Freeing the Self

Okay, so there are a few things I'd like to just go into a little bit tonight. The first is really just spending, I hope, five minutes on kind of placing what we're doing on this retreat, and the territory that we'll be exploring, placing that in a map conceptually. But really just too brief -- five minutes just on that. And then going into a couple of things that are more immediately practically relevant for our practice.

So if one had to sum up the Dharma in a nutshell, the teachings of the Buddha in a nutshell, very simply, how often he talked, of course, about the Four Noble Truths, and the first truth: there is suffering. You know, we suffer. There is dissatisfaction, dis-ease. And the second truth: there is a cause for that. And then it's possible to be free of that. And there are ways to engender that freedom.

Now, that second truth, the cause of suffering, usually the Buddha would give a shorthand answer, which is: the cause of suffering is taṇhā, is craving or clinging. But when he gave a longer answer, what he really said was words to the effect of, "Okay, we suffer because we cling, we crave. Why do we crave? We crave because we misunderstand. We misunderstand the nature of existence. We misunderstand, we misperceive, even how and what and who we are, and how the world is." Based on that misunderstanding -- it seems so obvious to us that life is a certain way, existence is a certain way: "I am like ... You are like ... You are. I am," really, for a start. There is this world that we live, and we're born, and we live, and we die in. All of that seems so obvious. There's space, and there's time, and there are floors, and carpets, and walls, and people, and this event, and that event, and I move through it in time -- all of that. We take it all for granted. It seems so obvious. That's what we perceive. That's what we sense.

And the Buddha says: right there, there's a misunderstanding. It's not real in the way that we feel, intuitively, that it's real. There's some fundamental misunderstanding about existence. We say, actually, all that is not real. In another language, it's empty. It's empty of that kind of seemingly independent reality -- it seems to exist in and of itself, by itself. And we don't see that. We don't understand that. We don't see the emptiness of things, that they don't exist outside of the mind. The mind, too, does not exist really independently. Because of that, we cling, and we crave, and we reject, and we long, and we get upset about this or that, and we fear -- all of that. Because of all that comes all that craving. Because of all that craving comes all that suffering.

And that's the Dharma in a nutshell. And what we can do is actually understand differently, penetrate -- our understanding can penetrate the nature of reality in a way that this misunderstanding is dissolved. And out of that, the suffering dissolves. Through that, the suffering dissolves, so that this world of saṃsāra and all these appearances actually -- in some Dharma language -- gets transformed. Saṃsāra and nirvāṇa -- nirvāṇa becomes what is revealed.

Okay. Now, that was very brief. And you might say, "Well, I don't understand that." [laughs] And someone yesterday, when we were doing the inquiry, said in response to the word emptiness, "perplexed." Now, oftentimes, that was the Buddha's situation, as well, that a lot of people were perplexed by that kind of language. So he actually avoided it, in fact. He avoided it and he didn't go there. He said at one point to a seeker called Kaccāyana, he said, "You know, it's hard to talk about this stuff, because most people think and feel in terms of either 'the self or the world exists' or 'it doesn't exist.'" And he said, "I, as the Buddha, don't conceive in terms of the extreme of 'exist' or the extreme of 'not exist.' I'm in the middle, the Middle Way."^[1] And that's what they call emptiness or dependent origination. So sometimes he said that. But there was the sense that most people couldn't kind of tolerate this seeming paradox. It's either something exists, or it doesn't exist. Either there is a self, or there isn't a self. Either there is a world, or there isn't a world. Either time is real, or it's not real. [5:50]

So mostly he just avoided, the historical Buddha, he just avoided those questions. And he taught more about practice. And he said if you practise in this way, you can see that when you have a certain self-view, or when you identify in a certain way with different aspects of your experience, you're going to suffer. You can see that. And you can start to see that really deeply and subtly. And through that seeing and learning to let go of the identification, this understanding of what I'm talking about will come. It will come. So rather than intellectually trying to figure out, "What does that mean? It exists, but it doesn't exist, and all this," it's actually going through the practice, learning to see: where I hold the self too tightly, I'm going to suffer. And understanding that through practice, letting it go, the understanding, the fullness of the understanding comes. So that's actually the approach we're going to take on this retreat. It's that we're developing certain practices of letting go that will move towards that fullness and that depth of understanding.

