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What begins as a modest pursuit—a way to relieve stress or anxiety, cool anger, or dial down self-loathing just a notch—can lead to profound realizations about the nature of things, and commensurately profound feelings of freedom and happiness.
I’ve personally experienced pretty dramatic, if sometimes fleeting, shifts of perspective.
Though I haven’t seen the whole edifice of enlightenment, apparently I’ve seen some of the building blocks.
The mindfulness meditation I’ve done has been within a particular school of meditation known as Vipassana (pronounced vih PAW suh nuh). Vipassana is an ancient word that denotes clear vision and is usually translated as “insight.”
Buddhist texts going back more than a millennium spell out what that means. They define vipassana as apprehending what are known as “the three marks of existence.”
The first is impermanence. Who could deny that nothing lasts forever? The second mark of existence is dukkha—suffering, unsatisfactoriness. And who among us hasn’t suffered and felt unsatisfied?
But the third mark of existence, “not-self,” is different. With not-self, comprehension itself is a challenge.† Yet according to Buddhist doctrine, it is crucially important to grasp not-self if your goal is vipassana: seeing reality with true clarity, such clarity as to pave the path to enlightenment.
What I was saying in that session with my teacher was that I—that is, my “self,” the thing I had thought was in control—don’t readily control the most fundamental aspect of my mental life: what I’m thinking about.
this absence of control is part, though by no means all, of what the Buddha had in mind when he emphasized the importance of grasping not-self.
“To understand not-self, you have to meditate,” he advised. If you try to grasp the doctrine through “intellectualizing” alone, “your head will explode.”
There’s a big difference between seeing the not-self doctrine in the abstract and really seeing—or, in a way, feeling—what it means firsthand.
And that’s particularly true if you want to not just apprehend the idea of not-self but actually put it to use, harness it to become a happier person and even a better person: to feel a new sense of connection with your fellow creatures and a new sense of generosity toward them.
But here we run into a problem: experiencing full-fledged not-self is typically reported only by meditators who have done a whole, whole lot of meditating—certainly more than I’ve done. If saving the world depends on a big chunk of the human race having this experience, we may be in for a long wait.
As strange as it may sound, you can, with even a fairly modest daily meditation practice, experience a little bit of not-self. Then, as time goes by, maybe a little more.
And, actually, I’d say that what Ajahn Chah called “intellectualizing”—trying to understand not-self conceptually, in the abstract—can help a person get on this path of meditative progress.
Like lots of doctrines in lots of ancient philosophies and religions, not-self is subject to varying interpretations,
He conducts this search systematically; he goes through what are known as the five “aggregates” that, according to Buddhist philosophy, constitute a human being and that human’s experience.
(1) the physical body (called “form” in this discourse), including such sense organs as eyes and ears; (2) basic feelings; (3) perceptions (of, say, identifiable sights or sounds); (4) “mental formations” (a big category that includes complex emotions, thoughts, inclinations, habits, decisions); and (5) “consciousness,” or awareness—notably, awareness of the contents of the other four aggregates.
The Buddha runs down this list and asks which, if any, of these five aggregates seem to qualify as self.
For starters, he links the idea of self to the idea of control.
So form—the stuff the human body is made of—isn’t really under our control. Therefore, says the Buddha, it must be the case that “form is not-self.” We are not our bodies.
He then goes through the other four aggregates, one by one. “If feeling were self, then feeling would not lead to affliction,” and you’d be able to change your feelings by saying “May my feeling be thus, may my feeling not be thus.”
So too with perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness. Are any of these things really under control—so completely under control that they never lead to suffering? And if they’re not under control, then how can we think of them as part of the self?
One problem with talking about the self is that different people have different intuitions about what the word self means.
When I think of my self, I think of something that persists through time. I’ve changed a lot since I was ten years old, but hasn’t some inner essence—my identity, my self—in some sense endured?
The Buddha would naturally be skeptical of this claim, since he holds that everything is in flux and nothing is permanent.
So two of the properties commonly associated with a self—control and persistence through time—are found to be absent, not evident in any of the five components that seem to constitute human beings. This is the core of the argument the Buddha makes in this first and most famous discourse on not-self,
How can the Buddha, on the one hand, insist that the self doesn’t exist, and, on the other hand, keep using terms like I and you and he and she?
