Self: Non tangible, ephemeral.
If your body was to disintegrate in an explosion where would you be? How would anyone label you? There’s absolutely no way they could separate the pieces of you from the outer atmospheric particles.
Same goes for your mind. All the thoughts and perceptions that you have are held together by your ego. They are artificial…fabricated. if the components of your personality were to disintegrate, you would no longer have an identity. So nothing is solid. We define ourselves a certain way today. Tomorrow we get new ideas or have new experiences which can change our outlook and who we think we are. .We are continuously recreating our own world.
The mind creates the world; the world creates the mind.
We explore, label and define the world around us and inside our minds. Without feelings, thoughts or consciousness and the sensory organs, we wouldn’t be able to perceive anything. Without consciousness, there is no awareness. And If we had a consciousness without anything to be aware of: existence in a Void? Perception with nothing to perceive.
Everything is interconnected and dependently co-arising. Everything depends on everything else. Nothing stands alone. Nothing is unchanging and eternal. Including your self.
The self is made up of the 5 aggregates: form, feeling, perception, thought and consciousness. Without them there is no self.
Think about a cake. Does it exist independently? Of course not. Not only does it rely on all the separate ingredients, but it also depends on the Baker and the oven. It depends on our perception. If we close our eyes, where is the cake? Cake is only a definition of all the component parts of it. Even though you can call it your cake, the moment it is eaten, is it still yours? Do you still want to eat the cake when it’s in the toilet?
Nothing to cling to. No self. Will this lead to an existential crisis?
When you dismantle your belief system or personality structure that you have an attachment to there could be issues. If you smash it all apart, this will have a destabalizing effect on your life. You might experience mental anguish that pushes you over the edge. You have no way of predicting if you will end up sane or insane at the other end. Breakdown or breakthrough?
So you need to find or create a powerful belief structure to replace your current one with. And that will take some effort, which is well worth it. You know that what you are doing right now is unsatisfactory. It’s leading you to search for something better This strong attachment to self is causing a feeling of alienation from everything around you which is leading to mental suffering.
You need to go through the all hope is lost stage but you don’t have to be violent about it.
It’s the dark night of the soul that you need to go through to drop your societal programming and reach a higher consciousness. I think In Zen they call it the great doubt. Before every spiritual break through, people have to feel deep despair because they are aware that they are giving up something that is comforting to them. They are losing a part of themselves and are forced to create a new self. It’s like if you have a job that your are efficient at and you move to a new one. the transition will make you feel like you no longer have the security in the old job and now are stupid and slow in the new one.
Improve your self so you can go beyond self: Baby steps
You have been trained to believe that you need an ego to survive in this world. So you always think in terms of me, my, mine. You live as a separate being disconnected from everyone and everything, creating your own world of isolated survival. You are greedy, paranoid and defensive, always taking offence at perceived attacks. You live in denial of natural rythms of life and death. The ego that you have built is hanging on for dear life because it knows it is a fake prop that can’t protect you.
But you have to work with it for awhile. That’s the paradigm that you have lived in up to this point. If you throw your ego away before you are ready, you will lose your grip on reality. So for the time being, you have to do the work on your self by training your mind, in whatever way that works for you to make you a better person. Such as using the Buddha’s model which includes developing virtue, concentration and wisdom. You train it by following some moral rules like Buddha’s five precepts. No killing, stealing, sexual misconduct, lying and intoxication. Your mind will settle down and then you can develop concentration through meditation which leads to insight and the development of wisdom and compassion.
Don’t go looking for a savior lean on. Alot of spiritual traditions say that you need to rely on a teacher to become enlightened. Not true. You can do it on your own. (But as an important aside: there really is no-one leading and no-one being led to enlightenment. There’s No enlightenment. No Self to enlighten.)
During your self improvement journey there will be people and movements that will try to manipulate and exploit you if you invite them in. How do you decide who to listen to? I’ve kind of made it a rule of thumb to read or listen to people, but I don’t elevate them to Guru status. If you’re going to join a group, the best thing to do is to affiliate yourself with one that is not cult like, (one that doesn’t enforce conformity). It should all be voluntary, where you are allowed to ask questions or leave if you don’t get the answers. Don’t allow anyone to dominate your mind and make you feel bad if you want to move on. The Buddha had to leave his teachers when he realized they couldn’t provide the answers.
Don’t worry about the people who criticize you for daring to grow. They could feel threatened because you are making changes that may be an inconvenience or confusing to them. Communicate to them what it is you are trying to do. If you change your attitudes or behaviors try to explain what you’re doing. They may like the ideas and adopt some of them as well. But don’t expect them to like what you are doing. You will probably lose some friends who don^t like the new you.
The spiritual journey is not about success or failure. When you are searching for the answers, you will appear to others to be flaky, foolish, or unstable. Today you are a Catholic, tomorrow a Hindu, the next day a Buddhist. There is nothing wrong with trying to find something that works for you. It doesn’t matter if you try different ideas. At the very least you will have gotten an education as well as some knowledge, by reading the Bible, the Bhagavad Gita and the Pali Canon. This is nothing to be ashamed of. You re doing something important. You’re looking for the answers to the puzzle of life. Hopefully when it’s all over, you will find it.
After doing the work on your self and being able to transcend your ego, you can experience your higher Self or not-self.
At one point I’m talking about how we should improve ourselves and at another I am saying we don’t have a self to improve. That’s because different stages of your journey require different solutions. Ultimately, you will discover that we can not improve ourselves. There really is no tangible self to improve. Self is merely an internalized cultural label that separates us from Source.
Its hard to talk about not-self when we appear to have a self. OK another way to look at it is to say that there are two selves: the mundane which is owned by our egocentric reality and the supramundane which is universal consciousness.
In order to live right, you have to tame the lower self so it can settle down and allow the higher self to take it’s rightful place and subjugate the ego. Then you will experience the true you which is not separate from everything else.
Imagine you are sitting by a river, you take in the sounds of the bubbling flow, feel the water spray and see the sun shimmering on the silver trout swimming by. You are not just a casual observer watching a movie. There is no subject viewing an object. No object being viewed by the subject. No you, no creek, no trout. No labels, no definitions. No separation. No higher or lower self. But yet, something is happening…you are experiencing pure awareness or not-self.
Comments are closed, but trackbacks and pingbacks are open.