In the tradition, especially the later tradition, they talk about two selflessnesses. 'Selflessness' is another word for 'emptiness,' so two emptinesses. And it's actually, everything is empty in the same way, but they talk about emptiness of the personal self, and the emptiness of phenomena -- in other words, the emptiness of things like objects in the world, or things like space or time or an emotion or awareness, things that we take for granted. So there's the emptiness of the self, and the emptiness of everything else, which is phenomena. This retreat will be just about the emptiness of self. That's where we're going. So I'm just kind of laying that out. We're mostly talking about that, because that's usually easier to get into for people.

We're going to explore: what does it mean that this self is empty? What does that mean? How can I understand that? In a way, you could, if you want -- this is an artificial distinction, as the other one is, but you could split it into two levels: personality level, and what I might call existential level. I'll explain what I mean. So I might have, you ask me about my self, or I ask someone about their self, and they say, "I'm an angry person," or "My personality is like this. I'm a loser. I'm the one who can't do anything. I'm weak. I'm a failure. I'm this. I'm that." [8:44] There's a way that the personality is defined in a certain way, and that's defined tightly and problematically, and it brings suffering. I'll go into this more later in this talk. So that's what I mean, personality level.

But then there are deeper levels, you could say, more subtle levels of identification. So for instance, saying something like, "I'm not the personality, but I'm awareness," or "I am the body," or "There's some kind of mysterious essence in here that owns all my thoughts" or something, that's what I would call a deeper, more subtle identification, the existential level. It's not so much about the personality level.

So one is a kind of, you could say, a little bit of a more gross identification. One's a bit more subtle. Yesterday, when we did, in the opening session, we did that little inquiry, and Catherine was saying "What's your response when I say the word 'emptiness'?" it was interesting to see and hear the different responses. And for some people, or for some people at some times, just the word emptiness, we hear a talk or teachings, or you read something, and there's this sense of freedom, comes in the heart, like a flower blossoming in the heart. There's a sense of the possibility there. One might not even understand what it means, but something in us intuits something, and the heart quickens. And there's a sense there, excitement, a sense of the beauty of something, a sense of the mystery of something.

Sometimes the heart feels touched. And again, I might not even know what the person is talking about, or exactly what I'm reading. But something in me feels touched by it, even though I don't understand. Something -- a sense of awesomeness, someone said vastness. And if and when that's the case, that's great, that's lovely, that's beautiful, no problem.

But sometimes, people teach about emptiness, and they teach it as a teaching of disappointment, that to realize the emptiness of things is to have your balloon popped of everything that you think is lovely and meaningful and deep and poetic and beautiful in life. [11:30] And so emptiness becomes a teaching of disappointment. It's like, "You know what? Saying things are empty means it's just kind of grim, get on with it, basic reality, put your nose to the grindstone and get on with it, and stop trying to paint everything nice."

Catherine: Who does that?

Rob: I'm not mentioning any names. [laughter] So I really feel that's wrong. That's wrong. That's a misunderstanding of where this is going. There's a real beauty here to be discovered, something really profound -- profoundly mysterious, and mystical to uncover. And of course, as we saw in the inquiry last night, and we heard in the inquiry last night, sometimes it triggers the other responses. So you hear that word emptiness -- and there's a problem in the English language, as well, so emptiness, and immediately there's a sense of kind of barrenness, something bereft or bleak in the heart. It goes grey. Or it triggers a sense of lack: "Emptiness. I don't have anything there." It triggers those responses: cold, loveless somehow, loneliness.

People have told me, sometimes even they're just listening to a talk about emptiness or a part of a talk that's about, say, the emptiness of self, or no-self, or something. And they're gripped by intense fear, fear of annihilation. And I ask them about it, and they say it's like fear of death. And I can see, you know, talking in different, teaching in different situations, and people start scratching and looking out the window, and eyes darting around furtively and stuff. And a person telling me, "When you say stuff like that, when I hear stuff like that, it brings up a fear of death, fear of annihilation, even just hearing about it."

