The Seven-Fold Reasoning (The Self cannot be found anywhere)

It's quite easy to say to oneself or to another, it's quite easy to say, "The self ultimately is an illusion, and so therefore I should let go of it." Easy, easy to say that. But the question as practitioners is how really to see this deeply, really deeply in a way that penetrates the heart, and penetrates the consciousness, and penetrates the life and the being, and brings with it transformation and freedom. That's the question. Just so far on this retreat, we've gone about this emptiness of the self already from a couple of different directions, at least. One is, for instance, in the letting go, letting be practice, letting go of aversion and pushing and pulling, etc., beginning to see how the self-sense is dependent. It's not fixed. It's actually dependent on aversion and clinging, on making something a big deal. It's not solidly, substantially existing by itself. It takes some kind of building and creating.

In the anattā practice that we've been doing, remember, it's quite subtle -- what we're actually doing is we're finding a way of looking at phenomena as 'not-self, not me, not mine,' of not identifying with phenomena. It's a way of relating to phenomena in the present moment. People have been asking -- if kind of labelling or mental noting, "not-self," or whatever it is, "not me, not mine," if that helps, great. What we're really doing is setting up a way of seeing and encouraging the kind of sustaining of a way of seeing of phenomena, in the present moment, as they unfold.

What I want to talk about tonight is another option. Tonight I want to introduce a practice, a possibility of a practice, which is actually not so much looking at phenomena and letting go of identification there, but actually looking for this self. Not looking at phenomena, but looking for the self, and realizing that no matter where I look, any conceivable place that I look, I actually cannot find the self. So in the unfolding of all this over four weeks, and really probably actually more later after the retreat if you pursue some of this, as some of you will, we begin to see how these practices actually feed each other and really reinforce each other and strengthen each other.

If we just take the anattā practice for a second, this learning to disidentify, to unhook the identification, what happens, as we've been describing, is we gradually with that practice get familiar with that space that opens up and that disidentification and learn to dwell in it, and the fear begins to -- gradually, for most people -- we get less and less afraid of unhooking that identification. And more and more familiar and less afraid of the sense of self getting a bit quiet and the letting go that happens. This practice tonight, it can feed into that whole process by filling out the fuller meaning of the anattā practice and the sense of anattā and the kind of reasoning behind it. I hope that becomes clear as I speak.

So there was -- we've already mentioned him -- a very, very significant, great teacher in seventh-century India, the abbot of Nālandā, a monastery/university, and his name was Chandrakīrti. We've mentioned him. And he was the one, as far as I'm aware, who really elaborated on this particular practice and really filled it out, but actually it has its roots -- I found it in the Pali Canon and I think it's in one of the verses of an arahant nun, and awakened nun. She just briefly mentions this practice or this way of seeing the self.^[1] Chandrakīrti's famous because he takes the image of a chariot, and he kind of takes it apart and says you can't actually find 'the chariot.' And the roots of that are actually from this nun, sometime obviously hundreds of years before. He fills it out.

So tonight, as I go into this and try and explain, options for you here. There's a lot of options. So one option is that you really get interested in this and you learn it as a meditation practice. Key words are 'meditation' and 'practice.' Learn it as a meditation practice. This is not an exercise in philosophy alone. And then that practice, like all other practices we've been talking about, certainly that I've been talking about, is something we develop. There's the potential to develop that and develop the power of it, and our skill and our capacity with it. It might be you listen and you just feel like, "Pff. I don't know. Maybe I like the sound of it, maybe I don't like the sound of it, but I'm going to file it for later." Totally fine. Totally fine to listen that way, just a sense of trying to follow, trying to understand, maybe taking notes if you want, but filing it for later and being very clear about that. And it might be that you find yourself just listening, and in that just listening, without even maybe thinking that we're going to file it for later, the seeds may be planted, and, as I said, they will have their effect in some way.

I hope that as I'm speaking, as I'm giving this talk, the whole of yesterday's talk is also present in your consciousness in a perfectly accessible way. [laughter] As is the whole of tomorrow evening's talk. [laughter] As I said, impossible to say everything at once. I actually wish the whole four weeks were all at once because there are ways that everything fits together, but particularly last night's and tomorrow night's. So get those psychic powers going! I have to give them in some order, so whatever.

I think a couple times I've been talking, and I've used the word analysis, and I've just thrown that out without really explaining what it means. This is an example of analysis, of meditative analysis. And you'll come across that if you read certain texts. It's quite common. But again, we can analyse philosophically and logically, and that's what part of this is about. So the analysis here is using reasoning, using the logical mind, using the reasoning faculty to refute (which is a fancy word for disprove), to disprove the inherent existence of the self, of the 'I' or the self. And when we say analysis in meditation, that's what analysis means in terms of meditation on emptiness. But the key word, again, is meditation. It needs us to be able to bring what sounds like a philosophical, logical analysis -- which it actually is -- bring it into a meditative mind and use it meditatively, and out of that, the freedom comes. Just thinking about it won't do much. Just kind of playing with concepts, not going to do much, not going to bring that deep freedom and transformation.

So to remember, to go back a few -- maybe one of the first talks -- we're refuting the inherent existence of the self, and that means that there is a self that actually exists by itself, in itself, from its own side, independently in some way. That's the intuitive sense that we have of the self: it exists in its own right. So the first step of this -- it's three steps to this practice, and it can seem a little clunky at first, but as we develop it gets much easier, much smoother. The first step of the three, technically, the technical language is (1) ascertaining the object to be negated. So that sounds like a mouthful. What it really means is getting in touch with this sense of the self, getting in touch. When we look inside and we introspect and we feel the sense of self, that for the most part we feel it as something exactly that, that's inherently existing, that exists independently, by itself, somehow here. The world can do whatever it wants, but the self is still here. And getting that sense, feeling that sense of the self in that way. Does that make sense? Getting that sense of it, which is the usual, intuitive sense that human beings have of their self, actually most consciousnesses have of their selves.

There's a -- I think it was from -- I'm not sure when he died, maybe twentieth century sometime. There was an abbot called Ngawang Belden, very famous Tibetan teacher. He said if the sense of the self as inherently existing isn't actually clear, doing the analysis and meditating on the emptiness of it is a bit like shooting an arrow when you've no idea where the target is, you actually don't know what you're shooting at. The chances of success there, of actually seeing the emptiness of this thing, are not very strong. It's actually important to take a little time -- we've talked before, a few talks, about the sense of self and really getting the sense how it appears, it feels to me, for all my life, it feels to me as something independently and inherently existent.

So, and again going back quite a number of talks, it's not just that we want, in meditating on emptiness, to withdraw the sense, withdraw contact with that sense of self and kind of let everything just go fuzzy or empty, so to speak. What we're doing here is something different. We're actually aiming at something and deliberately seeing that it cannot exist the way it appears to exist, which is different than just going to sleep and not having much of a sense of self when you're in dreamless sleep or going into deep samādhi, although that's important, too. It's actually looking right at the sense of inherent self and seeing it cannot actually logically stand up as an entity.

Okay. Now, if we talk about the inherent existing of the self or disproving it, that sounds intellectual, to say the self exists inherently, like it's some philosophical postulation, that a person's saying, "I believe the self exists inherently," and someone says, "I don't believe that." What we're talking about is not on the level of logic. We're talking about in your blood, in your bones, we feel the self as inherently existent. When push comes to shove, when someone points at you in a crowd and says, "You thief!" or whatever it is, or someone threatens you, or you're angry, the sense of self is palpable in that way. But even sometimes when it gets quieter, it's still there as a sense of inherently existing. We want to get familiar with that. So I'm not talking about a philosophical position. I'm talking about a very intuitive, innate sense of the self existing that way.

In terms of this practice or this contemplation, this analysis, what it's really doing is investigating the relationship of the self and the aggregates, the khandhas -- the body, feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness. It's investigating that relationship. Now, if we think about that relationship a little bit, we don't walk around thinking -- this is actually quite important; none of this we think about. We don't naturally think of the self as, say, one with the aggregates, or among the aggregates. We don't walk around with that philosophical view. Or we don't walk around with the opposite view of it's separate from the aggregates, it's different from the aggregates. But what this analysis is doing is actually saying something different: yes, we don't walk around that way thinking that; however, if the self had inherent existence, which is what it feels to have, it would have to be either somehow one with the aggregates, or among the aggregates, or somehow separate or different from the aggregates. Okay? Now, that's quite a thing to assent to, to say, "Yes, that's true." It's quite a thing. When I first -- yeah, hopefully I'm going to explain.

Yogi 1: [?] know anything about aggregates.

