Self, Not-self, & Beyond

Several years ago I was reading an article in a magazine in which a man was describing his childhood in New York City. His parents had come from Eastern Europe to live in America, and because the family was poor they put a lot of emphasis on his education. They encouraged him to get as much education as he could. One detail in their encouragement I found very insightful. Every day, when the young boy came home from school, the mother didn’t ask him what he had learned that day. Instead she asked him, “What questions did you ask today?” The mother was very wise because she realized that it’s through questions that we give shape to our knowledge: to understand how one piece of knowledge relates to other pieces of knowledge, and to figure out the best way to use our knowledge. This is why it’s important to shape our questions skillfully, for if we don’t, we give the wrong shape to everything else we know, and we won’t get the best use out of our knowledge.

This principle applies very directly to the Buddha’s teachings—which are all strategic—and in particular to the teaching on not-self. To understand this teaching we have to understand what questions it’s answering.

If you’ve ever been in an introductory course on Buddhism, you’ve probably heard this question: “If there is no self, what does the action and what receives the results of the action?” Our discussions this week show that this question is misconstrued in two ways.

The first is that the Buddha never said that there is no self, and he never said that there is a self. The question of whether a self does or doesn’t exist is a question he put aside.

The second reason for why the question is misconstrued is because it has the framework backwards. It’s taking the teaching of not-self as the framework and kamma as something that’s supposed to fit inside the framework. Actually, the relationship is the other way around. Kamma is the framework, and the teaching of not-self is meant to fit in the framework. In other words, the Buddha takes the teachings on skillful and unskillful kamma as his basic categorical teaching. Within that context, the question on self and not-self becomes: When is a perception of self skillful kamma, and when is a perception of not-self skillful kamma? And when are they not skillful?

So to get the most use out of the teachings on self and not-self, we have to approach them with these questions in mind. The Buddha is not trying to define what you are. He’s not trying to fit you into a box. He’s more concerned with helping you. He tries to show you how you define yourself so that you can learn how to use that process of self-definition in a way that leads to the ultimate goal of his teaching: the end of suffering and the attainment of ultimate freedom, ultimate happiness. In this way the teachings on self and not-self are part of the answer to the question, “What when I do it will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness?”

In this context the Buddha talks about the process of what he calls I-making and my-making, with the purpose of showing you how to engage in these actions in a skillful way. Normally we engage in these processes all of the time. We create a sense of “I” in two ways: (1) around what we can control in order to attain happiness and (2) around the aspects of our experience—our mind, our body—that we hope will taste happiness. In other words, we have a sense of our self as the agent or producer of happiness, and our self as the consumer of happiness. We start out very early in life developing our sense of self in these ways. And we create many different selves. Remember the story I told about your little sister. When bullies down the street are threatening her, she is very much your sister. When you get her home safely and she takes your toy truck, she is no longer your sister. She’s the Other. This shows that your sense of self is changing all the time—like an amoeba taking on many different forms.

So it’s good to understand that the sense of self is a strategy, and that we engage in this strategy, making many selves, all the time. Sometimes they’re mutually coherent, sometimes not. Sometimes they’re honest and straightforward, and sometimes not. This is something that becomes very apparent during meditation. As we’ve been mentioning throughout this week, your mind is like a committee. Each member of the committee is a different self that you’ve created and nurtured at some point during your life as a particular strategy for attaining a particular happiness. Sometimes they get along; sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they tell the truth; sometimes they lie. When you start meditating, you encounter them all. The skill of meditation lies in learning how to achieve some order and honesty among the members of the committee, identifying with the more skillful ones, trying to keep the unskillful ones under control, and bringing some truth to their interactions so that you can bring the mind into jhāna.

The idea of not-self is also a strategy that we’ve used many times. We’ve learned that, after identifying with some things for one purpose or to fulfill one desire, we have to dis-identify with them for the purpose of fulfilling another desire. For example, you may identify with your fingernails when they look attractive, but when they get too long you have to cut them and throw the cut-off pieces away.

As with our various perceptions of self, our perceptions of not-self can be either skillful or unskillful. Sometimes we try to lay claim to things that we cannot control, and sometimes we try to deny that we have any responsibility for things that we can control.

In the Buddha’s teaching on how to put an end to suffering, he asks you to make skillful use of both kinds of strategies—self strategies and not-self strategies—and to learn how to employ them ever more skillfully, with more awareness, more discernment, to help with the duties of the four noble truths.

The line between what you think is self and not-self is determined by your sense of control. If you look carefully at the aggregates—form, feeling, perception, fabrication, and consciousness—you can see that you have no absolute control over them, but you do have relative control. For example, when you tell your body to move, it moves; when you tell your mind to think about certain things, it’ll think about them. But your control here is not absolute. Someday you’ll tell the body to move and it won’t budge.

