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Venerable
Ajahn Sumedho -
Self and Self-Naughting
You need
not seek for it outside, you need not think that it is something far
away or inaccessible to you. It comes through the willingness to calm
down and stop resisting and to listen and awaken to your own conscious
experience.
I think something that interests us all is ourselves - because we are
the subject of our lives. No matter what you think of yourself, there is
a natural interest there because you have to live with yourself for a
lifetime. The self view is therefore something that can give us a lot of
misery, if we see ourselves in the wrong way. Even under the most
fortunate circumstances, if we don't see ourselves in the right way we
still end up creating suffering in our minds. So the Buddha was trying
to point out that the way to solve the problem isn't through trying to
make everything right and pleasant on the external dimension, but to
develop the right understanding, the right attitude towards ourselves.
This is the whole thrust of his teaching.
Living in Britain at this time, we expect comfort and all kinds of
privileges, rights and material comforts. This makes life more pleasant
in many ways, but also when our every need is provided for and life is
too comfortable, something in us doesn't develop. Sometimes it is the
struggle through hardship that develops and matures us as human beings.
I remember when we lived in London, we used to take walks up on
Hampstead Heath in the morning and watch these well-off people taking
their pet poodles for walks on the Heath. We'd start thinking that it
wouldn't be so bad to be born as a lap dog here in England: have some
nice lady constantly pampering you, making you little jumpers for the
winter, and finding tasty little dog biscuits to feed you. It looked
like a life of affection and comfort could be rather pleasing! But the
truth is that most of us would find that suffocating: we need to measure
ourselves against something, we need to struggle and to learn how to get
beyond the limitations that we think we have at this time. Where we get
defeated is where we give up to the limitations that we have through
resignation and apathy. Then of course we just get depressed and
miserable.
But when we give up or surrender to restriction and to restraint through
wisdom, then we find liberation! Life is the experience of restriction
and restraint, being born in the human body and having to live under the
laws of nature on planet earth. Mentally we can soar up into the sky, we
can go up into the heavens, but physically we are bound to limitations
that get increasingly restrictive as we grow older. This need not be
seen as suffering because that is the way things are. You can develop a
different attitude and learn to accept the limitations - not out of a
negative resignation but just because you realise that what you really
are looking for is within you. You need not seek for it outside, you
need not think that it is something far away or inaccessible to you. It
comes through the willingness to calm down and stop resisting and to
listen and awaken to your own conscious experience. But of course the
big obstruction to that is that we have the sense of ourselves as being
this or that or the other.
The sense of oneself is something that we become conscious of when we
are children; when we are born there is no sense of a self as being
anything. As we grow up then we learn what we are supposed to be, if we
are good or bad, if we are loveable or not, if we are approved of or
disapproved of. So we develop a sense of ourselves. We also often
compare ourselves to others and have role models of what we should be
when we grow up. I noticed from my own experience that the ego really
started consolidating when I was sent off to school: I was thrown into
those classrooms with all those strange children and then I started
noticing who was the strongest, who was the toughest, who was the one
the teacher liked the best. We saw ourselves in terms of our
relationships to others. This develops through a lifetime unless we
deliberately choose to change and start looking more deeply than just
living our lives through the conditioning of the mind that we acquired
when we were very young. Even when we get older, sometimes we still have
very adolescent attitudes or childish emotional reactions to life that
we have been unable to resolve except by suppressing or ignoring them.
And these can be very embarrassing or shocking to us.
There is one way of talking about the self that makes it sound very
doctrinal. Buddhists can sometimes say that there is no self, as if it
was a proclamation that you have to believe in; as if there were some
God on high saying "THERE'S NO SELF!"; and in that presentation
something in us resists. It doesn't seem true to just go announcing that
there isn't any self - because what is this experience that we are
feeling right now? Here there seems to be very much a sense of oneself!
You're feeling, you're breathing, you see and hear; you react to things
- people can praise you or criticise you and you feel happy or depressed
accordingly. So if this isn't me then what is it? And am I supposed to
go round as a Buddhist believing that I don't have a self? Or if I am
going to believe in something, maybe it is better to believe that I do
have a self, because then you can say things like: "my true self is
perfect and pure." That at least gives you some kind of inspirational
encouragement to try to live your life, rather than saying that there is
no self, no soul, leaving a total annihilation of any possibilities.