Rob: Okay, aggregates are -- khandhas is the Pali word, skandhas is the Sanskrit word. It's body, feelings (the sense of feeling unpleasant, pleasant, neutral), perceptions, mental formations (can mean thoughts, intentions, etc., moods), and consciousness. Those are the five possible things that it's likely for us to identify with. We identify with the body, we identify with our moods, we identify with our thoughts, consciousness or something. Okay? So it's one possible way -- we could divide a human being into body and mind. That's a possible division. We could also divide it into five aggregates. There's many divisions we could give. There's many ways we could divide a human being, if we want to. So if I can refute this sameness or difference, meaning it's either among or it's separate from, then I must necessarily refute the inherent existence of the self, okay?

Now, when I first heard that, I couldn't swallow that. It was actually quite hard to swallow. It seemed too simplistic to me. With time, it seems less so. What this practice does is it actually fills that out. It fills that out.

Yogi 2: Can you just repeat the last bit of that? If I can refute the sameness or difference ...

Rob: Yeah, then I'm refuting the inherent existence of the self, because if the self inherently exists, it must be either among the aggregates or separate from the aggregates, the same as the aggregates or different than the aggregates. I don't expect you to be happy with what I just said. As I said, I wasn't happy with it at first. Some people might be. What I'm going to go into tonight fills it all out, okay?

Yogi 2: Is that step two, the refuting that you just mentioned?

Rob: It's half of step two. It's not quite -- because I haven't quite finished yet. Perhaps I could just finish this little thing and then ...

Yogi 3: In one of John's talks he said that Ānanda was asking about this, and he said, "Can you control this?" Is that the same thing, can you control -- is that the same dialogue in a sense?

Rob: It's maybe part of it, but it's a slightly different direction. So I have to fill this out for you to get -- most probably, most of you will not have heard a lot of this before. Especially if you're from an insight meditation background, this whole way of going about meditation, or a Zen background, this whole way of going about meditation and this particular thread of reasoning, you won't have heard before. The people that were here last year will have gone through it. But for a lot of you, it will be quite new as a whole way of approaching things, so. That splitting it into two -- it's either the same as the aggregates or separate, among the aggregates or separate -- what I'm trying to introduce tonight in terms of this chariot thing of Chandrakīrti is actually breaking that into seven, and looking at seven possible ways the self could exist. So it has a name. It's called the sevenfold reasoning. [17:12] For me, when I first got into this, I couldn't really buy what I just said, but once going into the seven reasons, it actually seemed much more -- yeah, I could get behind that a bit more. That was much more thorough. It seemed a much more thorough and convincing sort of -- which I'm going to unfold.

So this is saying, the sort of thesis or whatever it's called, is now: if the self inherently exists, it has to exist in one of these seven ways, and there aren't any other possibilities. It has to exist in one of these seven ways. And they are ... Well, Chandrakīrti was talking about a chariot, but a chariot and its parts translate as the self and the aggregates. So if I move between these two, I hope it's still clear. If it gets unclear, stop me. Chariot and parts are a kind of practice warm-up for self and aggregates, okay?

So, Chandrakīrti: "A chariot is not findable as one or some of its parts." So we could say a self is not findable as one or some of its aggregates.

Yogi 4: Is this ... sorry, I'm really lost! Is this the first step of seven, which is part of two?

Rob: No, no. Good, okay, thank you. This is -- I'm just explaining it, and I will then move onto what the second step is.

Yogi 4: So this is the first step of the seven ways?

Rob: This is part of the overview, yeah.

Yogi 5: Because you said step one was ascertaining the object to be negated.

Yogi 6: That's step one of three.

Rob: Yes. Yeah, good, thank you. I thought before the talk I'd need to explain this. So there's three steps. The third step has seven parts.

[yogis talking over each other]

Rob: I haven't said the second one. [laughter] Okay, okay, sorry. My fault. My fault. Three steps. The third ... animal, mineral ... [laughter] The third step has seven parts. Right now, I've just introduced the first step. I haven't said what the second step is, but I'm in the process of explaining it, and as part of that, I'm just going to throw out what the seven steps are. Okay? And then I'm going to go into them as part of explaining the third step in more detail.

Yogi 7: So the second step, am I right in thinking it's if I can refute the self it's either among the skandhas or not, then it can't have an inherent existence?

Rob: Yeah, okay, let's say that's the second step. But what the second step fully is is really being convinced of that. I'll repeat it from what April said. The technical language is (2) ascertaining the pervasion. This is step two. Okay? Guys, don't -- what was I going to say -- it's going to sound really complicated. It might sound really complicated, which is partly why, remember last night and remember tomorrow night. [laughter] It's actually not that complicated once you get into it, okay? But for many of you it will sound like, "Whoa, what's going on here?"

[yogis talking over each other]

Rob: Step one is ascertaining the object to be negated, which means really feeling the sense of self and how it feels like it exists inherently. You know what you're aiming at. My aim is going to be, in this exercise, to disprove that, to refute it, to see through it. Okay? That's step one. Step two is really landing in a point of real conviction -- and the conviction is necessary; we really feel absolutely -- if it inherently existed it would have to exist in one of these seven ways (which I haven't yet gone through). Okay? And that's called ascertaining the pervasion. Pervades -- it means it must pervade all these possibilities. No other possibility. But the conviction is what's important. If we don't have the conviction logically, this practice won't work. It will -- not a waste of time, but almost a waste of time.

Yogi 8: Could ascertaining the pervasion be persuading yourself that there are only these possibilities?

Rob: Yes, resting, feeling really convinced in yourself.

Yogi 8: That those are the only seven?

Rob: Those are the only seven; there's no other real possibilities.

Yogi 8: Convince yourself.

Rob: Yes, reach a point of conviction, yeah. It's a part of the warm-up to this meditation. So this meditation, because it's new to a lot of people, it will take some reflecting on -- if you're going to pick it up -- before you're kind of ready to bring it to the cushion.

Yogi 8: And then you use those seven to investigate?

Rob: Exactly. And so the second one, once you've got the practice, is just reminding yourself of that conviction and feeling that conviction. Then you're ready to go into the -- yeah?

Yogi 9: Ready for the chariot.

Rob: All right. So ...

Yogi 10: The third one is ...?

Yogi 11: Is the third one of the actual meditation ...

[yogis talking over each other]

Rob: I think it's better if I talk rather than everyone talking. It's going to be a little tricky. Just hang in there.

Yogi 12: Could we ask you questions at the end?

Rob: It might be better. I mean, it looks already like it's going to be a very long night, but it might be that I throw it out and you sit with it for a while. You might feel, like I said, you're not going to want to take this up. But if you do, you sit with it, and you think through it, and you see, and then come to me either in interviews or in a question and answer, whenever it is.

Yogi 13: It's just you said there were three steps and I haven't yet heard the three steps.

Rob: Because people keep ... [laughter] The third step is (3) going through the seven possibilities and realizing that none of them are possible.

Yogi 13: So that's different to ascertaining the pervasion?

Rob: Yes. Ascertaining the pervasion is realizing that it must be that if the self exists inherently, it must be one of those -- it must exist as one of those seven. The third step is actually going through the seven possibilities. Before I get into the seven possibilities and actually pulling them apart and seeing why they need to be that way, I just want to fill out a little bit about how this works as a meditative process. So steps one, two, and then three. What happens when we get to step three is we begin looking through these seven possibilities one by one. You look through them. And investigating and actually realizing that each one -- the self cannot be that way. It cannot be that way. And reaching the end and feeling like there's no way, if the self inherently exists, that it can exist, because we've exhausted all the possibilities and they're all wrong.

At that point, if one learns to take this up as a practice, at that point something -- well, it's actually quite remarkable -- happens. The self, the sense of self, if that's what we're contemplating (because you can also do this on other objects), the sense of self begins to kind of disappear. And in its place, a vacuity, an emptiness takes its place. So we're actually looking at the sense of self, contemplating it, and going through this reasoning. If there's conviction, etc., it actually kind of vanishes, okay? And in its place is a vacuity, when it's working. And like all practices, sometimes it works better than others. A vacuity appears.

And then one needs to focus, actually maintain the awareness on that vacuity, on that non-finding, really. But the space that opens up there, the vacuity, needs to have the meaning of the emptiness of self, okay? So sometimes meditative spaces can just become spaces with no meaning; there's just a kind of nothing, or it doesn't seem to mean anything. This space is pregnant, you could say, pervaded with an understanding of the non-inherent existence of the self. Okay? So it feels like there's nothing there, but that nothingness is actually full of meaning. It's full of meaning. So it's not just a blank. It's not just that nothing exists. It's not a kind of, "Well, we can't really know how things exist." It's not a kind of state of open perplexity, okay? It's quite incisive in its meaning.

And -- I'm just filling out, doing this before I get into the actual reasonings -- at first, this sort of emptiness of the self feels like it's over there and the mind, so to speak, is looking at it over there. But with a little bit of practice, even, or more practice, the sense of separation, the mind here and the emptiness there, begins to fade. It's almost like they begin to melt into each other. The mind and the emptiness begin to kind of melt into each other and fuse, so to speak. But still that meaning, that pregnancy of meaning of the emptiness is there. It's not a blank. It's not a kind of unconsciousness. It's not a perplexity. It's not a non-knowing. It's not an unknowing.