There’s the story in the Canon of a king, eighty years old, who tells a young monk, “When I was young, it was as if I had the strength of two men. But now when I mean to put my foot in one place, it goes someplace else.” The same happens with your mind. There are times when you want it to think and it won’t think, or it’ll think about things you don’t want to think about. This lesson has been impressed on me very strongly this week. When I was studying French in high school, I actually got an award as the best French student in my class. But now when I try to say something in French, nothing comes out. This may tell you something about the American education system, but it also has to do with the fact that the mind is never totally under one’s control. And the situation gets worse as you get older.

So the Buddha recommends, while you have some control over the body and mind, that you make use of that control to help put an end to suffering. When the body and mind are relatively healthy and strong, you have enough control to use them as a path to the end of suffering. You start with the Buddha’s first set of categorical teachings, to abandon unskillful actions and develop skillful ones in their place. You use the aggregates to be generous, to develop virtue, and to develop the mind through meditation.

As you’re trying to gain skill in these practices, you come face-to-face with the committee inside. For example, when you want to be generous, some of the members of the committee like the idea of making bread to give to your friends, and some don’t. Similarly with the precepts: Some of the committee members like the idea of letting the mosquito live and others want to slap it dead. And with meditation: Some members of the committee want to focus on the breath and some want to think about what to do tomorrow. So part of the skill of the practice lies in learning how to sort out the members of the committee and to develop strategies for dealing with them effectively. You learn to use the healthy ego functions of anticipation, suppression, sublimation, altruism, and humor to train the less skillful members of the committee. As you do this, you begin to gain skill in creating a useful sense of self and not-self.

Now there are stages in the practice. After the first set of categorical teachings, you move to the second: the four noble truths. As we mentioned last night, when you put the mind on the path you take the raw material of the aggregates and turn them into jhāna. This is an important step in the practice, because as the mind gets into a state of jhāna, it finds new ways of feeding and new ways of understanding what is and isn’t necessary for happiness. This focuses your attention more and more on your ability to create a sense of well-being inside, and helps you to see lesser forms of pleasure as not-self. You have a solid foundation for letting them go.

When your skill is secure, you’re ready for the higher level of right view, where you start applying the perception of not-self across the board.

This is the step where you see that even though the levels of jhāna are a form of long-term welfare and happiness, nevertheless, they are still uncertain and inconstant. This is a sign that your sense of happiness has become more refined, and your standards for happiness have become higher. This is when the Buddha recommends that you develop the perception that even the pleasure of jhāna is inconstant, stressful, and not-self. This gives rise to a sense of dispassion.

To do this, he recommends refining the question that lies at the beginning of wisdom: “What, when I do it, will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness?” At this stage, your sensitivity to pleasure and happiness leads you to the realization that long-term happiness is no longer good enough. It’s no longer good enough for you to want to call it “my.” So now, regardless of whatever comes up in the mind, the questions become, “Is this constant?” No. “If something is inconstant, is it easeful or stressful?” Stressful. “And if it’s stressful, is it fitting to call it me or mine?” Here again the answer is No. You apply these questions to all things, even to any perception you may have about the deathless. This is what inclines the mind to a state of unfabricated happiness.

What this means is that at the beginning of the path, you don’t just say that everything is not-self and leave it at that. You don’t try to clone awakening, telling yourself that “Awakened people have no desire so I’ll have no desire, too. I won’t even desire awakening. Awakened people are beyond good and evil, so I’ll go beyond good and evil, too.” This kind of thinking doesn’t get you on the path. In fact, it keeps you off the path.

So instead of starting out by saying that everything is not-self, you try to develop your powers over what you can control. You push against the characteristics of inconstancy, stress, and not-self, and you see how far you can push before they push back. And you discover that, as you push, you can gain a large measure of pleasure and happiness. You develop discernment and wisdom in deciding what’s really important in life, which sorts of happiness are more valuable than others.

This is how the mind develops the noble treasures of conviction, virtue, shame, compunction, learning the Dhamma, generosity, and discernment. You learn how to hold on to these qualities for the time being, and you regard as not-self whatever goes against them.

Similarly, you develop the pleasure of concentration because you see that this is much more long-term than any other pleasure. This gives you a solid foundation from which you can let go of lesser pleasures, in particular the pleasures of sensuality.

Having access to this higher form of pleasure also enables you to look at suffering and pain without being afraid of them. That way you can look at them for the purpose of comprehending them. Normally when we look at pain, we look at it with the idea either of trying to do away with it or of running away from it. In neither way, though, do we get to comprehend the suffering or the pain. But if you have a sense of confidence and good humor in the face of pain—the confidence and good humor that can come from a state of good, solid concentration—then you can look carefully at the pain to the point where you really understand it. This enables you to perform the task with regard to the first noble truth, which is to comprehend it.