So really important. I'll throw this in now: we're absolutely not trying to annihilate the self, get rid of it, smudge it out of existence, destroy it, blow it up, or anything like that. We want to understand the self. It's in that, through that understanding, that freedom comes. We're not getting rid of it. We're understanding its nature, its true nature -- very important distinction.

Sometimes a person, people tell me, "When I hear about emptiness, when I read about emptiness, it seems to imply that everything is meaningless. Everything is pointless. What's the point if there's no self here? What's the point? If nothing really exists, what's the point of anything?" So I feel, rather than jump to this concept of, like, "everything is empty," and then trying to get one's head around that, if it doesn't resonate, if there's ambivalence around that, better to take it gradually, very gradually. So for example, the way we define our self, the ways we define our self on a personality level: "I'm bad. Deep down there's something bad in me. Maybe someone will find out. Maybe they already sense it. I'm hopeless. I'm a kind of hopeless case. I've tried this. I've tried that. But basically I'm hopeless. That's how I am."

So these are negative self-definitions. They're quite intense, very painful negative self-definitions we're talking about. And can you, if you have this sense of ambivalence around the teaching of emptiness, can you even just entertain the possibility that you see those kind of self-definitions as illusions? You actually see this thought that I'm bad inside, there's something rotten in me, this thought that I'm hopeless, this thought that I'm like this, or like that -- you actually see, "Gosh, it's not true. It's actually not true." And seeing that would be a relief, would obviously be a relief.

We can begin to see, with these kind of self-definitions -- we can make a whole long list of these kind of self-definitions. We can begin to see, when I look carefully, I see that however I define myself on the personality level, it is not, it cannot always be the case. It can't always be the case. There will be times when that's just not true. That's not what's manifesting. It's not really the case. If it was really true, it would always be true. When I see that, when I start to see that it's not always true, a sense of freedom comes. A sense of openness comes. A sense of relief comes. Release comes. That's the taste of freedom. That's the mark of insight: relief and release. When I puncture these tight self-definitions, particularly the painful ones, when I puncture them, relief comes.

So if you have this ambivalent response to emptiness, rather than thinking in terms of, "Gosh, nihilism," and all that, just think: "What would it be -- some of the painful self-definitions that I have -- to actually expose them as unrealities?" Would not that be freeing?

Then maybe one thinks, "Okay. Well, I see that I'm not bad. Maybe I then think my true nature is absolutely wonderful, and I'm better than everyone else." Or, you know, "Everything I do is great," or whatever. It just goes, you think, "Maybe seeing that I'm not bad, I'd just go to the opposite. I clamp around again and define with a positive self-image." Now, that can be okay, actually. As a stepping-stone, that can be really, really helpful sometimes. But that, too, eventually will be a prison. It will feel like, it will become a prison. Even a positive self-definition will become a prison. Why? Why and how? [18:00] If I think, "I'm brilliant," if I think, "I'm a success," if I think, "I'm this or that that's so wonderful," if I identify with it too tightly, I keep having to prove it. I keep having to prove it and kind of prop up that self-definition -- prove it to myself and prove it to others. And unfortunately, I keep running into people who don't always agree with me. [laughs] And then what?

Or something happens, and I don't quite match my own self-definition. That becomes a pressure -- a pressure and a burden and a weight and a prison. And it will feel tight. Just any definition is like circumscribing the self. Instead of the self, we could say, being empty, we could also say the self is infinite. The nature of the self is infinite. When we define it, we're putting it in a prison and a box. It's too tight. And that tightness will be felt as a prison.

So practically speaking, it might be -- I think it is, for most people -- much more helpful to kind of take suffering and dissatisfaction and the sense of constriction and imprisonment, etc., take that as one's lead in practice. In other words, where there's suffering, where there's a sense of constriction, noticing, becoming interested at that point and noticing or asking, "What's the self-definition going on at the moment? How am I defining myself?" And seeing that definition is empty. That self-definition, as we said, is empty. It's not really true. It's not the ultimate truth of things. That's empty. And we let go of that, without jumping into this "Everything's empty. Space is empty. Time is empty," and then going, "It's all meaningless," or "It's all nihilism," or the fear, etc., of death, or whatever it is. Just with the sense of imprisonment and the sense of suffering that I feel, seeing what those definitions are, and is it possible to see through them? Just that much. And that way, I'm being led by the sense of suffering and a palpable sense of freedom -- a palpable sense of suffering and a palpable sense of freedom. And it's not abstract. It's felt, and it's alive, and it's vital. [20:26] And it means something to me, not just intellectually.