One common Buddhist response to these kinds of questions is this: Though in the deepest sense the self doesn’t exist, human language isn’t very good at describing reality at the deepest level.
One point these mavericks tend to make is that nowhere in that first, foundational discourse on not-self does the Buddha actually say that the self doesn’t exist.
There’s a second, related scenario that might explain where we find the “you” that is liberated after the aggregates have been abandoned: maybe not all aggregates are created equal.
Maybe one of them—consciousness—is special. Maybe, after “you” let go of all five aggregates, it’s this one aggregate that is liberated, released from entanglement with the other four. And maybe that’s what “you” are after letting go of the idea of the self: a kind of purified form of consciousness.
Buddha seems to sing a slightly different tune. In one discourse, describing what happens after you take the not-self teaching seriously and abandon your attachment to the five aggregates, he says that consciousness itself is “liberated.”
Buddha’s discourse on engagement—suggests an appealingly simple model: liberation consists of changing the relationship between your consciousness and the things you normally think of as its “contents”—your feelings, your thoughts, and so on. Once you realize that these things are “not-self,” the relationship of your consciousness to them becomes more like contemplation than engagement, and your consciousness is liberated.
Some philosophers of Buddhism have suggested that maybe there are two kinds of consciousness
One is the kind of consciousness you’re liberated from, and the other is the kind of consciousness that stays with “you”—that is you—after the liberation. The first kind of consciousness is deeply entangled with—fully engaged with—the contents of the other aggregates, and the second kind is a more objective awareness of those contents, a more contemplative consciousness that persists after the engagement has been broken.
Advanced meditators sometimes report experiencing a “witness consciousness” that seems to roughly fit this description of the second kind of consciousness,
Maybe if it lasted forever they could claim to be enlightened. Maybe this “witness consciousness” is where the “you” that is ...
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Or maybe we should just acknowledge that Ajahn Chah was onto something: trying to understand the idea of not-self by “intellectualizing” could make your head explode.
And don’t feel like you’re committing a felony-level violation of Buddhist dogma just because you think of yourself as being a self. But be open to the radical possibility that your self, at the deepest level, is not at all what you’ve always thought of it as being.
I was still conscious of the feeling in my jaw, but my consciousness was no longer engaged with it in the sense of having possessive feelings toward it. I hadn’t let go of my attachment to all feelings, as the Buddha recommends, but I had let go of my attachment to this one feeling.
had no sense of ownership toward the tension that had made me want to grind my teeth, so I could view it with dispassion and calm.
Thirty minutes of my workaday meditation doesn’t put me in a position to view acute tooth pain so objectively as to take much of the suffering out of it. Still, this experience was testament to the fact that ownership of even serious pain is, strictly speaking, optional.
As we saw in chapter 2, feelings are designed by natural selection to represent judgments about things, evaluations of them; natural selection “wants” you to experience things as either good or bad. The Buddha believed that the less you judge things—including the contents of your mind—the more clearly you’ll see them, and the less deluded you’ll be.
these various unpleasant feelings—the tension in my jaw from overcaffeination, the tooth pain, the anxiety—is the paradox of control. All three feelings, in their initial, annoying persistence, proved that they were not under my control—indeed, if anything, they were controlling me!
And, according to the Buddha’s conception of “self,” my lack of control over them in turn proved that they were not part of my self. But once I followed that logic—quit seeing these things I couldn’t control as part of my self—I was liberated from them and, in a certain sense, back in control.
At no time, either in the course of having these experiences or in the course of thinking about them later, did I come close to abandoning the concept of self altogether. But hanging on to some notion of self didn’t keep me from experiencing a pretty significant redefinition of my self
the not-self teaching “is not so much a thing to be thought about as to be done.” And who knows, maybe that was the Buddha’s view of the matter.
In which case he was basically saying, “Look, if there’s part of you that isn’t under your control and therefore makes you suffer, then do yourself a favor and quit identifying with it!”
But for now my advice to beginning meditators is this: Don’t take the idea of not-self too seriously. Maybe the contemplative path will eventually lead you to the experience of full-on not-self, and you’ll come to believe that, in a profound and hard-to-describe sense, there’s no “I” in there.
