Tim Geil: Exploring Anatta: Non-Self

Nice to see everyone. So let's jump into this topic here. So I chose this topic of Anata, of non-self because it's been a very compelling topic for myself as a practitioner, as a student, and as a teacher. It tends to be the lens in which I see all of my own practice and also the lens of how I integrate it into my daily life, how I actually see how the sense of self arises in the midst of relationships and roles and responsibilities. Now Anata, our non-self, is one of the core teachings of the Buddha. You see the three characteristics of impermanence, of dukkha and Anata. It's a core feature of the five aggregates, dependent origination, the six spaces of consciousness, and of course the stages of enlightenment. And also the Four Noble Truths. The Four Noble Truths, the second Noble Truth, we can define it as tanha, this thirst to become, to form into this sense of self, to form into this identity and to this sense of separation. And yet this topic can be quite confusing and it will be bewildering too because on one hand there is this sense of self that we all know very well. There's this conventional sense of self that we live our lives with, that we experience the world through. I'm having this experience, I'm having this thought. This is happening to me. I hope that it will have something else will happen to me in the future or I'm afraid of it will happen. I have this job, this relationship. I have these emotions, I have these hopes and these dreams. And we start to hear the Dharma and we look at that sense of self trying to get a sense of that, that anata, that what is outside of the sense of self. Which gets tricky because we both need that energy to look, but also it starts to be the sense of self is trying to find itself. It's trying to, it's like those two mirrors parallel to each other that just go on into infinity. And the sense of self trying to get rid of it itself is I think one of the trickier things because sometimes we feel this sense of diminishment or adequacy, something fundamentally flawed with us. And if we somehow get through into this sense of non-self, then I can kind of get out of out of that pain, skip over it. This sometimes what happens in our minds. What can I touch upon all of those? So trying to see the sense of self is a little bit like that Dutch artist, MC Escher, with two hands drawing each other. So the one hand is drawing and then it flows into the next one. So you look for that sense of self and yet the sense of self itself is doing the looking. And yet, even though it's kind of bewildering, it doesn't make much sense from a certain perspective. That very sense of self starts to thin the first time, the very first time we start to meditate. And as our practice deepens and grows, it starts to lose some of its strength, some of its power, some of its identification. And there's this unconditioned peace and ease that starts to grow in its stead. And this is one thing I really appreciate about it, the meditative practice is that by design, it starts to already show through that sense of self, through the way it's the wording is and the way we practice with it. And again, we'll go into this more as we go along. And then when that sense of self is seen through when it falls away, whether momentarily or in a more sustained way, our whole life starts to orient, reorient around that new understanding, that new perspective. And so it really has a transformational effect on our practice. And this is one of the reasons it's one of the central teachings of the Buddha. So tonight I'd like to explore this teaching around on a time, and hopefully in an accessible and a practical way and see if we can get some new understanding or some different understanding around it. Now, the seeing through this sense of self can happen in different ways. Sometimes sincere practice alone, even without even hearing anything about an Anata or any of these other teachings, just practicing starts to open that door all on its own. Something just starts to fall away. And we can see this in the progress of insight, for example, when we practice that in very sincere ways, they often do an IMS. There's a point where that sense of self abates and falls away. And many meditation techniques and methods are designed to unfold in that way. Sometimes deep suffering can also open that gate, it allows us to see through this identification, two famous modern day teachers at Kartoli, who had severe depression for years until he finally something shifted and he suddenly saw the nature of himself, the nature of self fall away. Same thing with Byron Katie, also struggled with tremendous suffering. So sometimes that deep suffering leads to the seeing through this sense of self. It's like there's no other door except releasing that. It's also the method of inquiry of how I actually look for that sense of self. Who am I? Where is that sense of me? Some of the mystics and not so much, they're all passed away, but in the last century, Christian Murty and Masaga Gatti, all those teachers brought in that quality of direct seeing and that quality of inquiry to see in a more clear way. And of course, there's the Dharma, the Dharma with all its maps to understanding, to seeing through, particularly the dependent origination, the 12 lengths, the five aggregates, and six spheres of consciousness are all maps that the Buddha used to describe and understand this sense of self and to help people see through that. And then finally, there's the integration, that we can have a sense of seeing through this nature of self, but how does it actually show up in the world? How does it have non-self-parent? How does it have no relationships? How does it work? And ultimately, it's not so much the ideas around it, but the direct seeing that is essential, because the idea of it is very different than the experience, because that transforms the very way we see ourselves in the world. So tonight, I'd like to explore this sense of self from probably more of an investigative perspective. So that tends to be the way I tend to look at it. So investigation, just to step back and kind of define what that word means. Investigation, we can see in the seven factors of awakening. And I sometimes conceive of it as directed mindfulness, mindfulness that's moving toward where there's suffering, where there's struggle, where there's some area of unconsciousness. We can see it as sensing into that edge of where delusion and wisdom meet. Where we start to have wisdom growing, but there's also this sense of confusion and clarity. That