Buddhism: Finding Your No-Self

What's this article about?

"Life," the Buddha said – and this was a big thing, his first Noble Truth – "is suffering." And there is nothing (well, almost nothing) you can do about it. You may be rich today, but someday your money may be gone, and if that happens, your poverty will be all the more bitter. You may be young and attractive, but if you're blessed to live a long life, your looks will fade and your health will falter. You may be in love today, but what happens when your loved ones leave you? Or die? Life is, indeed, suffering.

If you're willing to look at it from that angle.

This might seem a bit strange from a modern point of view, but you need to remember that the Buddha was thinking about all this  around 2500 years ago, in the area between India and Nepal, and, as you might imagine, there are some rather stark differences between the lives of his contemporaries and ours.

The Buddha's World

First, there was just a lot more to suffer. This was before air conditioning, retirement accounts, antibiotics, democracy, corrective lenses, sole inserts, and most indoor jobs. If you were alive then and there, you were probably going to spend a good chunk of your time hunkered over in your rice paddy, quite likely in the heat, almost certainly in the rain, at least some of the time. Assuming you were lucky enough to have a rice paddy.

There was something else in the mix here, though, something that would really bring suffering into focus: the idea of reincarnation.

You were born. You had a little fun, but there was also all this loss, poor health, and hard work. And then, when things begin to get really bad, your life is over. Is this the sweet embrace of death? No – it's just your chance to be reborn and do it all again. And again.

And again.

This is samsara: the cycle of birth and rebirth, death and redeath, and all the suffering that goes on in between.

From this point of view, the idea of almost-eternal life doesn't sound so appealing, does it?

Suffering wouldn't be so bad if it only lasted for a few dozen years. It's something you could put up with, while eking out as much satisfaction and meaning as you could in the meantime. This is not, of course, the world that the Buddha perceived.

The desire to escape suffering, what the Buddha was looking for, was the desire to escape the nigh-eternal suffering that the universe kept proffering, at least according to the thinkers of his day.

Interconnection

This endless misery had to do with the idea that everything and everyone is interconnected. Suffering is caused by the fact that people are not just trapped in an endless cycle of birth and death. Within the big cycles there are smaller cycles of cause and effect - bad acts reap punishments, good acts are rewarded, and then the reward fades away, and suffering begins again. His goal was to escape all of this. That's what nirvana is – ceasing to be a being that is part of cause-and-effect. (Or, possibly, becoming a being who is immune to cause-and-effect, depending on who you ask.) The Buddha's ideas of interconnection go a bit further than the ones we have here in the west.

1. Karma

For one thing, there was karma. While we think of mass and energy as being constant in the universe, the people of the Buddha's world believed that morality was constant, too. Just as nature abhors a vacuum and e=mc², every good moral action must be repaid. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but if you do something good, you throw the universe just a little out of balance, and nature will repay you, in kind and magnitude, to return to homeostasis.

The same thing goes for bad acts.

So here's another form of entanglement: whenever we do something good or bad and it effects another sentient being, it alters the karma of both parties. Since all karmic debts will eventually be repaid, one of the nicest things you can do for someone else is let them do something nice for you. (This is why many of my Thai Buddhist acquaintances celebrated their birthdays by making donations at temples and cooking dinner for their friends.)

2. Dividualism

Furthermore, it appears that the idea of the individual worked differently there. This was a wet-rice-growing part of the world, and a person can't engage in wet rice agriculture by himself. It involves flooding and unflooding the rice paddies at various times of the year, and that means moving a lot of water around, which also requires a great deal of wood-, stone-, and earth-moving, to build dams and dikes and retaining walls and sluice gates. Survival in a society like this demands a great deal of cooperation in construction, maintenance, water distribution. In the end, a person couldn't just scratch out a living on her own. Existence involved being part of a larger whole – a family, a clan, a village, a district.

For all these reasons, people probably saw themselves enmeshed, entangled, and entwined with one another in ways that shaped their identities. This interconnection probably even shaped how they thought about what it meant to be human. In Confucian terms – somewhat different from Buddhist terms, of course, but not completely unrelated – to be human was to be in relationships with other humans.