And the whole thing, with this kind of melting, gets less and less conceptual. Words, verbal formations, reasoning begins fading with this melting together. So we're using the logical faculty, the reasoning faculty, as a kind of avenue into the non-conceptual. Ultimately, they fuse completely together, and in the tradition they say it's like water mixed with water. You can't tell the mind separate from emptiness. Emptiness and the mind, completely fused. That's the direction this is going in.

So just outlining that for the potential way it can unfold. It's interesting, and it's particularly interesting teaching a retreat like this, because you already get a sense, we can come at emptiness from so many different angles, and a lot of them will give very different meditative flavours to the experience. Or you could say the terrain that we kind of traverse will be different depending on how we go about it. So this gives a particular flavour. Other practices -- I'll introduce a very, very non-conceptual practice on Sunday if you don't like this one, and that kind of tends to unfold a different range of experiences. Ultimately, they all converge in this water mixed with water. But they actually have quite different flavours.

Okay. So step number three, going through the actual reasonings. I was going to summarize them; I never really got that. So let's summarize them and then go through them individually. So Chandrakīrti says:

(3.1) "A chariot is not findable as" -- number one of seven -- "one or some of its parts." Okay? We could say again the self is not findable as one or some of the aggregates. Okay?

(3.2) Number two, it's not other than its parts. So a chariot is not other, it's not findable as something other than its parts. A self is not findable as something other than the aggregates. I'm going to go through these in much more detail; I'm just summarizing them right now.

Yogi 14: Would you be able to post these?

Rob: Yeah, I will. Already done it. Yeah.

(3.3) Number three, I'm going to translate number three as a chariot is not findable in its parts. A self is not findable in the aggregates.

(3.4) And the parts are not in the chariot. The parts are not in something called the chariot. This is number four. The parts are not in the chariot; the aggregates are not in something called the self. Can't find a self that the aggregates are in. Can't find a chariot that the parts of the chariot are in.

(3.5) Number five, the chariot does not possess its parts. The chariot is not the possessor of its parts. A car is not the possessor of its parts. A self is not the possessor of the aggregates.

(3.6) Number six, it's not the mere collection of its parts. The chariot is not just the collection of parts. A self is not just a collection of aggregates.

(3.7) And number seven, nor is the chariot the shape of the parts. So the self also is not the arrangement of the aggregates, either in space or time. I'll fill these out much more in detail. So we say the self is not either the shape of the aggregates or the continuum of the aggregates. It's neither the shape nor the continuum.

Okay. So let's go through these one by one.

(3.1) First one. We said a chariot is not findable as one or some of its parts. A self is not findable as one or some of its aggregates. When we look at the aggregates, or we look even at just the mind, let's say, I begin to notice, well, for instance, the mind has lots of mind states. It's many, or rather, let's say the mind states are many. And the self, as aggregates, is already many. If we just say the self is the aggregates, already it's five. And we have a feeling of the self as one. 'Aggregates,' the translation of khandha actually means 'heaps,' so each aggregate is actually a heap. There's a heap of feelings we have -- pleasant, unpleasant, pleasant, unpleasant, neutral. It's like a pile. They are many. And the sense of self we have is one. So what does that imply? That there are many selves? Which mind state is me, of this many? Either there are many selves, or all the aggregates are one.

You're going to have to grapple. Either there are many selves because I witness many mind states, or many feelings, many perceptions, etc., or all of that, aggregates, are one, are a oneness. Neither of which fit. Certainly our sense of the aggregates is not that they're all one.

Yogi 15: In other words, if there isn't five or seven, they're all one.

Rob: Yeah, and that's not really -- that's not our experience, anyway. Even just take one aggregate, it's not our experience that it's just one. Or we say, "Well, then, there are many selves." But that's not the intuitive sense of self we have. We have a sense of the self as one thing. Okay? But you can take this first reasoning, and you can go a bit deeper. All of this, I'm going to throw out stuff, and as I said, if you want to take this on, I'm actually going to talk in quite a lot of detail, but you will still have to kind of grapple with this internally to come to that second step of feeling like, "Yeah, actually yes, that is true, and I can really say yes, that's true." It takes some thinking through and some grappling with. Is that a hand up or are you scratching your ...? [laughter] Okay.

Another possibility is actually looking at each of the aggregates and saying, "Is that me?" Remember, it's not findable as one or some. "Is the me? Is that me? Is that me?" So, for instance, let's take the body, the first aggregate. Start with the body. Is the body me? Is that my self? Am I the body? If that were true, if it were true that the body is me, if I had an amputation, or a person who is an amputee, would have less self. They would actually have less self. Or every time I cut my hair, or shave, or cut my fingernails, I would be losing some of my self. So then I say maybe part of the body is my self -- which part? Westerners would usually go for the brain. I can go through even parts of the body. Am I my liver? Is that me? Am I my this part, that part? So can actually break the aggregate of the body down into sub-aggregates.

Even with the brain, though, it's interesting. We tend to associate the self, somewhere it's in the brain. But it's interesting, you know, if you know anyone with Alzheimer's and the people around them. Parts of the brain actually die, and they have a sense of, "Well, it's still them." It's still them. It's like, which part of the brain needs to die for the self to go? So actually just look at parts of the body and get a sense, "Is that me?" If we look carefully enough, it cannot be. It cannot be that the body is the self, or part of the body is the self. If the body was a self, apart from anything else, the self would be unconscious, because the body is not conscious. The mind is something else. We couldn't say, "I am thinking," because the body doesn't do that. It's the mind that does that.

If I say the mind is the self, then we couldn't say, for instance, "I ache all over," or "I kicked the football," or "He touched me," "She touched me." Tricky stuff, but one needs to really dwell on it and think through it. If I go through the aggregates, instead of just body and mind, splitting a person into two, actually splitting it into five with the aggregates, again, I could go even smaller. I could go into livers and cells and whatnot, and I won't find a self there. The atoms in the cell, that atom, that atom, is that my self? If I go to vedanā and just this tone of things being pleasant or unpleasant or in between, again, what do I see? I can't find anything that doesn't change there. Which vedanā am I? All of them change, and that's not the sense of self that I have. I notice changing, changing, changing. None of it lasts long enough to be called the self.

And none of it is actually pretty personal. So my sense of pleasantness or unpleasant in any moment has nothing personal to it when I look at it. It's actually quite impersonal. It cannot be me. So looking at the aggregates or even smaller and actually just asking, "Is that me? Is that me?", in the meditation, "Is that me? Is that me? Is that me?" Actually just that much, even without going through all seven, can bring quite a degree of -- well, I was going to say freedom, but actually can make quite an impact, let's put it that way. So doing this, one goes through the totality of what a human being could be, all the five aggregates, and be very clear, looking at each part and seeing. Every part should be clear as not the self. So if you're doing a chariot or a car, every part of it is clear as not the chariot.

If we get into things like perception, similarly they come, they go. How can that be me? They come and they disappear. And when they're not there, how could I be that? Because I still feel like me when I don't have a certain perception. The same with thoughts and moods and intentions. That leaves consciousness, which is a tricky one, and we're going to come back to consciousness a lot on this retreat and actually investigate it more. But in the teachings, 'consciousness' actually means 'knowing.' 'Knowing' is a better translation of viññāṇa than 'consciousness.' So we know this, and we know that, and we know the next thing, and these knowings -- again, they arise, and they disappear. How can it be the self? It's not personal or permanent enough.

Yogi 16: What's interesting in this is, in order to do this at all, you've got to trust a sort of investigative process. Trust must be very closely linked to this idea of the self. So in a way, I think you have no choice -- you actually are, in a way, I think, trusting something or trusting that -- I don't think it's even reasoning; it's something deeper than that, isn't it? But it's interesting. There's something there. I don't even know about process is necessarily contained in any of those seven categories.

Rob: It is, because whatever process we experience as human beings must come under the aggregates. Eventually the capacity, the power of this analysis, is actually to turn back on itself. We'll get to this later in the retreat. You actually see that the process of analysis, the process of meditation, the process of consciousness is also empty. So you're quite right, you are trusting things. One thing you're trusting is reasoning. The other thing you're trusting is the functionality of things, and a certain amount of trusting conventional sort of knowledge that we get. But that's different than trusting the inherent existence of the self. It's quite subtle. But it's based on trust, and it's trusting reasoning, as one thing that it's trusting, which is a whole issue that I'm going to talk about tomorrow night, trusting reasoning, because that's quite a charged concept in twenty-first-century Western countries.

