a practice, very possible.
The second thing, and it's probably even -- if possible -- more important, is that this witness or this awareness always has with it -- what can we say -- factors, other factors, that colour and shape and fabricate experience. So we've touched on this. The world, the world of experience, is always fabricated or concocted. Those two words, 'fabricated' and 'concocted,' are a translation of the word saṅkhāra, the Buddhist word saṅkhāra. In English they give a very good sense because it implies something not quite real -- 'fabrication, concoction.' There's always something mixed with awareness, some thought or reaction, subtle reaction, or view, including the self-view no matter how subtle, or intention, or delusion; something that's fabricating the way the world is experienced and fabricating the experience. So rather than a world kind of existing in awareness, one actually sees that there's this building of the world of experience.
One time, the Buddha was sitting around with a group of monks, in this case, and he said to them, "Monks, if you" -- I'm paraphrasing because I couldn't find the story, but I'll paraphrase the story -- "if you had a stride, a step when you walked, you had a step that was 100 miles long, one step took you 100 miles, and you walked for 100 years or 100 lifetimes or 1,000 lifetimes, you wouldn't reach the end of the world. And yet, monks, unless you reach the end of the world, unless you see the end of the world, you won't know nibbāna." Then he went inside to his kuṭi and he shut the door. [laughter] And he left them to chew on that. I think it was left to Ānanda or Mahākaccāna to kind of explain that.[4]
What he's getting to is what I'm talking about. It's that the world is fabricated. And we want to understand something, so I'm going to say more about it. When in meditation, in practice, the awareness calms and it feels open and we're clear, we're present, one actually wants to start paying attention, deliberate attention, and see this process of the building and the fabricating of things and experience, the fabricating of the world. I actually want to see that because I want to understand it. And in seeing it, can I learn the skill, the art, of letting go of that building? I've said this before: it's not enough to just sit on the riverbank and watch phenomena go by. Of course they'll arise, and of course they'll fade. But that understanding won't be enough because it won't take you to the end of the world that the Buddha is talking about. I need to understand how the mind, the heart, is building experience. And is it possible, in that understanding, to actually let go of it and not build? So again, these words, the translation of saṅkhāra, 'concoct,' 'fabricate' -- in English they imply a falsity. They imply, like we call a lie, a fabrication, a concoction, some fancy story. The Buddha picks these words. Interesting.
So one thing I really want to stress is that that might sound completely abstract and like, "Gosh, I'm a million miles away from any of that kind of seeing in my practice. I don't know." But it's a continuum of understanding. This is such a beautiful thing. It's a continuum of understanding. At one level, at one end of this continuum, let's take when the mind is really writhing in complexity, it's really got a lot of papañca going on. We've got all our story -- and not just my story, but my parents' story, and their parents', and going back, and everything is really complicated. Some thing in the world, we've really gotten into a twist about. There's a lot of papañca, there's a lot of story-building, there's a lot of agitation. In that moment, at that time, the sense of the self is very strong. It's very marked. It's very built up, we could say. We've built the self-sense to be large, okay? Even if it feels like, "I'm terrible, I'm terrible, I'm terrible, and I want to crawl into a hole," actually that's still a kind of built up sense of self.
A lot of self at that point built up, but also a lot of thing, because I need to be agitated about some thing in the world. There's much self, and much world, much thing. They're arising together, they're being built together, and there's a lot of papañca. Then that passes, and I'm in a more ordinary state of consciousness. I see everything is just a bit more [normal]. It's not like some thing is completely prominent in consciousness, and being obsessed about, and really loud, and screaming at me, or the sense of self is so loud and exaggerated. It's just more normal. There's the self, and there are things, and it's okay. So as I let go of the story and the building and the papañcizing, self gets less, thing gets less. If I learn, as I was saying before, this avenue of practice to disidentify, let go of identification with experience, what I notice too is the sense of self gets less, even less than ordinary, and the sense of thing correspondingly gets less. This may take a little time to notice. Oftentimes people don't hang out enough in this practice of anattā to see that the sense of thing actually decreases. It takes a little getting used to. Oftentimes people just dip in and out of it, and that's one of the reasons I said in the other talk: really staying with the practice and taking it as an avenue that takes you deeper, because if we don't, we probably won't unfold these deeper insights.
