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 ts 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
.
(From a talk given by Ajahn Sumedho in Summer 1993)