If I look at all the parts, look at the aggregates, and I really look at them clearly, and I see, "It can't be that, it can't be that, can't be that, can't be that," and I really do this well and have a sense of doing it thoroughly, I will also feel like number six, the collection, I can't really accept that. I can't really accept that a bunch of stuff, none of which are the self, make a self somehow. So it will have a carryover effect for later on. One sees that if I just put things together that are not a self or a chariot and call it that, you can actually see -- it feels like something unreal that the mind is kind of gluing together in the mind. We'll come back to that.

So we can do this with other people, too. Let's say you're angry with someone. Who exactly am I angry with? Who am I angry with? Am I angry with their fingers? This is a really helpful meditative exercise. Am I angry at their fingers? Or am I judging their fingers? Am I angry at their, I don't know, large intestine? Or their gallbladder? Am I angry at their vedanā? Am I angry at their perceptions? Am I angry at their consciousness, their knowing, their knowing of this or that? Am I angry at that? Is it possible to be angry at that? Does it make sense to be angry at that? Usually, when we really get -- "I'm angry at their thoughts or their intentions or their moods." But again, if we go into this, those -- and we talked in other talks -- are dependent arisings. In other words, a person's intention for something is a momentary thing, and it arises dependent on the context. It's not them. What we do is we solidify a self of the person that we're angry with, and that reinforces the anger.

Yogi 17: [?]

Rob: Anger needs a target, yes. Anger needs a base or a target, exactly. And when we start seeing actually it doesn't have a target, per se, it starts draining the anger or the judgmentalism, or whatever else it is, yeah, absolutely. Okay, so that's number one. That's number one of the seven.

(3.2) Number two, a chariot is not findable other than its parts; a self is not findable separate from or different than the aggregates. If it were, if we could find a self that's somehow separate from these five aggregates, we would actually, if we mentally, in meditation, kind of shunt aside the five aggregates -- let's just put them to one side -- what's left? Is there anything left? Is there anything left, certainly, that I could call a self? Actually I shunt aside mentally in my imagination all the aggregates, nothing's left. There's nothing left.

So if it did exist as something separate, it would have to be apprehendable when I put aside the aggregates, but it's completely not. It's not found there. Sometimes it feels like the self has its own kind of basis almost outside the aggregates, but when we look for it, we cannot find it outside the aggregates. Okay? We could never apprehend it as such. We can only perceive or see or know something that is in the realm of the aggregates. Also, if it existed separately, it would be that this self that's somehow separate from consciousness and perception and feeling and form, it would actually be a complete and utter blank or non-existent thing. It wouldn't know anything. It would be completely pointless. Its existence would be completely pointless. It would be completely useless; it wouldn't be able to do anything and it wouldn't be able to know anything.

Yogi 18: I'm going to say why, but only because I'm thinking that this number two is the supposition of the Yoga Sūtras, of so many of the yogic texts, Patañjali and onwards, and I'm really struck by the chariot, the use of the chariot, because obviously that's in the Mahābhārata and so many other where you've got the jīva, the ātman, whatever, whatever particular text, they're trying to prove the existence of. You've got the driver, and then the chariot which is the senses. So yogis would say that there's not a blank and non-existent self; they would say it's part of this divine universal consciousness. Do we have a ...?

Rob: Mm-hmm, yeah, good. We're going to revisit this divine universal consciousness in a very big way during this retreat. The Buddha's teaching is any consciousness cannot be the self, any consciousness, whether it's subtle or expanded or whatever. Experientially, they're all consciousnesses that we experience and then don't experience, and experience and don't experience. Even if I say there's one big divine consciousness, I still have to look at that and say, well, is that one thing, really? Because either it doesn't know anything, in which case it's not really a consciousness, or it knows lots of things and then when it knows this it's not the consciousness that's knowing that. In other words, we postulate an entity where there's actually, you could say, separate things.

Yogi 18: It's a lot more complicated than that, isn't it?

Rob: It is a lot more ...

Yogi 18: Because, you know, if you -- I mean, the Bhagavad Gītā talks about the jīva being like a little separate seed off the global Brahman, and so I think for us just to say, "Well, that's blank," it's like ...

Rob: Okay.

Yogi 18: If we're doing a logic process, we have to be able to say ...

Rob: Sure, sure. But then you have to ask, what are the properties of that? And does it have properties that are outside the aggregates? So we could say, bearing in mind that the consciousness aggregate is knowing and perceiving of the six senses, the mind and other things, we're saying it cannot be that, okay? So if there's something outside of that, it would have to not know anything, because it wouldn't be conscious.

Yogi 18: Why would it have to know anything? My question is, why would it have to be blank?

Rob: Because it doesn't have the properties of consciousness or perception or feeling or anything like that.

Yogi 18: Couldn't we tap into it through our aggregates?

Rob: You will find that whatever we experience through the aggregates is actually part of the aggregates, because we would have to perceive this, and so that perception is then part of the aggregates, right? There's nothing I can know that's outside of the aggregates. The aggregates are the sum total of my experience. So there's nothing knowable outside of the aggregates.

Yogi 18: So, and that's the whole -- you have to perceive of something?

Rob: Perception involves perceiving of something, yeah.

Yogi 18: Okay. So you can't have perception and an object ...

Rob: Perception, by definition, if you inquire -- what does it mean to perceive? It involves something that's perceived. I'll go into this more a little bit in this talk, and later on as well.

Yogi 18: And that's where the dependent origination comes in, isn't it? Because that's the whole connection between seer and ...?

Rob: Mm-hmm, yeah.

Yogi 18: So you have to believe in that for this supposition to be ...?

Rob: Yes, yes. I'm not sure believe is the right word; you have to see that that's how it works, I would say.

Yogi 18: Yeah. Or remind yourself of it when ...

Rob: You have to remind ...

Yogi 18: Because me hearing it would be blank ...

Rob: Yes, so all of this you have to really work through to get this conviction of and actually say, "Yes, that would have to be like that," you know? What they say in Buddhist teachings is more like, such a self as you're talking about, this rider of the chariot, is actually not even the innate sense of self. Because if I say that the self exists separately from the aggregates, then what you have is something quite different from the way we usually feel about life. You have a sense of what happens to the aggregates, or a logical conclusion that what happens to the aggregates actually has nothing to do with the self. And the self that we actually care about innately, you know -- if you have a gun to someone's head, the self that they care about is somehow wrapped up with the aggregates. So what they say in Dharma teachings is this is a philosophical view of self; it's not even an innate view. It's one that's kind of offered as a philosophy. There are certain meditation experiences that we can go into that would seem to suggest something like that, and they're really, really significant and important as stepping-stones to freedom. But they're still bound up with the aggregates, and it's important to see that. Any meditation experience I have is bound up with the aggregates. We'll revisit that right at the end.

So the self that we care about, the self that I am attached to and that I look out for and I try and defend and pump up and beat up and all that is actually wrapped up with the aggregates. If I say it's something separate, the fate of the aggregates has nothing to do with the self, and that's not the sense we have of things.

Yogi 19: But ...

Rob: I'm really quite concerned about time so I think it's ...

Yogi 20: [?]

Rob: A differentiation?

Yogi 20: A differentiation to be made between just how [?] as we are here in this room and the enlightened self, a Buddha's self.

Rob: Buddhas lack inherent existence. Buddhas would be the first to say that they lack inherent existence. Absolutely. And if they say they don't, they're not a Buddha. Really, really important, yes. So we can talk about the appearance of this or that self, the manifestation of this or that quality, etc., but always lacking inherent existence.

Yogi 21: [?]

Rob: No, the Buddhas would...

Yogi 22: I couldn't hear your [yogi 21] question.

Yogi 21: Would the Buddhas not know themselves to be much more than the five khandhas even though it hasn't got inherent existence?

Rob: So we will be revisiting -- could everyone hear that? So Richard's asking would a Buddha not know themselves as much more than the five aggregates, as actually the entire universe? And again, the answer is no. So as a meditative experience, we can feel a sense of oneness, cosmic oneness, but the Buddha's very, very clear about that, I think, extremely important meditative experience, to be cultivated, to be nurtured, to be enjoyed, to let affect the heart, etc., open up love, etc., but to be gone beyond. So categorically a Buddha would say the view of oneness and oneness with the cosmos is not the right view of self, okay? So any view of self as anything inherently existent is not right.

Yogi 23: Because it comes and it goes?

Rob: Well, you can say as an experience it comes and goes. But actually more accurately -- and we'll get into this much more as the retreat goes on -- it's still a fabricated perception. So as the retreat goes on, we're going to be talking a lot about how our perceptions, whether they're everyday or deep meditative perceptions, are actually fabricated. They're fabricated by delusion, by grasping, by identification, all kinds of ways. When the consciousness opens up in a sense of oneness, it can feel like "Wow, this is the real McCoy!" But actually, it's still a fabricated perception. It takes a lot to see that. To me, that's a much deeper reason for undermining that as the self than just that it's impermanent. Because if it's impermanent, one could say, "Well, I'm dropping into a sense of ultimate reality, and then I'm dropping out of it, and all I need to do is kind of hang out there more. But I've glimpsed it," versus actually understanding, "No, I see, I'm very clear how this was built. It was a fabricated perception of oneness. We have a fabricated perception of separateness. We have a fabricated perception of whatever." But this I'm going to be explaining much, much more as the retreat goes on. To me, that's very, very significant in understanding the fullness of what emptiness means, the fabrication of perception.