And if I experiment with that, if we experiment with that, we're going to see something else. One needs to notice this. Again, if there's ambivalence about where this teaching of emptiness leads, one begins to see: to the degree that I loosen or see through these self-definitions, it allows more love. It allows more love. I let go of these tight self-definitions, and more love comes into the experience. Whether it's myself that I'm defining, and I'm putting in this tight definition and box, when I begin to see through that a little bit, love comes. Love is allowed. Love flows. It wells up naturally. It's the natural manifestation, you could say. But also with others -- when I put them in a box, when I define them this way or that way, I'm also blocking the flow of love to other, from self to other. So this self-definition business, and this reifying of self that we do, we do it for this self here, and all other selves too. Causes a problem, and it blocks the love.

So again, just at this level, if one's ambivalent about self and about emptiness teachings and where they lead, looking at that connection, you can actually feel it, just to the degree that you loosen these self-definitions. You actually feel and see a bit more love come into the experience, or a lot more love come into the experience. And that gives me the sense that I'm on the right track with emptiness, if I don't have that intuitive sense of just trusting the whole thing completely, which many people don't. Just the sense of, "I'll feel that freedom, and I'll feel that love come in. Well, maybe I can trust it. Maybe I can take that next step."

Let's talk a little bit more, just a little bit. I want to introduce and go into a little bit this concept of definitions, and talk about the personality level of the self, and how that gets problematic. So these self-definitions that we have, they can be conscious, certainly, but they could also be unconscious. They're obvious, sometimes, and some of them are quite hidden to us at first. So, "I'm hopeless. I'm a hopeless case" -- what did I say? -- "I'm hopeless, or I'm bad inside," as examples. "I'm a failure. I'm weak. I'm a weak person." What about something like, "I'm wounded. I'm deeply wounded, from my childhood or whatever it is. I'm wounded"? Or even something like, "I'm sick. I have a chronic illness. I'm a sick person." Now sometimes, of course, those have a relative truth to them. It is true that I have a chronic sickness. But how much is the self, my sense of self, my definition of self being bound up and wrapped up and limited and constrained by that, even though there's some relative truth to it? "I'm an angry person" -- said that before.

I remember someone saying, "I'm a passionate person." And this person was saying, "I'm passionate about everything," which is lovely. And the quality of passion -- so this is a positive self-definition, a quality so beautiful, what can manifest in the heart, and the necessity of passion in our life, to have that. And yet this person will say, "I'm passionate about everything." And it's like, "Oh, well, then you're in a bit of a box, because sometimes you're going to be tired, and you're not going to feel passionate." You're passionate about everything.

So questioning, it's like, what do I repeat to myself about myself? What do I repeat to myself about myself? Can I hear myself thinking that? When a thought has the word 'I' in it, what does that thought say about me? Or what is it thinking it's saying about me? What am I believing it's saying about me? What am I repeating to myself about myself? [25:05] What do I repeat to others about myself? What do I say to people? All day long, most often verbally, but also non-verbally, we're declaring to the world our self-definitions. What is that? How does that work? What are they?

So you see in different, each person here is -- what could we say? -- a part, a member of different communities, sub-communities, family, or this group of friends, or whatever it is, or this group that meets to do this or that, or whatever. What role, what character am I in the group, in that community? Who am I? I'm the clown. I'm the loser. I'm the one that everyone pokes fun at. I'm the one that knows everything. I'm the -- what am I?

So we're going to go into this, hopefully in the next few days, with some exercises, make it a bit more tangible for you. I'm throwing it out now as something to begin kind of setting the sights in your consciousness. When there's suffering, there's some kind of issue, there's some kind of thing we're suffering in relationship to, a situation or a person or something in ourselves, or something. And where there's some kind of issue, there's usually some way we're defining our self, or some way the self-view is stuck. Where there's suffering, there's an issue. Where there's an issue, there's usually a way we're defining our self, or the self-view is stuck.