(To deal with this pervasive sense of interconnection, social scientists have come up with the rather clunky, unpleasant-sounding "dividual," which they can juxtapose against the western "individual" to drive the point home.)

Insight and Meditation

So how do you deal with the suffering that comes from being tightly bound to the world around you in so many different directions? This is where meditation comes in. You can meditate for relaxation – that will make it easier to cope with all this suffering – or you can practice vipassana meditation – meditation to gain the insights that will help you escape from samsara.

Since we can't fix the world around us, the best thing we can do, in the long run, is to fix ourselves. This is the goal of vipassana: to gain the insights that will make you immune to suffering.

Physical pain occurs in any animal body. But emotional pain – the desires, the grief that follows loss, the fears and worries that suffuse so many lives – come from clinging to things we can't actually hold on to: loved ones who leave, possessions that break, jobs that disappear, promises that are never fulfilled, status that falls.

All of these, in one way or another, the Buddha realized, relate to a way of thinking about "I."

I am loved, I am valued, I am punctual, I am fun at parties…

Although we don't spend much time thinking about this fact, we spend a lot of our days thinking about the world as it relates to us, and all those relationships carry with them little identities.

We like a lot of those identities.

We cling to them. Even when we shouldn't.

Clinging

One day a few years back (a little bit before I wrote On the Clock, not coincidentally) I had taken a part-time gig teaching enrichment courses to retirees. They were a lot of fun – more confident and willing to put their ideas out there than the average undergrad, more willing to ask questions when something confused them or piqued their interest, and full of fascinating stories. (It was from these folks that I learned that the Japanese military sent incendiary bombs via balloon to the US during World War II.) One thing that they would not put up with, however, was tardiness.

We met in a small classroom in the old Spanish mission near Oceanside, California, a good distance north of my home, (The missions, founded by Junipero Serra, were spaced about a day's walk apart, so that a traveller would have a place to stay each night. Since I lived near the one in San Diego, this made for a noticeable commute.) I did not know Oceanside well, and the day I was going to lecture on Buddhist psychology, I got off at the wrong exit and found myself in downtown, stuck on an interminable one-way street heading away from the Mission. This disturbed me greatly. Even a little lateness would be held against me. When it comes to teaching, I'm a very punctual person.

Except, of course, I wasn't.

There is no such thing as a "punctual person."

There are people who have been punctual in the past.

There are people who like being punctual. They value it, and get annoyed when other people aren't.

But past performance does not guarantee future returns.

That particular day, I was not a punctual person.

It wasn't who I was.

The retirees were polite when I arrived (although they made it pretty clear that they had expected to start a little sooner). My pay wasn't docked, I wasn't reprimanded. Nothing bad actually happened in any material way – but I did disappoint myself. I popped my own balloon, the one I inflated by convincing myself I was a responsible, timely person.

I wasn't late on purpose; I just took a wrong turn. It was a minor mistake, and holding it against myself didn't get me there any sooner. All it did was serve a source of stress.

In other words, if I hadn't attached significance to my sense of myself as a timely person, and clung to that identity, nothing would have changed, except my mood and my heart rate.

Self/No-Self

This is a trivial little example of clinging – but that's basically the point. Most examples of clinging are trivial. And yet if you add them all up, you get a life.

To live in the moment is to give up connection to those little identities. If you get pulled over for speeding on the way to Oceanside, California, give up your attachment to the idea that you're a law-abiding person. And then give up your attachment to $368.

Maybe you think you're funny. If a joke falls flat, then at that moment, you're not. The feeling of failure can be hard to take, but is it harder than the frustration that comes with bombing again and again, across a hundred thousand lifetimes?

Here's a little quiz you can give yourself:

Try to come up with a definition of "I" that covers all these scenarios, but that isn't so broad and vague that it doesn't actually mean anything.