Okay. So if we had this split, it would mean that the journey, the fate of the aggregates, the manifestation of the aggregates would all be irrelevant to the fate of the self, and that's not how we feel intuitively, innately. What happens to my body, mind, what happens in the realm of the senses, and memories, etc., it's all independent somehow of what happens to me, and that's not the way we feel. That's not the innate sense of self. We can postulate other philosophical selves, and there are ways of kind of refuting them, too, but just talking about the innate sense of self.

(3.3) Okay. Number three. You get different wordings of this if you end up reading different texts -- the self is not inherently dependent on the aggregates, or the self is not the base of the aggregates. I'm going to translate it as in. The self is not in the aggregates. In other words, we look in the aggregates, and you can't actually find a self.

(3.4) Let's take three and four together. Three is the self as in the aggregates, and four, as the aggregates in the self. Both of these -- so number three is like if the self is in the aggregates, it's like a person in a house. Okay? It's like the self is somehow in this -- I don't know -- thing, these unfoldings called the aggregates, and the self is somehow in there as something separate. In other words, we could knock down the house, and the person's just standing there with all the house falling around them. Similar to the second reasoning -- we could shunt aside all the aggregates, and the self would be there. So it's a variation on the second. Do you see that?

Yogi 24: Do you mean physically? Like the sense that we physically feel it inside?

Rob: That's part of our innate sense of self, that we actually --

Yogi 24: In the house?

Rob: Yes, but the house also being the mind, because we sometimes feel it in the mind, somehow in the mind, yeah. Number four is the flip of that. So there's a self and somehow this self kind of holds or contains the aggregates; somehow the aggregates are in the self. This is like when you have breakfast here. I don't know what you guys have, muesli or hazelnut crunch or whatever it is, and you put your stuff in the bowl, and somehow the self is that bowl and the aggregates are the raisins and the nuts and the oats and the milk. Those are the aggregates. Again, I could pour that out, and I'm left with the bowl. I take the house down, I'm left with a person. We've seen from number two, when I do that, I can't find anything that makes any sense. So in a way they're subtler variations of number two, they're instances of number two, of the self being separate from the aggregates.

Yogi 25: Do you mean in that sense that -- it sounds ridiculous, but -- you can't find breakfast? You can find milk and hazelnut crunch, but you can't find breakfast? [?]

Rob: All this is an example of that. All this whole thing is an example of that. Yes.

(3.5) Number five: the self does not possess the aggregates; the chariot is not the possessor of its parts. This actually also, in English, we have two ways that we kind of mean 'possess.' Someone might say, "This tree possesses a trunk," but that would be an instance of number one, because where is the tree, separate from the trunk? The tree is the trunk; it's part of the tree's being. So that would be an instance of number one, of equating parts with the thing. Okay? More often we talk about possession as like, I possess something like my mobile phone. It's actually not mine, it belongs to Gaia House, but. I possess my jeans. And if there's possession, it's an instance of, again, something that's separatable.

Yogi 26: Ownership?

Rob: Ownership, possession. Yes. The self does not own the aggregates. So like a mobile phone, I can lose it, I can put it somewhere, and my self can be somewhere else. Like my jeans, I can put them somewhere and my self is somewhere else. So it's an instance of number two, of being able to clear away the aggregates and somehow find a self. How are you guys doing? Because I could go into ...

Yogi 27: You can't leave us at this point!

Rob: I'm not going to leave you at this point. I just -- there are degrees of detail that we can go into this, and ...

Yogi 27: I'd like you to give us the gestalt and see the whole thing and then ...

Rob: You're definitely going to get the whole thing. It's just a matter of how ...

Yogi 28: [?]

Rob: How do you feel about having a break? I'm fine with that. No?

Yogi 29: [?]

Rob: Well, some people don't want to, and some people do. I've never done that in a talk before. Well, it's occurred to me. All right, let's just push through. Look, I know it's very -- let's just see if we can finish it, okay? So I'm going to leave out a chunk. It's fine. It doesn't alter the gestalt at all.

Yogi 30: Can you just explain a little bit on what you just said about possession?

Rob: Yeah. So possession, if I possess something like I possess my mobile phone or my jeans, it means that I can put that thing somewhere. I own that thing. I can put it somewhere, and I, the self, can be somewhere else. Possession is either a possession of sameness, of being (in other words, like the tree that possesses its trunk, so it's actually an instance of number one; it's a part), or possession is different, and it means that like my mobile phone or my jeans, I can put it somewhere, and the self can be somewhere else, in which case possession, as something different, becomes an instance of number two, and I can't find this something that owns the aggregates outside of the aggregates when I clear them away.

Yogi 30: Why does this come as a separate point?

Rob: As I said at the beginning, either the self is somehow the same as or among the aggregates, or different. And people were like, "Hmm." So what we're doing with this sevenfold reasoning is filling out kind of ways that the mind will hide a sense of inherent existence, and actually fleshing them out a bit more. Sometimes it feels like the self is the possessor of the aggregates, so just going into that in a bit more -- it helps the power of the whole thing, meditatively. Yeah? Does that make sense, Ollie? Okay. Like, you possess that notebook, right? We say it's Ollie's notebook.

Yogi 30: I guess what I don't quite get is why you'd ever think yourself as possessing yourself.

Rob: Is the possessor of something? Is that what you said?

Yogi 30: I mean, it's not the possession of its parts, that's what you're saying? I don't understand why that would be on the list; of course it wouldn't.

Rob: The self is the possessor? The self is not the possessor of its parts. Because that's how we feel. This is my whatever, my thoughts, my this, my that, my arms, etc. Right? Do you understand? Okay. Possessor. I'm just wondering what's okay to leave out here. I'll try to do that bit later.

(3.6) Okay, number six, the collection as a possibility, the collection. If we go to a chariot, for instance, translate that to a chariot -- I have parts, I have wheels, I have a -- do chariots have steering wheels? Whatever. [laughter] Axles. Air conditioning. [laughter] I dump all those together as a collection, it's not the thing. I just dump -- this collection is not the thing. It cannot be the thing. Same if I take my body as a thing. I'm examining the inherent existence of my body. I just dump the parts together, arms and hairs and eyes and whatnot. It's not the body, okay? Similarly with the aggregates, if I somehow just -- if it were even possible to get a collection of aggregates and just dump them in a pile somehow, that's not the self. That cannot be the self.

(3.7) Number seven, the shape. Okay? The chariot is not the shape of its parts. There's many reasons to this, but one thing that really, again, gives a sense of why it couldn't be is -- well, let's take a body. Let's take a body rather than a chariot or a self. A body. Is this body the shape of its parts? If you imagine looking at this body, my body right now, and say, okay, imagine that very slowly my ears started moving downwards, down, and finding their way towards my feet ...

Yogi 31: That's what happens as we get older. [laughter]

Rob: And my toes started moving upwards, and my eyes found their ways in different directions in the body, etc. Slowly, the shape changed. At what point -- again, this is similar -- do you say, "Now, hold on." [laughter] "Something ain't right there. There's not quite a body there." Okay?

Yogi 32: We'd just define it differently, that's all.

Rob: Well, yeah. The mind imputes it. The mind imputes it. It gives a sense of that, it gives a sense of how this is something the mind gives it. When you actually go into shape, actually see a shape -- let's take the shape of my hand. That shape is actually many shapes. It's the shape of the fingers and the thumb and the palm and the lines, all that. How many shapes is this one shape of a hand? It's actually an infinite amount of shapes. Do they all have to be there for it to be the shape of the hand, or can some be different? You get the sense, it's like shape is actually, again, the mind gives something. The mind gives it that.

Anyhow, in terms of the self and the aggregates, it's not shape that's an issue. It's shape in time, which is what we could call a continuum. It's not the spatial shape. We talk about the mind, the mind doesn't have a spatial shape. The mental aggregates -- can't give them a spatial shape. We talk about the arrangement in time, the continuum. And some even Buddhist commentaries will say the self is the continuum of the aggregates in time, that's what the self is. But there are problems here. There are problems here. This is the last one, and it's, in a way, the most subtle one in some ways. Problems. What's the problem? The past is gone. We have a continuum in time -- let's say even just a continuum of consciousness, of moments of consciousness. The past is gone. Where is it? It's gone. The future has not come. If I am the continuum, then because the past is gone and the future is gone, I can't even make something called a 'continuum' as a kind of composite. I can't make a mass of something that's gone and not yet there. If that's the self, this continuum, most of it actually doesn't even exist right now. The present moment, where is it?

