Letting Go of Egoic Attachments

Giving up belief in identity-view is the key to stream-entry (the first stage of awakening). It is equivalent to realizing anatta.

Giving up belief in identity-view is equivalent to letting go of egoic attachments.

Egoic attachments are identified by observing the mind and body and noticing when unpleasant emotions and cravings arise in response to events or thoughts and noticing if/how the ego is involved. Learning to notice the sensations in the body that accompany emotions help one to notice when unpleasant emotions and cravings arise.

It is possible to learn to let go of egoic attachments by practicing relaxing meditation which helps you to cultivate samatha.

Cultivating vipassana helps you learn to notice egoic attachments, and cultivating samatha helps you learn to let go of egoic attachments. When you let go of egoic attachments you are not affected by identity-view and you suffer much less.

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There isn't an entity separate from the aggregates.

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There isn't any entity separate from the aggregates*. When something upsets us we are thinking of an entity ("me") that needs to be defended from insult or injury. While there is a body that is made up of various tissues, a brain that has different regions with different functions, a mind with different ways or producing thoughts, emotions, impulses, sensory experiences, sense of self or no-self, there isn't actually an entity ("me") separate from those various different things. Yet we think "I have a body, I have a mind, those thoughts emotions impulses are mine". There isn't any actual unified entity, "I", or "me", that has those things only the separate parts. Our attachments to self are based on an idea of a "me" that does not exist, when the basis for the attachments is understood to be an illusion, the attachments diminish.

When you understand from observing the mind in action that there isn't any entity separate from those different parts, that there is no one that needs to be protected from insult or injury, then attachments and suffering diminish. But reading these words alone may not allow you to understand this. The way to understand it is to quiet the mind with relaxing meditation, then watch the activity of the mind:

• Notice the arising and fading of thoughts, emotions, impulses, sensory experiences, and the sense of self or no-self.

• Notice thoughts, emotions, impulses etc. pop into awareness fully formed from who-knows-where. You don't see how they are formed, created, or chosen. When you try to concentrate you get distracted by stray thoughts. You have unwanted emotions - you don't choose your emotions. You have impulses that are often unhelpful. Sensory perceptions and sensations appear in consciousness and you can't stop them. People have conflicting desires that work at cross purposes such as craving food when trying to lose weight. You don't control your thoughts, emotions, impulses etc., so you don't control your mind. If you don't control you mind, you don't control your body either.

• Notice that stream of consciousness is a sequence of cause and effect where one thought or emotion or impulse triggers the next due to a memory, an association, an experience, or logic, without any actual entity controlling it.

  Notice automaticity. Notice that when you do something, to a large extent it happens automatically. When you walk, you don't think about balance or having to move your feet a certain way, you just do it. Sometimes when you drive you find yourself on a section of road, but you don't remember getting there.

• Notice the feeling of agency (free will) comes from having impulses before you actually do something, but the impulse and the decision to follow it or reject it arises from unconscious processes that you don't have control over, they just pop into awareness like all other thoughts, emotions, impulses, sensory experiences, and senses of self or no-self.

• Notice the idea or feeling of being an observer of thoughts, emotions, impulses etc. is dependent on something to observe, and it comes and goes depending on intensity of attention, and it is no different from any other thought or feeling that arises from unconscious processes.

• Notice that when you are upset, the ego is usually involved and that you have an idea of a being, an entity "I" or "me" that needs to be protected from insult or injury, and that entity doesn't physically exist - what really exists are just the various separate parts, the body and tissues, the brain and its various regions, and the mind made up of different sources for thoughts, emotions, impulses, sensory experiences, and senses of self and no-self.

Most people have already noticed much of this without doing any formal meditation or mindfulness practices. What they haven't done is recognized the implications.

Another helpful practice is mindfulness. When you are mindful, in meditation or daily life, you are aware of what is happening or what you are doing in the present moment. You are not thinking about the past or the future or trying to solve a problem. You are just observing in the present moment. When you are mindful, when you mind is not wandering, when you are observing in the present moment, you are not thinking of a "me" that is separate from the aggregates.

The belief that there is an entity separate from the aggregates is called identity-view (sakkaya-ditthi), it is one of the ten fetters that are lost when one is fully awakened. Losing identity-view is the main component of the first stage of awakening, stream-entry.

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* The Stream Entry of Ajahn Chah - By Ajahn Nyanamoli Thero

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You can describe to yourself your experience as a whole, which can be called ‘the five aggregates’. If something is external to it – you realise ‘how could I even think of that? How could I think of something external to my thinking?’ That is a complete contradiction in terms.