[49:26] And if it's possible, if I can develop this -- and I'm talking about long-term practice -- but if it's possible to actually let go of all the aggregates, not even identified with consciousness, very subtle hooking of identification, I let go of that, I'm not identified with any of the aggregates, there's no seeing any of the aggregates as 'me' or 'mine,' even less self, even less thing. Less and less and less and less and less, until nothing happens. Nothing happens. Nothing arises at all. The insight there, rather than making too much of a thing about that experience, is the continuum: less self, less world. Less building of the self, less building of the world. There's also something about, as practitioners, learning or getting used to moving along that continuum of the self being tight and strong and constricted and loud, and less and less and less, and knowing that. It's just a fact of the human condition that most humans spend most of their life kind of in an almost continuous state of self-referencing: "What do you think of me? What do they think of me? What do I think of me? How am I defining myself?" And it's shifting and changing and it's painful. It's a painful process. And it's almost without interruption. It's constricting. It's a constriction. And it's tiring, it's exhausting. Part of the human condition is that one becomes so used to that, so used to it, it becomes like water for a fish. One doesn't even realize that it's a constriction, all this selfing. One doesn't even feel it as a constriction. So one part of it is getting used to that spectrum.
Now, there's another way of going about this, and I think I've touched on this in another talk. It's letting go of the push and the pull. So we're, again, almost constantly in a tussle with experience. I push away what I don't like (aversion), I pull towards myself what I do like (craving). A similar process happens. If I learn, if I develop the art, the skill, of relaxing that push and pull every moment, just really focused on relaxing that push and pull -- that's what I'm interested in if I'm following this avenue -- what do I see? As I push and pull less -- in Dharma language, as I cling less -- what happens to the sense of self? Quietens, gets less. What happens to the sense of thing? Again, I need to hang out enough to see this: it gets less, including such a thing as the 'present moment' or the 'now' or whatever.
So what do we see? We see that the self, we say in Dharma language, is 'empty.' It's dependent on the push and pull. And the world is empty, too. It's dependent on the push and pull. This is a completely, utterly counterintuitive understanding, because we believe in a world that's just there. I open my eyes -- there it is! What are you talking about? We all agree it's there, and that's how it is. But one of the deep gifts of Dharma practice is actually turning that on its head.
And there is this possibility, definitely there's this possibility, of just building less, learning to build less and less, to participate in this building process less and less until it gets to the point that what is revealed is the unbuilt, what the Buddha called 'the Unfabricated,' asaṅkhata, the Unborn, the Uncompounded, the Deathless. That Deathless is not something that's a kind of eternal, lasting forever; it's something actually beyond time, because time is also built, and it's also beyond awareness. Going back a few minutes before, we actually see there's no such thing as pure awareness. (I'm putting a lot in this Dharma talk; I hope it's not overwhelming.) We can sometimes have that sense in practice of a pure awareness. As I said, very beautiful, very helpful. But at a certain point, one needs to go beyond that. There is no pure awareness. Awareness, too, is fabricated, is built in this process, mutually built. And awareness is a very subtle form of subject that knows an object -- consciousness and an object. One sees that that is built as well. Awareness, too, we say is empty, lacks inherent existence. Extremely important and very deep insight. It's not necessary to jump there right away, but very important. Very common for people to leave that level undone and just end up in a kind of awareness as some ultimate, real thing. That's a whole other talk.
The thing I want to emphasize, really, is that it's a spectrum of one insight. If I grasp, if I complicate, I'm building self, I'm building thing, world of things, and clinging. So clinging, self, and things get built, and they mutually support each other like a tripod -- three sticks leaning on each other, mutually built. To see that to any degree of subtlety, or anywhere on this spectrum, is fantastic. It's wonderful. And it's the same insight, same inquiry that takes one all the way to nibbāna. So looking into a really papañca situation, and seeing through that, and seeing how everything was built -- it's the same mode of insight all the way to what we call 'the Deathless.'