We have a sense of self like my self is fully here right now. When we feel into the innate sense of self, it's like the self is here. It feels like it's all here. It's not like it's not all here right now. But if it was a continuum, most of it -- we could say 99.9999999999999 [per cent] -- is not here right now. It's not present. It can't be. It's either gone or to come. That gets even further -- if I say, "Wait a minute. That's going to be true at any moment that either was or is a present moment. So it was true at any moment in the past, and it will be true at any moment in the future, that the self is not really there." How big is the present moment? How long does it last? We're going to get into this much more. It's like meditatively sometimes really feeling the sense of the present moment as this kind of infinitely small sliver. It's actually paper-thin, paper-thin, the present moment. Very, very helpful meditatively.

Later on in the retreat, we're going to get into actually seeing that there is no present moment that's findable, either. That, too, is empty of inherent existence. But begin to see -- it cannot be the continuum, because there's no time for it. In the present, it can't be. It can't be that. And I can't build anything from it then. If we just -- not really a sidetrack, but it's like a side thought that someone might have and say, "Well, if you talk about Rob, for instance, and say, all right, but in this moment, it may not be that Rob is exhibiting his defining characteristics. Somehow, you might be a continuum, but in this moment, maybe you're just sitting meditating or whatever, you're not defining your characteristics right now, but the self is still there because it has the potential to do that." We might feel something like that. And that potential is kind of a property of the continuum somehow, which is fair enough. However, we talked in the past -- what I exhibit, the traits, the characteristics, the actions I exhibit, are also dependent. They're a dependent arising, dependent on the situation, the environment, the past and all that. None of that exists, either, in an independent way.

Not proofs, but a few things to think about. If it was the continuum in time, the self was the continuum of moments of consciousness in time and that was the true nature of the self, would it then be that I would have to have experiences in a certain order to still feel like I was the self? A continuum is an arrangement in time. It's not a proof, but it begins to suggest something. Would I still be me if I had two kind of very insignificant experiences in the reverse order?

Yogi 33: What do you mean, like if time was...

Rob: No, if I was saying, like, I make this sound [clicks], and I make this sound [trilling sound], and if it was a continuum, my self would actually be dependent on the ordering that that happened in. But that's not the sense. I feel the same whether one happens first or the other happens first. It's not a proof; it's just something that's suggesting of it can't quite be. A continuum is actually a manyness, it's a manifoldness. We say it's a continuum like it's one thing. Again, we have a sense of the self as one thing. But it's actually many things, a continuum is necessarily a collection of many.

Yogi 33: [?] linear

Rob: No, a linear collection of many. In other words, that's what a continuum is -- it's a collection of many things, many instances, many moments, you could say. Oh, I see what you're trying to say -- as an unbroken linearity.

Yogi 34: Linear in time?

Rob: Linear in time. A continuum is linear in time. But I think April's asking, is it unbroken like that? Well, the fact is that we do chunk it in terms of experiences, and so it is actually divisible that way, and then it becomes a manyness. The self, again, we feel as a oneness, not as a manyness. Let's push on and finish.

Yogi 35: John is stressing that Buddhism is not saying that the self doesn't exist or does exist, but that it's a process. How is that ...

Rob: I would also say -- maybe a slight difference there. I would say the self doesn't exist inherently as a process, either, because -- I'll come to this right at the end -- sometimes we think, "Okay, the self is a process, but that process really exists, or the elements that make up that process really exist," and that's part of a subtle place that the delusion will hide a sense of self. But it's very subtle. It's much more subtle than the usual, but to me that's not quite full enough yet. We have to see that the process doesn't inherently exist and the elements that make up the process don't inherently exist. I will touch this at the end.

Yogi 35: Unlike him, you stick your neck out to say specifically there is no self?

Rob: No, I would say there's no inherently existing self. I would say the self is a dependent arising, and it exists conventionally, is able to function, but it has no inherent existence. It's quite a thing to understand what that means, that it can appear and be here and function and we can feel it, but it doesn't inherently exist. It's a journey of understanding, this whole emptiness business, and we swing by going too far into kind of nihilism, "It doesn't exist," or not enough, actually, not quite enough, and actually just refuting it a little bit, and it's not quite full enough to bring the full freedom. So the journey, to me, there's kind of a swing involved between those two.

Yogi 36: I don't think that's exactly John's view, though. I don't think he'd say ...

Yogi 37: He's saying 'no thing'-ness.

Rob: Good, so yeah, in other words, a thing, process, is not findable as an inherently existing entity, and neither are the elements that make up the process. That's quite important. We'll talk a lot as the retreat goes on, getting to that degree of thoroughness of unfindability.

Yogi 38: When you say about -- sorry, this is really quick -- having to get a balance between nihilism and [?], isn't it actually that when you're awakened you see both? It's not like finding a pinpoint on that spectrum, it's that you can actually behold the existence that most of us see, and then non-existence?

Rob: Yes, but I wouldn't call that -- let's just say yes. Yeah. But reaching that place, one will swing. Most people will swing. Yeah. All right. So last piece here about this, filling the seventh out. If the self is the continuum of the aggregates, remember we said the aggregates are actually the totality of experience. So it then means that the self is not independent of experience. It's not independent from the totality of experience. It's not separate from experience. So when we perceive -- perception is an experience, but it involves the world, it involves the "out there," and if I say it's a continuum of the aggregates, the aggregates actually involve this kind of what we could call an 'interface' with the world. Now, the felt sense of 'I' is that it does exist independently, and it doesn't matter what experiences I have. Maybe we pick out a few significant experiences in our life and say, "That was really significant in building me, and that was," but actually it would have to involve all of them, all the most insignificant details.

But even more deeply, the present moment of knowing anything, of any experience -- how to say this -- the consciousness is not separate from what is known. So every time we know, there's like two sides of a coin here. There's the knowing and the subject we could call 'consciousness,' and the what is known, and they go together. So it means that if the self is the continuum of aggregates, it's actually not findable as something separate from any experience or anything else in the totality. The sense we have is of something separate and of something that's independent of all that.

Any time there's knowing, there's a known. Going back to what April asked before, is it possible -- I think it was April -- that we have perception without perceiving or a perceiver in that moment? Is it possible that I can find any of these separately? Are they the same? So they're not the same; the perceiver is not the perceived. But they're also not separate. I cannot find them separate. There's an unfindability here, an unseparability here. There's nothing actually separate. The mind and the world are not separate. The past and the future are not separate. Does that make sense if I say that, that they're kind of two sides ...? No? Implicit in the aggregates is this kind of non-separateness of the self and the world. If I'm saying it's a continuum, I'm actually assenting to a kind of non-separateness, and that's not the innate sense of self that we have. We have a sense of a self that's somehow independent: "This could happen to me, or that could happen to me." We begin to see, I can't actually find the dividing line between this self and the world, the totality of the universe.

Okay. Those are the seven, and like I said, quite a project, but if you decide to take it on, either on this retreat or in the future, you're going to have to think through them for yourself and kind of really grapple a little bit and reach a point of -- and even find your own reasonings why it doesn't work out. That's fine to do.

Yogi 39: Sorry, maybe this -- what's the point? [laughter] Sorry. Why?

Rob: No, no, of course. Why? Because, going back to the first talk, why do we suffer? The thesis of all this, all this whole retreat, is we suffer because we feel that the self has an inherent existence, and things, too, have an inherent existence. And we need to see that that is delusion, that that's not true, that it cannot possibly be true. When we do, and we're able to really see that and feel the impact of that, it frees us. That's the point.

Yogi 39: But we're starting with a -- it's a kind of a tautological thing, we're starting with it's not going to -- go through these steps to prove what we began knowing which is that there is no self.

Rob: Oh, okay, but like I said at the beginning ...

Yogi 39: I don't know if I'm saying ...

Rob: Okay, well, let me say something. Like I said right at the beginning, I think I began this talk with it's easy to say there is no self. Anyone can say that. Anyone can say that. It's easy to say the self ultimately is an illusion, therefore let go. The real juice of the whole thing, the real marrow of the whole thing is, can I know that here in a way that frees me? So how do I move from this statement, which some people would believe, some people would turn their noses up, some people would argue with, that the self is an illusion -- how do I move from that as a statement, as an intellectual statement, to actually a heartfelt truth? That's the journey, and this is one way, one way of filling that journey. Without that journey, the whole thing is just like -- well, what would be the point of that? What would be the point of just saying that the self is an illusion and not actually really digesting that deeply at a cellular level? That would be kind of pointless.

So this is, as I said, take it or leave it, for all of you. But this is one way that can go very deep, actually really letting that understanding penetrate deeply. So the way this is working is, the unfindability in any of these ways implies lack of inherent existence. It doesn't imply that the self doesn't exist; it implies that it doesn't exist inherently.