investigation allows our attention to really lay on there. I look at investigation not as a so much as an intellectual process, as you might think of like an investigative reporter, but much more of a process of direct seeing, an invitation to see and feel and open to the body, body's experience, for example, or that actually felt sense of this. So it's less often think of it as like a one part cognitive and then four parts feeling of the body. So as we start to study this sense of self, eventually it actually, let's go of it. Something follows through. There's a beautiful quote from Dojin, patron saint of Zen. The first part of it, I would say the whole quote is, to study the Buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind as well as the body and minds of others drop away. No trace of realization remains and this no trace continues endlessly. So this very powerful statement from Dojin, there's a lot here to unpack and to direct toward pointing toward the path. But I want to use the first two parts of this as a framework for tonight, that to study the Buddha way is to study the self. To study the self, what does that mean? How do we actually bring that quality of investigation around the sense of self? And the second part is to study the self is to forget the self. So that would be kind of the basic framework. And these two aspects are helpful from an investigative perspective, which I think is particularly helpful in a lay life. You know, if you're primarily a householder with responsibilities and relationships and jobs and maybe kids or grandkids or whatever it might be, how do you bring forth the depth of practice in the midst of the busyness? Because maybe perhaps many of us have gone on many retreats and there's that sustained quality of our practice, our letting go of all of our responsibilities, so we can really devote ourselves to just being present. What we substitute for that, that sustained practice on daily life is our energy and this inquiry, this kind of driving or this passionate inquiry or investigation, particularly how our practice shows up in our lives. We bring energy and interest into understanding the nature of self, which then naturally leads to forgetting the self. So there's, there's more to say about studying the self because that's coming from this side of our minds, the side of our normal way of approaching things. And there's, so we spend more time on that. This helps to reassure, reassure the sense of self, okay, it's okay to actually relax. Because in some ways that's ultimately what happens is we can only go so far with our will. And if the sense of self starts to become a little worried and tense around it, that kind of puts the brakes on everything. But if we can start to relax into this inquiry, relax into the nature of who we are, something that since the self relaxes, and then finally let's go. And then we'll talk also at the end about forgetting the self. Where does that go? Which goes to a place beyond words, which is it's harder to articulate. So this first aspect to study the Buddha way is to study the self. Now, if I talk about a few different things, listen with the idea of what resonates with you. What's kind of a something that draws your interest forward. Because this becomes a gateway for you, a gateway in how to find a purchase in this slippery topic. It could do this slippery because the more we look for that sense of self, we try to understand it. This sense of self is actually just becomes kind of hides behind that very energy itself. So if something resonates, you know, make a note of that and see if you can bring a way to practice to bring energy to that. And we really do need energy to start this process of looking at the sense of self to see through this kind of core delusion. This core, I think it as a core delusion because from the sense of self's perspective, greed makes sense, hatred makes sense. You know, all these things are always being battered by the worldly winds of praise and blame and gain and loss. When the sense of self falls away, there's a more less battered by that. And so that energy allows us to start to see through that delusion because it's a very subtle kind of behind the scenes and lying premise of this, this sense of separation. So we learn to start to turn our attention to that sense of self, this sense of I, this sense of me, of mine, also outwardly as I look at another person, that's yours, that's you, that's who you are. The sense of us who's having this experience right now, as I kind of guided a little bit in the meditation is that we can do our normal practice, but then sometimes step back and just notice, okay, where is the sense of me who's meditating? Where is that actually located? You know, is it as solid as I think it is? And the sense of self is interesting in many ways. If we, if you kind of hold this possibility that the sense of self actually isn't as continuous and stable as we usually take it to be. And how we take that sense of self and project it into the past and we're through memory, that's the me who lived through that experience. And yet it only does exist in our memory at this point. If we stop thinking about that past, if we stop calling it forth, where is it? There's of course the conditioning of our past, which then shapes the way we perceive this moment, perceiving how things are. Our dog, we put up a baby gate from when our daughter was young to keep him kind of corralled into the kitchen area. And early on in that process, the gate fell and made this loud noise. And so he would see that gate and he would, you know, be very afraid of it, even though it was completely stable. And this is an example of how the conditioning of our lives does distort the present moment, distorts how we see things, how we experience life. And this is one of the freedoms we start to have with practice, is to free the present moment from our history, from our past. There's also the projection to the future, how the sense of me will be in that imagined future. Maybe it's one I'm nervous about, maybe it's one I'm excited about, but it's all in turn the imagination into the sense of idea. And yet we won't be the same person that we had that experience, you know, like yesterday or 10 years ago, the same thing we won't see in the future. We won't be the same person that we are right now. Herklaides, the Greek philosopher said, we can't step in the same river twice because it's not the same river and we're not the same person. This teachings have been permanent. It's a constant change. It goes against this idea of a permanent