Who is the "I" you're talking about when you say:

• "I have a cold." (Is that your hair or you feet? Probably not. Your immune system? Your blood? Your ear, nose, and throat?)
• "I'm angry." (This one is probably not your immune system. Is it your brain? Do you know it because you feel it in your fists or stomach? Is it your nervous system?)
• "I'm soaking wet." (Of course you are. If you weren't you'd be a mummy. But that's not what you mean. This "I" is not even entirely in your body – or, depending on how you're using the word, not in your body at all.)
• "I was rear-ended on the interstate." (It's very unlikely that this implicates your personal rear end.)
• "I was dreaming…" (do you mean that you were doing something in your dream-world, or that you were creating the dream world? They were both "I," of course, although those two versions of I are very different.)
• "I am my father's child." (Lots of possibilities here.)
• "I am a Romanian." (That's not your immune system. It's more a state of allegiance – but then, that implicates things far from your body. Would you be a Romanian if you were born on a spot in what is now Bucharest, 200,000 years ago?)
• "I am contributing to climate change." (If you were alone on earth, there's very little you could do to cause it. Nature would continue on with its homeostasis. This "I" is only possible as part of a much larger system.)

I'm serious about you taking this quiz.

When you've got your answer, click here.

In the End

To reach enlightenment, a person has to give up all desires – and this involves an exceptionally deep cleaning of her connections. This is the goal of vipassana meditation, along with the realization that life really is suffering and there is only one way to escape it.

The theory behind this sort of meditation involves the idea that there are two human natures. We live in one of them day by day, clinging, striving and desiring, connection to all those identities we like to imagine ourselves through. There is a second, harder to find, in which we accept who we are, in our infinite and fluid possibilities, and welcome the world as it is, without resistance or ambition to create a solid, lasting self.

So the normal human nature – the one we ordinarily live through – is basically deluded. It works on the premise that there's a self that exists through all of our experiences. The problem is, as the Buddha discovered, there isn't. So how can you lose your sense of an immutable self?

The practice of meditation often involves sitting quietly, and noticing that noises are noises, thoughts are thoughts, and feelings are feelings – they all exist, they all pass through your awareness, but none of them are you. It's easy to get caught up in thoughts and feelings – pique is a powerful thing – but, when you meditate, it's important to remember that "I" is not the goals you're so easily absorbed in, or the feelings that wash over you and pull you out to the emotional sea.

The goal here is to disconnect a sense of "I" from everything that goes through your head. If you can rid yourself of identities, of an "I" that is connected to things, then you can solve the problem of personal suffering, You may not get rid of the pain, but you can eliminate the "I" that suffers it.

How to Meditate

All of this is stage-setting for what seems like it should be an easy, relaxing exercise. Here's a simple meditation:

1. 1. Set a timer for 20 minutes.
   2. Sit comfortably in a place with few distractions.
   3. Close your eyes.
   4. Don't think or feel.

And when the timer goes off, you're done.

That's it.

Step 4 is the hard part. As you sit quietly, thoughts will inevitably pass through your mind. The trick is to avoid getting caught up in them. Instead, the goal is to realize, "Oh, here's a thought," and let it go. (If it's important it will come back later. No need to worry about that.) You can also get caught up in emotions. One of the most prevalent emotions that appear when people meditate is annoyance at being unable to stop feeling emotions. Feelings create more feelings. It gets very meta. Set all that aside.

If you do this often enough for long enough, you can habituate yourself into recognizing that the thoughts and feelings it's so easy to get wrapped up in aren't actually you. They are simply thoughts and feeling that pass through the awareness that you connect to your sense of "I."

So What About Us…

here in the west? If Buddhism was about escaping the horrors of eternal interconnection, why has it become so popular in places like the US, where people neither worry about intensive interconnectedness nor about living too much life?

What Buddhist meditation offers is a way to think about escaping from the excesses of life. Whether they involve the dense interwovenness of clan-based wet rice agriculture or the hurly-burly of the capitalist hustle, or, for that matter, the ferocious lifestyle of the Yanamami of the Amazon Basin or the challenges of life in the Eskimo, most ways of being lead to specific – sometimes unique – forms of suffering. Those forms all afflict one or another vision of "I."

What the Buddha had to offer was a way of stepping back from the forms of "I" that people are so prone to lock themselves in to, and to find a way of looking at the world with eyes that see everything else, but not one's own self.