Yogi 40: So that's the key.

Rob: Very key, very key, yeah.

Yogi 40: That it has inherent existence, that's the illusion.

Rob: That's the illusion, yeah.

Yogi 40: [?], they just don't have inherent existence.

Rob: Yeah. I'm going to -- this is the thing that's really difficult to understand. It's like, what exactly are we refuting when we say "inherent existence"? It's this sense that something exists somehow independently, from its own side, independent of the way of looking at it, etc. That's actually quite subtle, to see that that's what's being refuted here. And it's really a journey to understand that deeply, I feel. That's why the last talk, I will be talking exactly about that balance. To say something we've already said, sometimes a person says, "Okay, you're basically saying the self doesn't exist at all, that nothing exists at all," and that's not what's being said. That would be going over into nihilism. But a common mistake is to say, "It's okay, all we're refuting is the inherent existence of things, therefore just carry on as you are," and we're back in the normal, default -- that's the danger. So this is -- I call it a razor's edge; it's such a fine line of subtlety, of kind of penetrating and understanding. We will fall both ways. Also, as I'll say later in a talk, we will find a tendency to fall one way or another. But we can have too much caution with this. I'll talk about this later.

Yogi 41: Can I just say -- inherent existence as in independent and separate?

Rob: Independent, separate, existing by itself.

Yogi 41: [?]

Rob: Yeah, you could say that, but careful that emptiness doesn't end up just sounding like oneness. Okay? So if I say "not separate," there's a way that we can just -- oneness is great, very important, but it's at best a stepping-stone onto an understanding of emptiness. So yes, it's true, I don't exist separately from the rest of the universe. But there's more to it than that. Particularly -- and this goes back to the first talk (and again, I keep wishing I could say everything at once and keep reminding you; it's impossible) -- to me, what it means to say "empty" is to realize that the mind is actually doing something when it perceives anything, self or anything, and it has a way of creating a kind of experience as if things existed by themselves, in themselves, of themselves, over there somehow, independently of the way that the mind is looking at or conceiving of them or perceiving them. So that's the fuller meaning of what emptiness means.

Can I just -- is it okay if I finish? Sometimes a person says, "Well, it could be all of the seven." But all of the seven implies that inherently, it's not this or that. And again, when does it shift between the seven dependent on the way the mind is looking -- which is another way of saying it's not this or that in itself; it's dependent on the mind; it's empty. So as I said when I was outlining the sort of meditative procedure, first you have to actually think through all this stuff. It has to sit with you good, and then you feel like it's portable, and you're able to take it into the meditation and actually use it meditatively. Then this vacuity will open up, if it's going well, and you kind of focus on that, you stay steady on that, with its meaning: the meaning of this unfindability as meaning the lack of inherent existence.

If you get into this practice, whether it's on this retreat or later in your life, whatever, what tends to happen is at a certain point, obviously, you can come out of the meditation -- it's almost like you can let the vacuity disappear, and the sense of self reappear, and it reappears with a sense of inherent existence, and then it's almost like it reappears but it's qualified by your understanding, by your seeing that it's empty. It's almost like, "Ooo, that's interesting. It looks like it's inherently existing, it feels like it's inherently existing, but I'm actually really knowing and holding that knowledge that it appears as inherent existence, and I know it's not." And that's a very important stage too.

When you're in the meditation on this, again, if it goes quite deep and there's that sort of vacuity, we have to keep remembering this meaning, keep remembering the meaning of emptiness. It takes, you know, I can't rush through this. In time you actually can go really quite quickly through this because you've absorbed it, but we have to take our time and really make it work. When you're in the meditation and the mind wobbles or loses that sense of feeling like it's lacking inherent existence, you can bring in a bit of reasoning. It's like stoking the fire. You're just turning over the embers, and you get that conviction again.

So we're not, in this kind of practice -- again, this is a subtle point -- but we're not actually looking for something called 'emptiness.' We're looking for the inherent existence of something, and then realizing that we can't find it. We're feeling that inherent existence (step number one), and then feeling the emptiness of it, really letting that impact on the being. So this is a picture of one kind of analysis, and they talk about balancing this analysis with samādhi, so getting the mind calm and then doing the analysis, and the mind calm and the analysis. At a certain point, when this gets really humming, the actual analysis itself starts to drop the whole being into quite a deep state of samādhi, because, like we talked about, insight leads to samādhi sometimes. And then that's quite -- to benefit from that, you don't need to keep going back to the samādhi.

Yogi 42: It's all so -- where's the difference between the meditation on emptiness and the samādhi?

Rob: At a certain point, they fuse.

Yogi 42: Okay.

Rob: They fuse. In other words, the very meditation on that emptiness starts to bring the same kind of joy that you would get in the samādhi, and the mind kind of really locks in on it, as well. They become one, actually. They talk about, in the Gelug tradition that you're from, they talk about the union of -- what's the -- I've forgotten what the phrase is, but it's a special insight, it's that coming together. Yeah.

Yogi 43: When you're moving from the innate sense of self and then the analysis, do you hold the innate sense of self like you'd hold the body sense? Is it not held while [?] ...

Rob: Yeah, I would have it first, get it really clear, and then hold it sometimes, but you'll find that it can still carry over, the meaning of what you're doing, even when you're not ... It's on tap, exactly. And you can just refresh yourself of it at times, yeah, yeah. But you'll find that actually you can sometimes do it letting go of that, sometimes. Probably in strict textbooks, they'll say no, but actually you can get away with it.

Now, this we can do to anything -- not just selves, but absolutely anything, any object, any phenomenon, any situation. It's that same thing. It will not be findable as any of these seven options. Same possibility. If -- and again, I'm just filling this out for the future -- at some point in your life you really take this particular avenue up, what you find is if you really go deeply into the emptiness of the self, really deeply, it actually has, in that pregnancy of meaning, it actually has the emptiness of all things, all things. It's like to see the emptiness of one thing is to see the emptiness of all things deeply. But it's also something as a practice we can do to this and that, and practise on the self, practise it on another, practise it on a retreat, this or that thing that feels like it has inherent existence.

So as I said, and Ollie was wondering what John meant when he said, it's not that we're arriving at a view of the self as some kind of -- it's not like we want to get to some place where we're viewing the self as actually truly some kind of mechanistic process, and we're reducing it to its elements and that's the true self. We're actually going beyond that too. And if I go deeply enough into emptiness, I see that those elements and that process, too, is empty. As I said right at the beginning -- this is the final thing -- you can shelve it, you can ignore it, you can save it for later, you can take it up now, as you like. I'm not really bothered. But there is a way, in time, that all these practices and angles that we'll be going through and approaches that we'll be going through on this retreat tend to fill each other out. They're like a jigsaw, and they give life to each other and more sort of power and profundity to each other. They reinforce each other and fill out each other's meaning.

Yogi 44: You just start with one bit of it?

Rob: Yes. In fact, last year was quite interesting for me teaching this, because last year was the first time I'd ever taught this to anyone, and people were getting quite a lot out of just doing the first one, just kind of looking at aggregates like, "Is that me? Is that me?" So that will open up already quite a bit of "ooo," you know? So by all means, yeah. But it's weird -- you know, I know it sounds complicated and sounds like a lot; it might be actually less than you think to do the whole thing. But by all means, just start with like the first one.

Yogi 45: The first stage?

Rob: The first of the -- well, the first stage certainly, but the first of the reasonings as well, and just kind of look: is that me? Is that me? Is that me? Is that me? Is that me? And see what that does.

Yogi 46: Is stage two formally meditating [?] ...

Rob: If I'm doing it, I always check in that that conviction is there. If I'm doing it as a meditation, I just really check that that conviction is there, because as I'll talk tomorrow night, we ...

Yogi 47: Sorry, the conviction that we have an innate ...

Rob: No, the conviction that if we had an inherently existing self, it would have to exist in one of these ways. So that's a kind of -- it's throwing your lot in, throwing your dice in with the logical process. Now, there's a whole lot about that that we, or many here in this room, would feel like, "I don't know about that." Even if we're all for logic, we still feel a little hesitant at that point. It's a big commitment. It feels like, "Well, I believe, all right, but it still feels a lot to say." So it's good to check in meditatively with that.

Yogi 48: Does it become a self-fulfilling prophecy?

Rob: What?

Yogi 48: If you throw your lot or your dice in, say I'm believing that to begin with, then everything that follows becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy in the sense that if you say I believed it to begin with, I go through these steps, I'm going to come out believing it because I said I believed it to begin with.

Rob: I'm not sure I follow. What are you coming out believing?

Yogi 48: That the self is -- that there's no inherent existence.

Rob: But that's not what you start believing. When Ryan asked what's step number two, what's the conviction there, it's not that there isn't an inherently existing self; it's that if there was, it would have to exist in one of these ways.