And the question is, how? Or a question is, how? Because when that happens, when we tighten the self-view and define our self, it starts feeding back more suffering. The whole feedback loop starts getting even stronger.

Something else happened, a number of things happened to cause that feedback loop, you could say. Where there's, say, a negative self-definition -- let's say, I'm a failure, or I can't do it, whatever it is. What happens? I have that view, and that view colours and trains my attention. In my experience, it primes the perception. I have a negative self-definition, and that starts me focusing on negative qualities that I see in myself. And then I start to see that. So if I believe I'm a failure, I start to kind of look for evidence of that, evidence of my failing. And that's out of all the field of what arrives in my consciousness, all the stimuli and sensations and perceptions and messages, I will start to hone in on those, select them out, drink them in, digest them -- it goes right back into that self-definition, which primes the perception even more, and around we go.

So I'm reinforcing that very negative self-definition through its priming my perception. That happens through thought, through all kinds of ways. One of the beautiful gifts of mindfulness practice is that we start paying attention in a more even and careful way during the day, and we start to see, well, as I said before, there are times when, for instance, this quality -- let's say, I'm an angry person -- there are times when anger is not there. There is the absence of anger. I'm a needy person -- there is the absence of need right now. Oh, hadn't even noticed that before. I was just defining myself, whitewashing myself with 'I am a needy person.' There's the absence of need. See it's not always there. And I begin to see, actually, there's the opposite. Sometimes there's strength there. Sometimes there's a sense of independence, autonomy. I begin to see the presence of the positive qualities.

So in one way, you know, beginning to move into this territory of the emptiness of the self, we could say that part of -- it's not actually just at the beginning; it keeps going, in fact. That's quite an important thing: it keeps going. But we're expanding the box of what we think the self is. We're expanding it. We're, you could say, opening up the self-view. We're opening up the self-view. Had limited it, had constricted it, bound it in the self-definition -- we're actually opening it up. How do we open up self-view?

One way is through honouring and loving the self. I open up the self-view through honouring and loving the self. What does that mean? The fullness of the self, the fullness of what manifests through me, all these aspects, all these corners, all these expressions of self, and of my being, all these manifestations -- by honouring, by respecting, by loving them, I start to open up the whole self-view. So as always, with that comes a question, question, question, question: what do I overlook? What habitually do I overlook in myself? What do I ignore in myself? What expressions of self, what manifestations of self, what corners, dimensions, aspects of self do I tend to overlook and miss? Really, really beautiful and important and deeply enlivening question.

A little while ago, I was talking in an interview with someone somewhere else. And they were telling me -- to cut a long story short, they said, "I'm a TV addict." And this pattern of, "Well, I've got all this stuff to do, and I'm a procrastinator. Here I have, I'm studying for" -- I've forgotten what it was, a master's or something or other. "And got all this thing to, you know, get on with my essay or thesis," or whatever it was, "and there goes the TV on, and then hours later, I'm still with the TV, and I'm not getting to my thing. I'm a procrastinator." And that's the self-view.

And this is quite interesting, talking. And what she was not seeing was that, it's like, first, "Well, when you think of going to the work rather than watching TV, what comes?" And at first, it was like, "Well, I'm a perfectionist. I'm a perfectionist, and there's a fear of failure. If I start to get involved, and I start writing the essay or whatever, and there's a sense of, 'It has to be perfect.' And that's so -- it's such a pressure, and such a pain. It's too much, so I just watch TV, won't get involved in that. Or I fear that I'm going to fail. I'm just not going to get it. I'm not going to do a good job. And there's that fear, and that's painful, so I just watch TV, numb it out, don't go there."