self. And yet we project that into the future. It's like we're connecting the dots. Okay, I grew up, I had this experience when I was a child and then through different school education and then different relationships, different roles and jobs. And I see that as a constant sense of self. And yet if we look closely, we see how that's actually constantly arising and passing. And this is a subtle seeing that you might have access to when your practice is really steady, very deep, seeing that sense of self arise and pass away. But sometimes stepping back just to again, this is helping to reassure ourselves that it's okay to explore this territory, to see that it's actually, it's not something that we're going in an unknown territory. We're actually rediscovering what's already here. What I mean by that is that this is really our essence and this is self as we forget that essence. We can step back and look at it kind of the bigger picture of our lives. Think back in your own life and the different roles that you inhabited, the different roles that felt very alive for you and very pertinent, you know, how you were as a child, how you were in whatever schooling you did, whatever relationships, whatever jobs and roles you had for myself, having a child became a big defining role for me, you know, how it was to be a father to our daughter. And the more I held onto that role, the more suffering it was for myself and for others, because that role would naturally change when she goes through different phases of life, when she went off to college and feeling that empty nest. And so we start to see that the more attached we are to those roles, the more suffering we experience, the more pain we have from that, that movement. And at the same time, the more lightly we hold it, the more ease we have. And so this is pointing to kind of the big nature of self, the big identifications that arise and how we can start to become looser with that. This starts to hint at why the sense of self is part of that second noble truth and how the thirst to become, the thirst to form to the sense of self is really tied to the origination of dukkha, the origination of suffering. The Buddha was reflecting before, after he became the Buddha, he was reflecting back before he was the Buddha. He was subject to these things of aging, of death, sorrow, defyment. And then he also realized he was seeking after, he was basically realizing how impermanent his own experience was, how his body was impermanent, his mind was impermanent, his health was impermanent, and he realizes he was looking for happiness, he was looking for ease and peace and things which were also externally in change, in flux, and how that made no sense, that him he's changing and this other thing is, his life is changing. So seeking what is outside of that, what's outside of this nature of self. So let's talk about what is this sense of self, you know, what does, what does that mean, how can we understand it? So I think it's important first of all to say that there is the healthy sense of self, there's the relative truth of the sense of self, that we need to have enough self-love and appreciation for ourselves, to learn how to care for ourselves, to have enough self-esteem. You know, it doesn't have to be perfect, but you know, the balance needs to shift enough that we kind of basically feel okay about ourselves. If we try to skip that, and sometimes this happens in the term spiritual bypassing, when we think, okay, if I can get over this personal pain, I can avoid it by going to these deeper states of realization. I think of it as a kind of a spiritual game of, spiritual bypassing game of shoots and ladders. I don't know how many of you are familiar with that game, but there's, it's a child's game that you have these board that you have little squares you're going along, and there's these places where you can take a ladder and jump up higher on the board to the final goal. But there's also places that are shoots that you get on and you slide back down to maybe the very beginning. So if you ever played this game, it's a little, it's very, it's completely random, or the dice, and you're almost there and you hit a shoot and fall back. And that's a little bit what happens with our practice. If we start to go into this spiritual bypassing territory, that I want to avoid my personal pain by retreating into something like anatta, to use that as a way to kind of jump over myself, over my pain. I may take the ladder, but then one of those shoots we're gonna, I'm gonna land on the shoot, and that's gonna take the form of maybe a deep loss, maybe a relationship crisis, maybe a health crisis that can bring us back down to the base. So part of this, this territory is so helpful to have compassion. It's kind of heavy, heavily weighted on the wisdom side, but compassion is so important for us to be able to meet this experience, to meet how this mind and body is unfolding. This also, I think it's helpful to think of it as the relative navigational sense of self. This is the conditioned self, right? So that for most of us, including myself, I spent a lot of time trying to make myself, my self more functional, more psychologically healthy, more able to think better, to reason better, to be able to learn skills, to do different careers. And that navigational self helps us navigate through the world, go through the, all the difference ups and downs. And this comes and goes in different stages of life. And part of our, so we don't lose that, we don't lose that capacity to have this navigational self. The big shift with, with understanding Ananta is that we realize that's not the bottom line. That's not the end of the sentence. That's not the end of the story. There's actually something beyond that navigational self. And that becomes what Oriental is. That what becomes our kind of a guiding, kind of a North Star. Now, as you reflect on your own practice, you've, you probably realize that there's times in your life you're surprised by you, how you respond to familiar situations. That somehow you respond very differently. Perhaps there's a quality of, of ease or perhaps not taking it so personally. Then there's this part of this freedom that we experience in our practice. And this is not becoming less and less attached to that sense of self. So the different ways that our society careers put projections on us, we start to have more freedom around it. So this sense of self, there's the, again, there's the virileality of the navigational self or the relative self. There's the importance of having a healthy s