Yogi 49: It's qualified. The conviction is you're qualifying it by saying that if there was an innate sense of self, it would be found in one of those...

Rob: It would have to be. It exhausts all the possibilities.

[yogis talking over each other]

Rob: So all this, I'm aware, we've just gone through, I've just been trying to be as logical as possible, as clear as possible, so it feels like, "Pfff." I mean, for some of you, you'll be just thinking, "Get me out of here. This is a nightmare of kind of logic." But actually we're talking about really -- this is a very powerful meditation. I have to say, you know, my root tradition is insight meditation. A lot of emphasis there on non-thinking, similar to Zen. So I would read about some of this stuff, and I just kept it at arm's bay for quite a while, and then for some reason I started doing it and was quite surprised at its power. And you're talking about a real felt sense. So we have, as I said at the beginning, we don't walk around with a philosophy about the self -- "This is my philosophy about the self" -- most of us. We're talking about a gut feeling of the self, and that gut feeling turns out to be wrong. So in this way we go through a logical process to have a gut feeling of its emptiness, and there's a real feeling with that. When you go through these and you really see it's empty, it will bring an emotional reaction. Now, it could be fear or sadness as we talked about, bereftness as we talked about last night, but it could be joy and wonder and freedom and all of that. It's an emotional thing that we're talking about. We're just using the logic to get through it.

But in terms of self-fulfilling prophecy, no, because they're different things that we put in there. One is a faith in logic and the other is taking the consequences of that faith. So it's not that we've decided something at first, not that at all.

Yogi 50: Where is this practice from?

Rob: Well, the original place, as far as I'm aware, the original place it gets really discussed is in Chandrakīrti's text called the Madhyamakāvatāra, which is loosely translated as something like Supplement to the Middle Way, or Entrance to the Middle Way, something like that, from the seventh century. And then picked up for the most part nowadays by the Gelug Tibetan tradition as quite a central practice of their way of seeing the emptiness of self. Outside of that, I don't really know that many people do it, outside of that tradition. So someone like the Dalai Lama would be doing this a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot. It would be one of his main, main practices, really going into this. And it's interesting, if you pick up, like the Dalai Lama, you can roughly divide his books in two: there are the very, very popular ones where he just talks about kindness and everyone should be nice to each other, and then there are the ones that almost no one reads because they're going into this kind of logic. He has a brilliant mind, brilliant mind philosophically and logically, a very, very smart guy. And he's been trained, you know, years and years of this kind of philosophy and this analysis, and they debate, and they go into it. So another half of his books are all about that, and quite rigorous on that front, and much less selling, you know. [laughter] But yeah. The Gelug, as far as I know; I don't know outside of that that really goes through it.

Yogi 51: It's also like a kind of koan in a way, isn't it? You're trying to find out who you really are. The more you look, the less you can find, and you come to a point of intellectual exhaustion, really, which is like [?]. At least as teenagers, we try to work out who the hell we are ...

Rob: I'm going to talk about this tomorrow night -- I've never practised much at all in the Zen tradition; my understanding, though, is actually it's not the same. It's something different. I'll talk more about this tomorrow night. What we're doing here is reaching a place of absolute clarity and knowing that something is empty, which is different than kind of throwing our hands up in the air and saying we can't know or it's unknowable or something like that. So as far as I understand, they're actually quite -- well, if you don't mind, I would like to address it tomorrow night, because it's part of a whole ...

Yogi 51: Okay. In a koan, you don't throw up your hands in the air. You get to a place where you get to the bottom of the self, really, where you are emptiness.

Rob: Okay. I don't know enough about it, but ...

Yogi 51: There's much more of a struggle involved.

Rob: Like I said, I don't know enough about it, but it might be that. What I really want to be clear about here is that we reach a point of kind of knowing something. And because of the conviction, step two, that knowing has a real force to it. It's like, we really know something, and we know the lack of inherent existence of the self or anything else. We know the emptiness. And it's that clarity and penetration of the knowing that really is the power of this particular practice, which is -- as I said, there are many, many approaches to emptiness, and this is one particular way of going about it, different than what we've done so far and maybe other ones.

Yogi 52: We're proving it to ourselves.

Rob: Yeah, it's a proof. Exactly. Yeah, exactly.

Yogi 52: Whereas a koan short-circuits [?].

Rob: Yes, exactly. Now, some people say that what Nāgārjuna, who first really sort of began amplifying all the teachings on emptiness, what he's actually saying is you can't trust your thinking mind, and that's what emptiness is saying. That's actually not correct. If you read Nāgārjuna, again, brilliant, brilliant mind. I mean, unbelievably sharp intellect. And what he's doing is using the logical mind to prove that things can't exist inherently, which is a different thing to saying, "Reasoning is a waste of time," which sometimes people present as the teachings of emptiness. So you put it very well, Ollie. It's exactly that. It's really having that. Yeah.

Yogi 53: At the end of the day, it's what works for you, isn't it?

Rob: Absolutely. Yeah. So we're just throwing something out. But again, I would say, absolutely, what works for you, and as I said right at the beginning of the retreat, throwing lots of things out, find what works for you. The thing is, don't underestimate the incredible tenacity and power of delusion to find levels that things still inherently exist, okay? So whatever we're doing, we have to make sure it thoroughly cleans out any possibility of inherent existence anywhere. Sometimes we'll have a feeling that something works for us, but it's actually not gone as fully deeply. I've heard some people say, and I actually wonder whether it's a good thing, to actually sometimes practise in ways we don't feel like practising, because maybe that will illuminate a corner that we otherwise wouldn't illuminate. So there's a kind of balance there between yeah, following what works, and really flushing out the habit of the mind, of delusion, to keep giving something inherent existence. It will keep giving -- even when we say to someone, "But I don't feel like I'm giving anything inherent existence," unless we absolutely see that it's empty of inherent existence, you can pretty much safely assume that delusion is finding some way. We might not consciously realize it, but delusion is finding some way to give something inherent existence. And that, yeah, I would ...

Yogi 54: In your opinion, is it -- this seems a very profound meditation, and is it safe for anyone, any stage of that practice ...

Rob: Thank you, yeah, okay. So this again goes back to the opening talk and the talk on samādhi. I feel all of this is safe. I really do. One thing is the samādhi and the mettā practices, and they really, as I said before, they really act as cushions. I'm not sure how it works -- maybe Virginia knows better -- but if Gelug practitioners actually kind of warm up on chariots and cars and things like that, and actually get used to it, and then when they're ready begin the self. I would feel that actually you're all, everyone in here, is totally fine doing it on themselves, helped by the samādhi, helped by the practices already that we're -- as I said, when there's samādhi, when there's mettā, when there's letting go, basically the self is getting quieter, so we're getting more and more familiar with letting go of the self, rather than jumping from full-on self to zero. Even this practice, it's unlikely that it's going to kind of zap your self first go off, you know? Who knows? But there's a way that it's cushioned. Everyone in here has some pretty solid mental health ... so far. [laughter] So I'm not really concerned about anyone. And you will find some freedom opening up. And it may bring up some fear, but you can find fear comes up through samādhi practice, through anattā practice, through letting go, you know? It's par for the course for 99.9 per cent of meditators sometimes, and it's okay. It's fine. It's really fine. But yes, it's safe.

Yogi 55: This is part of what you said last night, I guess, about stretching and experimenting.

Rob: It can be, but I really don't want you to feel like you have to do this practice ...

Yogi 55: [?]

Rob: It could be, it could be, yeah, and actually keeping it alive, and yeah, it could be part of that. Yes.

Yogi 56: Is there a way to know that you've exhausted all the possibilities for delusion not to be hiding somewhere?

Rob: Yeah, a very important question.

Yogi 56: Because it seems to me, I can see myself not quite sure I've exhausted ...

Rob: I wouldn't worry about it right now. As the retreat goes on, we'll unfold where delusion can be hiding. The way I go about this retreat (and it's hard for you to see it right now, but it relates to something I said in one of the early talks) is I divide the emptiness up into emptiness of the personal self -- so far, most of what I've talked about, not all, but most of what I've talked about is dealing with that, emptiness of the personal self -- and then there's emptiness of phenomena, 'phenomena' meaning experiences and chairs and cushions but also vedanā and perceptions and consciousness. So they, too, are not just empty of being owned by someone, they're also empty in and of themselves. They, too, lack inherent existence. And like we said with the anattā practice, it has a spectrum of subtlety. That, too, has a spectrum of subtlety. I think it's fair to say one of the last, one of the most subtle places that delusion can hide is giving inherent existence to awareness. We tend to feel like, "Well, awareness must exist, otherwise nothing would exist," or time, or the more sort of taken-for-granted aspects of human existence. But we will get to that. We will get to that. Hopefully by the end of the retreat you'll have a sense of any possibility where it could be. Hopefully. [laughter]

Okay. So ... it's 9:33. [laughs] Let's be quiet together for a bit now.