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Disengaging the Ego

Unpleasant emotions can be hard to let go of. If you examine unpleasant emotions, you may notice that there is usually some involvement of the ego. You might feel that if you could somehow disengage your ego then you could let go of the emotion and you would suffer a lot less.

There is a way to disengage the ego. It is easier to learn to do it while meditating, but the disengagement persists for a time after a meditation session, so it can be helpful in daily life. And with practice, disengaging the ego becomes easier to do.

This is one way to disengage the ego:

1. Relax and meditate to quiet the mind.

2. Then notice an unpleasant emotion, let yourself feel it.

3. Try to see clearly how the ego is involved - so that you understand disengaging the ego, letting go, would eliminate the emotion. But at this point you probably feel stuck, you can't let go.

4. Then try to relax. That probably that won't change much, you still feel stuck, until the next step:

5. Add an extra ingredient.

   I don't know exactly what to call this extra ingredient, probably the best way to describe it that will get someone close enough to figure it out for themselves is to call it metta. But it is not exactly metta, it is metta/humility/forgiveness/tranquil-happiness/freedom/compassion. It is the feeling of letting go, the feeling of letting go of your ego, the feeling of having your ego disengaged.

   When you do this correctly, the ego disengages, you let go of the emotion.

   I think many people who meditate will recognize this feeling, but you might not think of it as ego disengagement. I know this feeling very well, it's what I mean when I say, "When I am fully relaxed, nothing bothers me". But I had to experience it in the right context to see that is ego disengagement. If you follow the link and master that practice, you will understand what this "extra ingredient" is. When you do that practice, first your body starts to feel numb or tingling, then that feeling becomes more intense, then you feel like you are floating, and that becomes more intense, then you experience a transition (your ego becomes disengaged) and nothing is bothering you. If you experience that transition while focusing your attention on an unpleasant emotion, you will see that your ego has been disengaged.

I don't know how easy or hard this will be for any particular person to figure this out, but once you see how to do it, you can practice it and get better at it. The disengagement persists so you have to wait until it fades before you can try to produce it again.

In Buddhism, the first stage of awakening is called stream-entry. The main ingredient in stream-entry is the loss of identity view. Identity view is the belief that the self is a thing. When you are able to disengage the ego, you implicitly recognize that the ego is something that can be turned on and off or engaged and disengaged. The ego is not a thing, it is not a permanent entity, it is some type of process - it is one of the various unconscious processes that produce mental activity ie. thoughts, emotions, impulses, sensory experiences, and also the sense of self (the ego). When you can disengage the ego, it is loss of identity view.

Loss of identity view doesn't mean you don't have emotions, it means you don't identify with them. When the ego is disengaged, you can let go of emotions more easily, and you can stay mindful more easily. When you are mindful of emotions, you don't react to emotions by pushing them away or judging them or suppressing them and you also don't get lost in thought or carried away by emotions in response to them.

The other factors in stream entry are loss of doubt about the teachings and loss of attachment to rites and rituals. Loss of attachment to rites and rituals is interperted to mean that you stop looking at meditation as some type of magic process because you see how it really works. So, learning to disengage the ego also involves loss of these other two factors, you understand how meditation helps you end suffering, and you have no doubt that it really works. Therefore, learning to disengage the ego is one way to attain stream-entry.

The process of learning to disengage the ego more easily over time so that you can keep the ego disengaged for longer and longer periods of time in daily life is part of attaining higher stages of awakening. In order to keep the ego disengaged in daily life, it is necessary to be mindful in daily life so that you can stay relaxed and notice when the ego becomes engaged and then disengage it.

Another part of attaining higher stages of awakening is letting go of attachments and aversions. Disengaging the ego allows you to let go but it doesn't automatically rid you of attachments and aversions. It doesn't eliminate your habitual reactions that have been reinforced over a lifetime. You still have to observe the activity of your mind to recognize attachments and aversions, and you have to decide to let go. Letting go means learning to relax and accept your emotions rather than reacting to them with in unmindful ways - you don't push emotions away or get carried away by them. Letting go may feel like letting down your barriers and expanding your borders. It may feel like your self is dissolving.

It can be hard to figure out how to accept emotions. It becomes easier if you understand that an unpleasant emotion is resistance to a fact of reality that we don't like. It's a lot easier to accept a fact we don't like than an emotion because if we understand a fact is the truth, then there is really no alternative but to believe it, ie. to accept it as truth. If we understand an unpleasant emotion is simply our resistance to an unpleasant fact, then if we can accept the fact as a truth, then when we accept the fact, there is no more resistance to it. It can be helpful, when you experience an unpleasant emotion, to identify the fact of reality that you are resisting, and remind yourself that what is really the problem is your resistance to the fact that, "reality is not the way I want it to be".

