Remember Ajahn Chah, the Thai monk who said that if you try to understand the idea of not-self by “intellectualizing” alone, your head will explode? He once recounted a time when he was trying to meditate and kept getting interrupted by sounds from a festival in a nearby village. Then, as he recalls it, he had a realization: “The sound is just the sound. It’s me who is going out to annoy it. If I leave the sound alone, it won’t annoy me. . . . If I don’t go out and bother the sound, it’s not going to bother me.” I wouldn’t take that anecdote too literally; it’s not as if sound bothers you in
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