These are just examples of the use of language; we can say "there is no
self" as a proclamation, or "there is no self" as a reflection. The
reflective mode is to encourage us to contemplate the self. The Buddha
was pointing to the fact that when we really look at these changing
conditions that we tend to identify with, we can begin to see that these
are not self. What we believe in, what we hold to and cling to and
assume, is not what we really are: it's a position, it is a condition,
it is something that changes according to time and place. Each one of us
is experiencing consciousness through the human body that we have, and
it is like this.
Consciousness is a natural function, there is no sense of self in
regards to consciousness. The only reason that we might assume a self is
because consciousness operates in terms of subject and object; to be
conscious we have to be a separate entity, so therefore we are operating
from this position of being this subjective being here. Then we can get
obsessed with a very personal interpretation of everything: every
reaction or experience, whether it is instinctive or whatever, can be
interpreted in the sense of it being me and mine. We can interpret the
natural energies of the body in a very personal way as if this is me, my
problem, rather than seeing them as part of the package that we get from
being born as a human being. Even a baby when it is first born has
instinctive drives to survive, so when it is hungry it cries. Babies are
usually born beautiful creatures so that we naturally want to love and
take care of them. Do you think that the baby is doing this deliberately
- "I'm trying to be cute so that Ajahn Sumedho will hold me, my mother
will love me" - or is this just the way it is, just nature in operation?
These are just natural things, but we tend to see them in very personal
ways.
We hold views about each other that we carry with us for a lifetime: she
is like this, he is like that; and these influence how we react and we
respond to each other - just in the way someone looks: pleasing, happy,
welcoming; mean and unpleasant; or somebody praises us or insults us. We
can carry resentment about being insulted for a lifetime and never
forgive that person. Maybe they did it when they were just having a bad
time, even after thirty years, we can still make a problem about it if
we want. So this self needs to be examined and looked at and
contemplated, in religious terms.
Every religion has its self-naughting teachings: in some ways religion
is about relinquishing the selfish tendencies of the mind, so before we
can, say, realise the Kingdom of God we have to let go of our selfish
fascinations and obsessions. Or, if we are going to realise the true
Dhamma, we need to let go of the self view. So this can be another
command from above, like "You shouldn't be selfish! Get rid of any
selfishness and try to become somebody who is pure!" We would all agree
with that, nobody here would relish the idea of becoming more and more
selfish, but sometimes we don't know how not to be selfish. We may have
grand ideas that we should give up all our wealth, not hold on to
anything; then we're getting closer to not being selfish - but the
strange thing is that when you become a monk or a nun, sometimes,
although you are thinking you are getting rid of selfishness, you find
yourself getting more and more selfish. Your selfishness becomes very
concentrated, because you can't spread yourself over such a wide area as
in lay life. So you become much more aware of it. And if you condemn it,
then it seems to be a hopeless situation, because you begin to interpret
life from that sense of "I'm selfish and I've got to get rid of this
selfishness." And one of the biggest problems in our way of thinking is
to relinquish that basic premise that "I am this person and I have got
to do something, in order to become an unselfish, enlightened person in
the future."
We are conditioned to think this way in our culture: be a good boy and
therefore you do this and you do that and in the future you will become
somebody who will be worthy and acceptable in society. This makes sense
on the worldly side of life, because we start out illiterate, so we have
to learn, and from then on we have to study all the different subjects
in a school in order to become someone who can get through the system.
If we fail then we become someone who fails. And failure is despised. It
is interesting in teaching meditation to people who have this fear of
failure, they fear that they are going to fail in meditation. But there
is no way you could fail in meditation. It is not about failure,
otherwise even meditation becomes just another way for us to prove
ourselves. "I can't do it now. If I practise hard, I will become a good
meditator and I will become enlightened, hopefully..." And then the
doubt comes: "But I don't think I could ever get enlightened. Who is
enlightened?"