In Buddhism, those at the highest stage of awakening are said to experience nirvana with remainder. Nirvana is the absence of suffering. That there is remainder means it is not complete absence of suffering. This is because a complete elimination of suffering is not possible due to the limitations imposed by being a biological organism.

Related Reading

Despite the common perception that awakening is a sudden and mystical experience, for many people, maybe the majority of people, awakening is not sudden and not mystical.

Man on Cloud Mountain - Shodo Harada Roshi-Segment

Often enlightenment or kensho or satori is considered to be some kind of unusual experience or something external or some kind of special phenomenon. But it’s not like that. There may be some kind of sudden revelation or some kind of sudden perception, but its not something that is that unusual or that strange or foreign that we come upon or that comes upon us. 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.

On Enlightenment – An Interview with Shinzen Young

When it happens suddenly and dramatically you’re in seventh heaven. It’s like after the first experience of love, you’ll never be the same. However, for most people who’ve studied with me it doesn’t happen that way. What does happen is that the person gradually works through the things that get in the way of enlightenment, but so gradually that they might not notice. What typically happens is that over a period of years, and indeed decades, within that person the craving, aversion, and unconsciousness—the mula kleshas (the fundamental “impurities”), get worked through. But because all this is happening gradually they’re acclimatizing as it’s occurring and they may not realize how far they’ve come. That’s why I like telling the story about the samurai...

Enlightenments By Jack Kornfield

There is also what is called the “gateless gate.” One teacher describes it this way: “I would go for months of retreat training, and nothing spectacular would happen, no great experiences. Yet somehow everything changed. What most transformed me were the endless hours of mindfulness and compassion, giving a caring attention to what I was doing. I discovered how I automatically tighten and grasp, and with that realization I started to let go, to open to an appreciation of whatever was present. I found an ease. I gave up striving. I became less serious, less concerned with myself. My kindness deepened. I experienced a profound freedom, simply the fruit of being present over and over.” This was her gateless gate.

Uposatha Sutta - The Dharmafarers, themindingcenter.org

Even so, bhikshus, just as the great ocean slopes gradually, slides gradually, inclines gradually, not abruptly like a precipice — so, too, in this Dharma-Vinaya, penetration into final knowledge occurs by gradual training, not abruptly.1

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Give Yourself Permission to Have Emotions

When something happens and you feel an unpleasant emotion or craving, you may react to that emotion with more unpleasant emotions. This creates a type of feedback loop. (For those who are interested in dependent origination, step 12 feeds back into step 6.)

For every time a situation triggers us, we trigger ourselves again and again, because we don't like having unpleasant emotions, (especially if we practice meditation because we want to become serene and we feel anything that is not serenity is a kind of failure). This is one reason it is so hard to let go. And it focuses our mind on the situation so we get more triggers from the situation. 

But you can interrupt the feedback loop when you give yourself permission to feel bad (allow yourself to accept/welcome your feelings without rejecting them or pushing them away) and while also maintaining mindfulness (not judging, not getting drawn in: your thinking mind doesn't start wandering, and you are not carried away by emotions).

The suffering caused by negative reactions to emotions is usually what is causing the vast majority of our suffering. The resistance is really the problem not the actual emotion. When you accept your emotions with equanimity, you experience a great sense of relief. Unpleasant situations are much easier to endure when you stop making things worse by beating yourself up over how you react to them.

And it isn't just unpleasant emotions and cravings. There are often emotions that in themselves aren't unpleasant, but we might not like to have them for various reasons so we react to them in an unpleasant way. This often happens if we feel an emotion that doesn't reflect our values, for example if you think of yourself as a spiritual person but you feel excessive pride, or someone else's misfortune makes you happy, etc. These types of emotions can set up the same type of feedback loop, where one emotions results in other unpleasant emotions.

By giving yourself permission to feel all your emotions, by making it okay to let yourself feel what you feel, you can experience your emotions to their full depth, explore layers of emotions and associated reactions. You can get things out of your system (let go of them) by letting them express themselves.

Doing this, in a sense, is losing identity-view because we stop protecting the "self" from insult and injury. We stop reacting like the self-image is a physical thing when it is only an image projected by the unconscious processes that produce all of our thoughts, emotions, and impulses. When you give yourself permission to feel all your emotions, it is like removing the ego filter.

Developing the habit of observing the mind and learning to notice the sensations in your body that accompany emotions can help you learn to notice emotions more easily.