It's not just the gross self that we're interested in seeing through, the self of the inner critic or papañca or the problematic ego. We're actually interested in seeing through and understanding any kind of sense of self at all, no matter how subtle, even the most subtle sense of a subject and an object, an awareness with nothing there and an object. We want to understand all of that as fabricated. Sometimes in practice, one gets a sense of, "Oh, there was no self then, and then the self came back," as if it's a kind of on/off switch. It's more of a spectrum. One wants to really see that, because without that, one will miss the more subtle manifestations of self, which we're very interested in exploring.
So the Buddha said, "When one sees the origination of the world as it actually is with right discernment, non-existence with reference to the world doesn't occur to one." In other words, when one sees how the world is built, the world of experience, the world of things is built, you can't say it doesn't exist. Then he goes on to say, "When one sees the cessation of the world as it actually is with right discernment, existence with reference to the world doesn't occur to one."[5] Because one has seen, "Oh, if I don't build, it kind of disappears." With that whole building and not building, one sees I can't really say it exists and I can't really say it doesn't exist.
So it's not a nihilism, this teaching of the emptiness of the world, the emptiness of the self. It's absolutely not a nihilism. It's not saying it doesn't exist at all. It's also not something that's supposed to leave us in a kind of existentially fraught or confused place, an agnostic place. It may be frightening for some practitioners -- for actually quite a few practitioners -- at first. But eventually it's not supposed to leave us in a place of fear at all. It's moving us towards freedom, no question about it. And with this exploration, opposite of nihilism, there is a reverence that comes. There's something so beautiful in this dependent arising, this mutual emptiness, that the heart feels a real reverence, a kind of bowing to this. There's a sense of awe and a sense of beauty, not at all nihilistic, not at all cold, not at all.
Once a cosmologist, a brahman cosmologist, went up to the Buddha and he said, "Does everything exist?" And the Buddha said, "That's the most popular cosmological theory." And the cosmologist said, "Okay. Does nothing exist?" And the Buddha said, "That's the second most popular cosmological theory." [laughter] So the brahman said, "Okay, okay. Is everything one? Is it all just a oneness?" And the Buddha said, "Aha. That's the third most popular cosmological theory." [laughter] And finally he said, "Okay, is it a plurality? Is it just a manifold, multiple?" The Buddha said, "That's the fourth." He went on to say, "These are all views and extremes of view, that everything exists, everything doesn't exist, it's all one or it's all multiple, plurality." He went on to teach this brahman what we've talked about: dependent co-arising. He said that's what I teach and that's what we call the Middle Way, the Middle Way between the extreme of existence and non-existence. "I teach the Dharma, which is the Middle Way."[6]
So when we look at this, and we've taken the self and the world, we see that the self is not inherently any way. We make these definitions about the self and these views and these constrictions. The self is not inherently any way. And nor is the world. So on a gross level, we say the world is fair or it's unfair, or we say it's a benevolent universe, or it's a cruel universe, or it's a cold universe, or it's an indifferent universe. These are all views. Or the self is separate from the universe, or it's one with the universe. Or even saying it's 'interconnected' -- that also, to me, that word doesn't quite go far enough to really penetrate the depths of what's meant by this mutual co-arising. It doesn't quite go far enough to say the self and the world are 'interconnected.' I mean, it's lovely, and it does open a lot, but it's not quite enough. Or again, that the self exists or does not exist. There's something in this seeing this mutual dependent arising, this mutual co-arising, it brings freedom with it, a beautiful freedom, absolutely beautiful freedom.
And to repeat, getting away from this idea of a kind of certain experience -- that has its place, but it's more that it's one continuum of seeing this dependent arising, this mutuality of dependent arising. The more I see it, the more and more I see and sense that, the more freedom there is. The more I look into it, the more freedom there is, right across the whole board. I'm sure for some of you it all sounds very new and very abstract and very removed from where you are, but it's actually one thread of insight, one thread of insight. Wherever we are in our practice, we can start to follow that thread. No question about it, wherever we are. That's available to us. In a way, one just follows that thread, along with cultivation, one follows that thread and it unfolds. The whole show, self and the world, begins to unbind, and one understands that. In that understanding is the beauty and freedom.
Okay. Let's have a minute or two of quiet together.