People like to check us all out to see if Ajahn Sumedho is enlightened
or whether Ajahn Viradhammo is, or whether we have reached some kind of
advanced level. Or are we just blokes who haven't quite made it? But
there is a different way of looking and thinking which is the opposite
of seeing ourselves in terms of being somebody who has to do something
to become somebody who is better than he or she is right now. That is
the worldly way of thinking. That's what people like to hear isn't it:
"I had all kinds of problems and was a very miserable, unhappy man and
then practising meditation I saw the light and now I'm happy and
fulfilled." From the worldly conditioned attitude, "I am this person, I
am this personality, I am Ajahn Sumedho... I am all kinds of things... I
should be and I shouldn't be." But the aim of Buddhist meditation is
about changing one's attitude by using the reflective or intuitive
function of the mind.
When we go into the stillness of meditation, often times the sense of
oneself will take us over, we'll be filled with all kinds of memories
and ideas about ourselves. We sometimes wish that... "if I go and
meditate then I'll go into stillness and I'll get out of this ugly
scenario of myself." Sometimes the mind will suddenly just stop and
we'll experience a kind of bliss, or a peace that we have either
forgotten or never really noticed before. But the sense of oneself will
still operate because of the force of habit. So we develop an attitude
of listening to this self, not in terms of believing or disbelieving but
in noticing what it really is that arises and ceases. Whether we think
of ourselves as the greatest or the worst doesn't matter, the condition
itself comes and goes. Through letting go or `self-naughting', not
trying to get rid of it but allowing it to go, then we begin to
experience the true nature of mind which is bliss, silence.
So there are moments in our lives when the self does stop functioning
and we get in touch with the pure state of conscious experience. That is
what we call bliss. But when we have those blissful experiences,
immediately the desire to have them again takes over, and no matter how
hard we try to have it again, as long as we're attached to the view of
wanting bliss again, we will never get it. It doesn't work that way.
Wanting it means that we have already made it impossible, so the
attitude then is one of letting go of desire. Not trying to suppress
desire, because that is another kind of desire: the desire to get rid of
desire is still the same problem. So if we're trying to suppress or
annihilate desire, it doesn't work. Nor does just following desire. But
in this state of attentive awareness, we begin to see what is actually
taking place, then we can let go of the causes of our suffering. We see
how it actually is, and we have that intuitive wisdom to let go. So in
this life as a human being from birth to death every moment is an
opportunity for understanding in the right way. Success or failure
suddenly doesn't mean anything because even if we fail, we learn from
that. This doesn't mean that we don't try or put ourselves forth but
that our aim is no longer to succeed but to understand things.
It takes a long time to get underneath this self view because it is an
all pervasive influence on our conscious experience. With meditation
also, we bring attention to very ordinary things like the breath and the
body, and so we learn how to bring our attention into the present
moment, to sustain our attention rather than be caught up in trying to
become something, or trying to get something out of our practice. This
`trying to get something' doesn't work because whatever we get we are
going to lose; so if you feel you've got samadhi that means you are
going to lose it also. When we go on a very formal quiet meditation
retreat, we can get into a blissful state. But then when the retreat
ends, we lose it. This doesn't mean to dismiss retreats but to try to
look at these opportunities, not from the worldly, self-centred position
any more but from observing how things are when we remove sensory
stimulation, or when we get out of the sensory deprivation tank and walk
out into the street, with the traffic noises, the pollution, and people
rushing by - we can feel even worse than before because now we have
become refined and the coarse world is too unbearable. But if we
contemplate in the right way, we see the sensory deprivation or the
sensory stimulation as `the way it is'. Then it doesn't stir up or
aggravate the senses and we're more or less in touch with the mind that
is blissful. It's always present: but when we're caught in irritation
and agitation, we don't notice it.
So the Buddhist approach to this, rather than going off and living in a
sensory deprivation tank, or becoming a hermit, is to develop that
awareness, because through mindfulness we begin to realise that the pure
nature of the mind is always with us, even now. Even though we might be
agitated or irritated, if we are mindful we'll experience a natural
bliss beyond that. And once we realise that for ourselves, then we know
how not to suffer. The end of suffering is in seeing things as they
really are, so that our refuge isn't in this reactive excited condition
of the eyes and the ears and the nose, the tongue, the body, the brain,
the emotions. In these are the conditions that are irritating, agitated.
Through mindfulness we realise that which transcends these conditions.
That is our real refuge. This we can realise as human beings through
wise contemplation of our own personal predicament.
Forest Sangha Newsletter: April 1998, Number 44
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