When you notice an emotion you don't like, it can help to say to yourself in a relaxed way:
"It's okay to feel _____".
Try not to push away or judge the emotion, also try to observe how it feels in your mind and body while staying mindful, ie. without getting lost in thought or carried away by emotions.

Saying "it's okay" is a way of saying, "I experience relief from struggling against a fact, by accepting a fact as a fact. Resisting the facts of reality just makes things worse than they have to be. It is much nicer to have equanimity than to be upset - being upset doesn't help."

Saying "it's okay" is not to be understood as giving yourself permission to do anything in response to a situation or emotion, and it is not to be understood as encouraging yourself to repeat anything in the future, it is to be understood only as a reminder to experience your emotions with equanimity and mindfulness. (Equanimity is not pushing away, not rejecting, not judging and mindfulness is not getting lost in thought, not getting carried away by emotions). When you react to situations with equanimity and mindfulness, you are just taking your ego out of the equation. This will allow you to formulate a response to a situation with compassion and reason rather than selfish emotions.

In addition to emotions, you can fill in the blank with physical sensations and situations as well as emotions. You can also include things that are pleasant but that you might react negatively to. Accept with equanimity anything that produces a negative reaction (disliking or craving). Accept the situation and your reactions with equanimity. Try to notice different aspects of the situation that might be upsetting you and accept all of them.

When you notice unpleasant emotions arising, if you look closely you can usually see that the ego is involved. There is almost always something that offends the ego or threatens the self-image that is responsible for the unpleasant emotions. By accepting situations and emotions, giving yourself permission to have unpleasant emotions, you are disengaging the ego. You are teaching yourself to turn off the ego filter, to look at things free from identity-view.

When you accept everything with equanimity, you experience a great sense of relief. Unpleasant situations are much easier to endure when you stop making things ten times worse by beating yourself up over how you react to them.

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Copyright © 2024 by ncu9nc All rights reserved. Texts quoted from other sources are Copyright © by their owners.

How I Would Define of Buddhist Awakening

In this article I will discuss how I think Buddhist awakening should be defined.

Buddhism is explained at its most basic level by the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path which explain the cause of suffering and the end of suffering. So in Buddhism, awakening has to be about easing suffering. Most suffering is caused by attachment to the self-image and to diminish suffering those attachments have to be diminished. The fetter model of awakening in the Pali canon says that at stream-entry (the first stage of awakening) one loses identity-view. Exactly what losing identity-view means is subject to different interpretations. In my opinion, losing identity view should be understood to mean losing attachments to the self-image to the extent that there is a substantial reduction of suffering. I don't know if it is possible to lose those attachments 100% and I don't know that it is impossible either. But in my opinion:

Awakening should be measured by the loss of attachments to the self-image that result in lessened suffering.

Some people define awakening based on experiences that happen during meditation or by some type of non-dual or spiritual experience. There is no Pope in Buddhism and different people have different opinions. I can only say in my opinion:

Experiences only cause awakening if they also cause the loss of attachment to the self-image.

Just the experience by itself, without the loss of attachment to self-image, does not constitute awakening. The experiences by themselves are not necessary or in every case sufficient to cause awakening. 

Since I would measure awakening by loss of attachment to the self-image and not by any particular experience, there is not a good way to identify a moment to call stream-entry. Actually, I would define stream entry as when you understand from examining your own mind that the self-image is just an image and not a thing. But that can happen without causing loss of attachments to the self image. So for these two reasons I would not encourage people to seek or view stream-entry as the first stage of awakening.

(The reason I use the term self-image instead of self is because all of our thoughts arise into consciousness from unconscious processes, we never see how thoughts are constructed they just pop into awareness, and any thought of self that rises from unconscious process is not the self it is the self-image, it is an image projected by unconscious processes into consciousness. We are not able to conceive of the self we only know the self image.)

I also hold the opinion that:

Enlightenment, for most people, is a gradual process independent of exceptional experiences.

Not every one has exceptional experiences and some people who have an exceptional experience don't lose attachment to self-image from it. Awakening is said to be gradual in the Pali canon. Shinzen Young says most of his students awaken gradually and I think that is true for the general population.

I also believe everyone, even non-meditators, have some level of insight into anatta and therefore some level of awakening.

• Most people understand when they get distracted by stray thoughts that they don't control their thoughts.

• Most people understand they don't control their emotions and they sometimes have impulses that are not helpful.

• Most people realize that their egotistical tendencies can cause problems (suffering) for themselves and they would be better off if they were less egocentric.

• People know that when they walk or do other tasks, they don't pay attention to every movement, our bodies operate by themselves to a large extent.