In addition to confidence, the practice of jhāna also gives you a sense of competence. You’ve mastered an important skill and learned how to bring some order to your committee. This way—when you run into the limitations of even the most skillfully constructed mental states and start applying the perception of not-self to everything, including the path—it’s not through self-hatred. It’s simply through the mature realization that this is as far as intention can take you. At that point, the mind is truly ready for an unconditioned happiness.

And here is where you see the genius of the Buddha’s strategy. When the mind becomes more and more focused on the pleasures of jhāna, all of your clinging gets focused in one place, a place of great stability and clarity, so that you can watch clinging in action. Because you see that the state of concentration is the one thing worth controlling, your sense of self is focused there as well, so you can clearly see it in action, too. Once all your clinging is focused here, then when you’re finally ready to cut this one last form of clinging, there’s no further clinging to any fabricated phenomena at all.

This is why, when you learn how to apply the perception of not-self even to jhāna, there’s an opening to the deathless. And when you can apply the perception of not-self to the phenomenon of the deathless, the mind goes beyond all phenomena and arrives at ultimate freedom and ultimate happiness—total freedom, total happiness—as a direct, pure experience.

At this point, you can put all your strategies down. Because this happiness is totally unconditioned, you don’t need a producer and you don’t need a consumer. There’s no issue of control or no control. There’s just the absolute, unshakable experience of freedom.

Many of the forest ajaans have emphasized this point in their teachings: that in the attainment of awakening, you put aside both self and not-self. Several years back, there was a controversy in Thailand as to whether nibbāna was self or not-self. The issue was even argued in the newspapers. So one day someone went to ask Ajaan Maha Boowa, “Is nibbāna self or not-self?” And his answer was, “Nibbāna is nibbāna.” That was it. He then went on to explain how self and not-self are tools on the path, how both are put down when the path has done its work, and how neither applies to the experience of nibbāna.

Ajaan Suwat, one of my teachers, also said that when you’ve experienced deathless happiness, you don’t really care if there’s something experiencing it or not. The experience is sufficient in and of itself.

What we’ve been describing here is a special kind of consciousness that lies beyond the aggregates: The texts call it “consciousness without surface.” Once it’s been attained, then freedom is never lost. The mind no longer tries to define itself, and because it’s not defined, it can’t be described.

What we can learn from all of these points is how to employ questions in the practice. You try to avoid questions that are not helpful in putting an end to suffering, and you adopt questions that are. These are the questions that lead to discernment, and you refine discernment by refining these questions as you use them strategically. For example, you start with the question about what leads to long-term welfare and happiness. Then you refine it to the questions that apply the three perceptions of inconstancy, stress, and not-self to all the aggregates. Then you refine that perception even further, to the perception that all phenomena are not-self, and then you finally drop that perception as well to abandon clinging in all its forms. Even the perception of dispassion that results from those perceptions is something you ultimately put aside.

So it’s through these skillful questions that discernment is developed. This was the way that the Buddha himself found awakening. He looked at his actions and noticed that he was actually creating suffering. That is to say, he was looking both at the actions and at the results. Then he said, “I’m trying to act for the purpose of happiness, but why am I creating suffering? Is it actually possible to act in a way that does lead to happiness?” And he had the courage to ask that question continually, and to keep testing his answers to that question, to see how far it would take him.

This inquiry involves two qualities that are absolutely essential to any successful meditation. The first is learning how to be observant—and not just observant in general, but being particularly observant of your actions and their results. When you’re looking into the present moment, this is what you should look for: “What am I doing? What’s the result of what I’m doing? Is this acceptable or not?” If it’s not, that’s when you bring in the other quality, which is ingenuity: “Is there some other way that I can act that would be more skillful?”

This means that, as we practice, we have to be willing to experiment—which means willing to take risks and make mistakes, but always willing to learn from those mistakes. This relates to the most skillful form of self-identity you can take along the path—the self that takes pride in always being willing to learn from its actions—because this is how you see the noble truths. After all, all the truths are actions and results. When you’re acting on craving, you’re engaged in the second noble truth. When you’re developing mindfulness, concentration, and discernment, you’re engaged in the fourth noble truth, the path. And when you master as skills the duties appropriate to each of the truths, that’s when you really know the truths—and as Ajaan Lee says, only when you really know things in practice like this can you let them go.

This is how you find awakening. The more you exercise your freedom to act skillfully, the more you understand what it means to have freedom of choice. The more closely you look at and understand this freedom through exercising it, day by day, in all of your actions, both inner and outer, the closer you come to a freedom that’s absolute—and that answers every really burning question you have.