But actually, what was interesting was, that was not the whole story. We were just exploring it a little bit, and actually, it was true, there was some perfectionism there, and some fear of failure, but there was also love there, and a love of giving herself to the work, giving herself, the fullness of herself to a project, that abandoning oneself and giving all one's energy and one's intent and one's life force and one's attention to something -- there was also that love there. And it wasn't seen, and it wasn't acknowledged. That's actually something beautiful. That's actually very beautiful. It was just, "I'm a procrastinator. Or at best, I'm a perfectionist. And I have a fear of failure," completely missing this other dimension, very deep and very beautiful. And if, as we're working with it, actually just sit in that. Sit in that love, and actually begin to kind of embody it more. What's that feeling of that love, to give oneself to something, and one's fullness, one's life force? What's that feeling in the body? How does that feel? Can you sit there for a time, and be with that, and let that open up inside you? [34:27] And that brings, among other things, it brings a different sense of self, a different view of the self, a different experience of the self, through opening to that, acknowledging it, and sitting in it.

Or another example: I was talking with someone also not too long ago. There was a long history to this, but she was saying, "You know, I used to have in my life this real pattern of wanting to seek attention. I was a real attention-seeker. And I would be the clown, and I would be this and that, and I would engage, was involved in a lot of groups, and a lot of not-so-skilful kind of social interactions where I was just seeking attention, and poking fun at people, and all this kind of stuff." And beginning to see, you know, that was feeling kind of hollow or inauthentic -- painful, actually, after a time. And wanting, naturally, to move away from that, to let that kind of thing go, that kind of way of being go. And then seeing, "Well, now it feels like I want to have more alone time." So this person was exploring more alone time, and not so much hanging out in the group that they were in -- more quiet time. And actually feeling, "I don't really like those big social situations, those big group situations that I used to love."

And then she said, "Pff. I hope to God this changes soon, this not liking of groups." And I was like, "Oh, why?" And there was an assumption there: "Because it means, it implies that I'm not interested in connecting. And maybe something's wrong with me. Maybe I'm kind of, I don't know, slightly psychopathic or something. I'm assuming there's something here, that I'm not interested in connecting. I'm not a warm person. I don't like to connect." But again, actually, something was not seen there, because we were talking a bit more, and actually, it was the case that there was a kind of connecting that felt very new, that was much more one on one -- not groups, one on one, where there was, for her, what was quite new, a real sense of authenticity, and sharing, and intimacy, and sensitivity to another, and openness, and vulnerability. And that was a whole new arena for her. And she loved it. She was loving it. It was beautiful. It was really calling her and speaking to her.

But again, very easily, the self-definition just worries that I don't like connecting. She wasn't even acknowledging that that was actually there. We had to explore a little bit for her actually to see, "Oh yeah, there is -- actually, there is that." And again, what would happen if one dwelt a little bit in that desire for what one loves -- in this case, for that kind of intimate, open connection, the sweetness of that, the closeness of that? Actually dwelling in the desire, again, it does a lot of things, doing that. But one of the things it does is expands the self-view out of this: "I'm a kind of person who doesn't want to connect. I'm not interested in people." It expands the self-view.

So I could also ask, following on from that, or one might ask oneself, and I think it's important to ask oneself, many times in one's life, many, many times in one's life: what do I stifle? What do I not allow because I think I should be like this, I should appear like this? We touched on this in the opening talk. What do I stifle?

And again, in Buddhist -- certain Buddhist situations, this is really, really important, I feel. This language of "there is no self, or the self is empty," or whatever -- does that mean, for us, that we're moving to an absence of personality, moving to kind of wiping out the personality? Is that where we're going with this? Is that where you want to go? [laughs] I don't either. I'm really not interested in that. That doesn't attract me at all. But it's there. It's definitely there in the teachings, in some streams of the teaching. There's a kind of erasure of the personality. And we could talk a lot about this.

Or there's something like a kind of normalcy that comes in. It's like, if you're a Buddhist, you're kind of like this. You're not too flamboyant or loud. You don't dress loud, and you talk in a certain way. And you behave in a certain way, and not in certain other ways. That creeps in, and it creeps into the culture. Why? What's going on there? What assumptions are underlying that? And they're connected with emptiness -- some of them are connected with emptiness. Are we moving towards normalcy, this straitjacket? The older I get, the more normal I want to appear? [laughter] Is there not something beautiful and precious in our individuality, and the freedom to express our individuality? Emptiness means we're free to express, free to allow. And sometimes that individuality is strong, and it's expressed, and it wants to be expressed strongly. It wants to expressed. That's how the life force wants to express that individuality sometimes.
Okay, how are you doing? I could continue for about another ten minutes or so, or I could call it here, or ...? Yeah? Are you feeling overloaded with concepts? [laughter]

Yogis: No.