Some people understand this better than others but I think everyone has some glimmer of some part of the fact that our mental and physical life is largely controlled by unconscious processes, which in Buddhist terminology are called the Five Aggregates of Clinging. And whatever amount of enlightenment a person has, they can gradually increase it by practicing meditation and mindfulness and work through the mula kleshas and develop insight into the cause of suffering in their own mind and begin to lose their attachments to the self image. 

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Identity-view

https://mohitvalecha.wordpress.com/2016/06/15/stepping-on-a-frog/

Once there was a monk who specialized in the Buddhist precepts, and he kept to them all his life. Once when he was walking at night, he stepped on something. It made a squishing sound, and he imagined he had stepped on an egg-bearing frog.

This caused him no end of alarm and regret, in view of the Buddhist precept against taking life, and when he finally went to sleep that night he dreamed that hundreds of frogs came demanding his life.

The monk was terribly upset, but when morning came he looked and found that what he stepped on was an overripe eggplant. At that moment his feeling of uncertainty suddenly stopped, and for the first time he realised the meaning of the saying that “there is no objective world.” Then he finally knew how to practice Zen.

If you want to know what this story really means you can follow the link.

What I want to discuss here is that this story illustrates an important principle of how to let go of attachments and aversions, how to let go of unpleasant emotions.

The monk was upset when he thought he stepped on a frog, but when he found out it was an eggplant he wasn't upset any more.

When you are upset and it is due to a misunderstanding, if you clear up that misunderstanding, you can let go easily and you won't be upset any more.

When people are upset, usually it is their ego that is making them upset, but they don't notice it because it feels like a normal and unalterable fact of reality that they should be upset in that situation. That is the fundamental misunderstanding of most suffering, we think our emotions reflect reality when they are really produced by the ego, by egotistic and egocentric thinking (identity-view, Sakkaya-ditthi).

But if people examine their feelings and see their reaction is somehow due to egotistical or egocentric thinking, then they realize they are being silly, they don't have to be upset. And they can let go.

Sometimes it's hard to see how our ego is hurting us because these ways of thinking are so ingrained we don't even notice them, we just think "this is reality and it is not always nice." 

But if you can examine your thinking and see how it is really your ego that is causing the trouble, you see it was just a misunderstanding (you thought it was an inevitable aspect of reality but then you realized it was just your ego), and you can let go. Then reality is a lot nicer.

It might be hard to understand how it can be so easy to let go of unpleasant emotions just by recognizing the involvement of ego in suffering, so I will provide an example.

One day I walked to the grocery store. Often when I would go out for a walk, I would walk in my neighborhood and it would be a pleasant walk. It was a residential neighborhood, there wasn't much traffic, there were birds singing, and cute rabbits in nicely landscaped yards. But that day I needed to go to the store and instead I had to walk on streets with a lot of noisy traffic, past storefronts on streets with litter. It wasn't very nice. I didn't like it. It was better to walk in the residential area than the business district. Then I recognized it was my ego that was upsetting me. This idea that it is better to walk by the houses rather than the busy streets is egoic thinking. The word "better" is saying something about winners and losers. If you have what is better, you are a winner, if you have something worse, you are a loser. I realized it was my ego that didn't like the walk to the store, my ego (the aggregates) wanted to do what was better and not what was worse. When I understood that, the feelings of better and worse disappeared. I (the aggregates) felt like the walk to the store was not better or worse, just different. It had it's own flavor of familiarity, there were people in the cars and stores, it enabled me to get the groceries I needed, etc. It wasn't all good, but it wasn't all bad ether. Really, it wasn't good or bad. The problem was my unconscious egoistic reaction.

This kind of thing can happen many times a day. We have ingrained in our thinking that if we get what we want and avoid what we don't want, we are successful, and if we don't get what we want and can't avoid what we don't want, it is a failure. If you are mindful, if you watch the activity of your mind in meditation and daily life, and can see how every little twinge of dukkha, every little craving or aversion, every little liking and disliking, wanting and not wanting, is your ego is making you suffer, you can let go each time. It sounds simple, but this kind of thinking is so ingrained, it seems like an aspect of reality rather than something you are doing to yourself. You have to be alert to how you feel and then examine your feelings and see what role the egoistic and egocentric thinking (identity-view) is playing. If you do it, you can remove a lot of gloom from reality.

https://inquiringmind.com/article/2701_w_kornfield-enlightenments/

As Ajahn Chah described them, meditative states are not important in themselves. Meditation is a way to quiet the mind so you can practice all day long wherever you are; see when there is grasping or aversion, clinging or suffering; and then let it go.

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