Someone in a discussion forum commented that the doctrine of no-self made them depressed. I think they might have been reacting to this article which I posted to the forum before blogging it here.
I replied that "no-self" doesn't give me that feeling at all. I wrote:
Buddha never said there is no self, he just said that none of the things we form attachments to should be considered self because they are impermanent and not completely under our control. And being attached to them inevitably leads to suffering so that we will be happier if we give up those attachments.It is a recipe for happiness not an argument for nihilism.
To me it means I don't have to suffer from attachments to self - which is the cause of all mental anguish. Imagine that, no more mental anguish. To me that is wonderful. Like on the same level as "Jesus Saves" is to Christians.
(I am a Spiritualist and I believe in an afterlife. Buddha also believed in an afterlife. Where is there room for nihilism in that?)
Here is one way to understand no self:
- Close your eyes notice the feeling of your body, your thoughts, your emotions, they create a sense of you being in your body, a sense of you as the entity having a body, having thoughts and having emotions. (When I do this I get a sense that I am observing a person in my body who has a mood (whatever my mood is at the time) and that person is me - someone else might experience it differently.)
- Now open your eyes and look around you and notice what you see. Now you are aware of only what you see, you are not thinking of your body, or your thoughts, or your emotions, and those things are not producing a feeling of you being in your body.
Is that so bad? If you have physical discomfort or emotional pain, focusing outside yourself will ease the emotional anguish more or less depending on your level of concentration. That's good isn't it?
Actually this is an interesting way to practice to understand how the mind produces the sense of self, repeatedly alternating between focusing inward and focusing outward, focusing on feeling self, focusing on not feeling self.
Noting (a type of vipassana or insight meditation) has a similar effect. When you are noting, the same phenomena that otherwise contribute to your sense of self: awareness of body, thoughts, emotions etc., are experienced as a series of separate disconnected moments of awareness, so they do not produce the feeling of being a self.
When you suffer, it is because the self-thinking arises, the less you engage in "identity view" the less you suffer. How you use your mind, thinking about the environment outside your body, or observing the phenomenon of consciousness, doesn't change anything about reality. It doesn't prove or disprove anything such as the existence of a soul. It is simply a different way of looking at the same things - one that greatly diminishes suffering.
This kind of "no-self" is not thinking "I don't exist", it is simply thinking about something other than "myself". Maybe there is a self maybe there isn't, but empirically we know that thinking "myself" results in suffering, so why think of it? Some people might choose to, but others who want to reduce suffering might decide they prefer to train themselves to stop thinking of "myself" all the time.
If you think about it as deactivating the default mode network in the brain and activating the experiential network, you are simply using a natural ability you've always had and been using from time to time all your life.
Or think of it this way: instead of seeing everything filtered through your ego, you can remove the ego filter and see things as they really are:
What it is, is the ability to see without any interruption of the ego, without any filtering of the ego. And since we are all walking around seeing things through our ego filter almost all the time, to suddenly be able to see without that filter is a surprise. But it is nothing that we have ever not had."But it is nothing that we have ever not had."They say that the mind of a baby is something that we can compare this to. A baby isn’t seeing things from an egoistic place. It is seeing directly and clear. It is the exact same kind of thing when we are seeing without the ego filter.
- Shodo Harada Roshi
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