Catherine: Are they allowed to say yes?

Rob: They're absolutely allowed to say yes, yeah. [laughter] No one did, did you notice? [laughter]

Catherine: There could be a reason ...

Rob: They're shy, yeah. I'm happy to stop or continue. It sounds like it's okay if I continue just a little bit. Okay. So that's, if you like, seed #1 that I want to implant, impart, implant right now. And we'll be touching on that in the days that follow -- definition, and self-definitions, and puncturing them, loosening them.

The second one is related, but actually a little bit different. And it's what I would call the sense of the self. Now, the more I pay attention to my experience in my life, in any situation, all situations, the more I pay attention to my experience, I'll start to see -- this may be subtle, but this is why I want to go slowly with this. We're just beginning to impart this, implant something. I will see that the sense of self is different at different times. I don't mean the definition, necessarily, of self. I mean the sense of self. So imagine a social situation, or a group situation, or a retreat situation, whatever. Something happens, and suddenly, everyone's looking at you and pointing at you, and they all think you've done something really stupid. Or you have done something really stupid. [laughter] And everyone's looking at you, like -- and the sense is, "God, they must think I'm a real" whatever. What's the sense of self -- not the thought of self, but the sense of self at that time, in that embarrassment, in that heightened self-consciousness? One of the aspects of it is heightened self-consciousness. Yeah? That's part of what I call the sense of self; it's a heightening in the self-consciousness.

But there are other aspects too. How does the body feel at that time? What's going on in the mind? What's the self-sense? Or if I'm ridiculed -- and compare that with another time or situation where you actually feel very relaxed, not ridiculed, not embarrassed, not scrutinized by anyone. Maybe you're alone. Maybe you're with someone that you just trust, and it's very relaxed and easygoing. Maybe the self just feels not so tight, not so self-conscious, not so solid. Because in that moment of embarrassment and ridicule, the self feels very solid, feels very dense, almost.

When there's a feeling of lack -- maybe towards a person, or a thing that I need, or whatever it is, there's a feeling of lack and desire -- what's the self-sense then, when there's a lot of sense of lack? How does the self feel? What's that experience? Or when there's the inner critic? Or when the meditation goes deep, when it feels like meditation is going 'well,' if we even use that language? There's a quietening in the mind. Things begin to open out. And that sense of, rather than the constriction of the sense of self, there's an opening out of the sense of self. There's a lightening of the sense of self. Does this resonate at all? Does it seem ... yeah? Good. Okay. There's an opening out, a lightening -- what could we say? -- a refining, a spaciousness to the sense of self. Yeah?

So, to notice all this. This is the start of something that's actually extremely significant, extremely profound and significant. This is the beginning of something. To start to notice, in all different situations and different times, the self-sense, the sense of self, how it feels. Every mind state that we have -- meaning every mood that we're in, or every emotion, or right now you might be little bored, or a little tired, or a little this or that, or interested, or whatever -- anything, any mind state has with it a way that the body feels with that mind state. So rarely, when we're bored, do we feel a lot of a blissful energy in the body, and a real openness and lightness. It doesn't really go together. Every mind state has a body sense with it, and a self-sense with it. In other words, the self feels a certain way, actually, at any moment. At any moment, there's a mind state. With that mind state, there's a body sense, and there's a self-sense.

So it's not just through thoughts that we know about the self, and the experience of the self: I'm like this, I'm like that, I should be more this, or da-da-da-da-da. Certainly that level tells us about -- it's part of the self-sense. But there's also a felt sense of the self, manifesting through the body, manifesting through the way consciousness feels at certain times: more open, more constricted, more spacious, etc., more contracted, more solid. This is a spectrum, a continuum. Okay? So when I'm really in that embarrassment, ridiculed position, or really upset about something, the spectrum is at that end of the self: very tight, very constricted, very solid, very dense, very oppressive -- all that. When I'm normal, everyday, just relaxed, it's less tight, less solid, less constricted, etc. When I'm (whatever that means for me, where I'm at) deeper in meditation, I'm going down on this spectrum. It's more light, more refined, more open, more spacious. And we just move up and down, up and down. Our life, every day, and most of the night, up and down, up and down on this spectrum. So I'm just throwing this out now as a kind of primer, something to pay attention to. And this is extremely significant in terms of understanding emptiness. I'm just putting it out for now. [19:08]

So in the mettā, what's the relationship, for example, with mettā and self-sense? We just started the mettā, but some of you have a long history with mettā, and we just started. But again, I'm throwing this out for you to investigate. When the mettā feels like it's going well -- again, whatever that means, not getting too tight around that -- what's the self-sense?

Yogi: Blissful. Light.

Rob: Okay, great. Lovely. Blissful. Light. Very good. Pay attention to this. Learn. There's a lot to learn here. What's the self-sense feel like, what do you notice about the self-sense when the mettā feels like it's going relatively well, or when it's feeling difficult or whatever -- basically, in different mind states, as I was saying? So often, or occasionally, people ask me, "Well, if I'm giving mettā to myself, and I say, 'May I be well, may I be happy,' etc., isn't that reinforcing the self the whole sit, because I keep saying, 'I, I, I, I, I,' and I'm directing it towards 'me'? Won't that just reinforce and resolidify the self?" Well, check it out. See what happens. Does it? Actually, it doesn't. And then there's the question: why not? What's going on there? And we'll go into this. [49:34]

Okay, so I'm going to leave some out, but that's fine. There's a lot here. There's a lot here to explore. We move up and down, or the self-sense moves up and down on a spectrum. I want to get intimate with that. Really start getting the sense of that, just as much as one can, a little bit, okay? So there's that sense: the sense of self moves up and down on this kind of more open, more refined, more constricted, more solidified, etc., moves up and down that. And there's also what I was saying earlier: the way that the self can just feel differently at different times. In other words, we're expanding the box.

So I should've said this earlier, but I'll throw it out now. It's okay. How does that box get expanded? How does the self feel different, another way, when I feel something different, when I feel something that's unusual for me to feel? So maybe my emotional range is a certain range of emotion: I tend to feel this and this and this a lot, and I kind of move, shuttle back and forth in this kind of emotional range. And in that, let's say I'm fearful a lot, and I know myself in that mind state of fear, and the self feels and is defined a certain way in that fearful mind state. What would it be if I feel, for once, and I dwell in a feeling of courage and fearlessness? And I actually, again, really embody that, and then the self-sense starts to feel different. I'm edging out this box, and these walls are getting wider and wider.

What would it be if I tend to not feel vulnerable, not let myself feel vulnerable much at all? I don't really go there. I don't really allow that. And then I begin, perhaps gradually, to allow myself to feel vulnerable, and to dwell in vulnerability. I actually realize it's okay. It's more than okay. It's beautiful. One of the things that comes out of that is the self-sense, because I feel the self differently, I feel almost a different self in that, dwelling in that vulnerability.

But also, what if I, for instance, rarely let myself feel strong? I never let myself feel this sense of strength. And then, maybe gradually, I let myself feel strong. And I dwell in that strength, and I realize that's also okay -- more than okay. That has its beauty. And again, the self feels different. I feel shattered by this thing that's happened. I feel broken. I feel weak. And then after a while, I let this other sense, this other emotion come in. It comes in through the body, and I dwell in a sense of strength. And the whole self-sense feels different. I'm pushing out, I'm opening up that self-view.

Just to end with a thought that we touched on yesterday, and we'll keep coming back to this. So emptiness and emptiness of self -- they are tools for freedom. They are ways of looking that bring very, very profound freedom. But that's all they are. That's all it is. Emptiness is a way of looking. It's a view that we pick up and put down. And its complementary view, if you like, its complementary way of seeing is self. So what is it to pick up the view of self, and to honour and respect that, and learn how that, too, can be a very helpful, very healing, very fruitful, very freeing view and tool? Both, both. With real development of practice, we learn to include both, and just move between both: not-self or no-self, emptiness of self on one hand, and self. Both true, to a certain extent, both freeing if we know how to use them, if we learn how to use them both. And watching out for the preferencing.

Okay. So perhaps let's just sit quietly for a minute or two together.