A simple explanation of 'not-self'

This week I've attempted to write something simple 🤞 about the Buddhist idea of 'not-self' and the insight that comes when we see through our 'self-view'.

Here are links to previous posts on this theme, 🔑 = free, 🔒 = paid
🔑 Finding Freedom - Video
🔒 The First Three Fetters - Video
🔒 Meditating on Direct Experience - Meditation

I’ve just finished a retreat on the 10 Fetters and the poems of Rumi. Lots of images emerged. One was of a ‘house of cards’. It’s an image of how we construct ourselves and our world, with everything dependent upon everything else.

There’s that famous verse in the Dhammapada where the Buddha says,

‘House-builder, you are seen!
You will not build a house again!
All the rafters are broken,
The ridgepole destroyed;
The mind, gone to the Unconstructed,
Has reached the end of craving!’

Of course, this ‘house-builder’ is the self.

I was trying to build a house of cards on the shine, imagining multiple levels, but it kept on collapsing! In the end, I had this mantra going around in my head, ‘the more I add, the more stable it becomes, but the more I have to lose.’

But in losing the self, do we really lose anything at all?

Nothing to lose

To say the self does not exist is as problematic as saying that it does exist because the whole notion of self is flawed to the bone.

- Andrew Olendzki

You’ve probably been there. An argument starts between one person who says there’s no self and another who says there is, and it goes on and on until everyone feels weird and alienated and eventually, someone changes the conversation.

Why is the idea of self so hard to talk about?

I think comes down to what Olendzki says above, the whole notion of ‘self’ is flawed. We end up debating the existence of something we’ve yet to define.

Buddhism sees the emptiness of all things. That is their relative existence, their dependent arising. The table across the room from me is right now dependent on various factors. It depends on having the conventional flat top and legs, usually four, without which it wouldn’t be a table. It depends on wood, screws and glue. On the carpenter who made it, on the tree that provided the wood, and on the man who planted the tree. Oh, not to forget the woman who gave birth to the man who planted the tree... and so on indefinitely.

Two tables and a chair, Amorgos

The table, right now, is also dependent on me recognising it as a table. If I thought it was in fact a chair, I’d sit on it and it would become a chair. When I look the other way, the table no longer exists for me.

There’s a complexity to all the ways in which the table is empty.

But there’s also a simplicity. We can at least point to the table and know what we are discussing.

What happens when we try to point to the self? To what and where do we point?

On a recent retreat, we looked for the self. What and where was it? We’d lie on the floor and just observe what was happening. Sensations of the floor beneath us. The sound of birds singing. The shape where the ceiling meets the wall. A feeling of sadness, then of ease. Thoughts of the future, thoughts of the past.

Each experience, as it came into focus, became ‘me’. It was as if the ‘self’ was something that moved around, now a sensation, next a feeling, and then a thought.

So what and where was the self? Just then, it seemed to be potentially everything and everywhere! Certainly, not something I could point to, like the table.

Our tendency to identify

What we call ‘the self’ is simply the tendency to identify with experience.

There are sensations and feelings, there are perceptions and volitions, there is awareness. These are all the elements that make up our experience and we know them as the 5 skandhas, 5 ‘heaps’, or processes.

The full name for these skandhas is pañcupādānakkhandhā. The first part, pañca, means five. Then upādāna translates as clinging or attachment. The skandhas become 5 aspects of experience that we cling to.

There simply is experience, and if we could leave it at that we’d be enlightened! But there’s also the tendency to cling. We cling to experience as ‘me and mine’, we identify with it.

When we looked at the first three fetters, we saw how they support one another. Self-view supports doubt, doubt reinforces self-view, all our habits and rituals give substance to the sense of self.

Underlying these three, on a deeper level, are fetters 4 and 5, desire and ill-will. They are the engine of self, keeping it running. As Sangharakshita says, it’s not so much that we have a self that clings, but more that we have clinging that creates a ‘self’. Clinging, or craving, comes first.

I really do seem to exist

Notice the language you use when you talk about the ‘self’. You may find that it’s more provisional than certain. You’ll find yourself saying, ‘It seems like…’ or ‘It’s as if…’

And it’s true, each of the skandhas, in turn, can seem to be the self. I love how Andrew Olendzki labels them in the introduction to his book Untangling Self.

The self seems to exist in the following ways:

As the occupant of my body.

There’s a sense of ‘interiority’, like there’s someone ‘in here’. The body then feels like a vehicle that I move around in. It’s as if there is someone looking out through these eyes, saying words with my mouth.

As the beneficiary of feelings.

As I go through my day, some things feel good, others not so much. Sometimes something happens that’s really unpleasant. It feels as though I am the beneficiary of those feelings. I get to enjoy the pleasure and feel like a victim of the pain.

As the artiste, expressing myself.

There’s a sense that everything I do is an expression of ‘myself’. I’m enacting my own life, it’s particular to me. I am the centre of my world.

As an agent, making choices.

I am an agent. The one in charge of my life. I make decisions and am responsible for the consequences of my choices. Sometimes I deserve praise, sometimes blame.

As some kind of essence.

I am the watcher. I am the background awareness within which everything is happening. I am all of the above and more.

The Story of Me

As the days, months and years pile up, all our experiences seem to add up to something, they become the story of me. As Carson McCullers says,

"Things accumulate around your name. You have a name and one thing after another happens to you, and you behave in various ways and do things, so that soon the name begins to have a meaning.”

I recently met for the first time someone I’d known of for ages. They’d known of me too. We knew the story of one another.

The first thing they said was, ‘You’re so small, I thought you’d be bigger.’ I know! I think I’m bigger too, till I see myself in a photo. Recently I had the pleasure of seeing Laurie Anderson live on stage. I mean, as far as I’m concerned, she’s a giant. But it turns out she’s tiny too, like a little bird.

The other day I had the thought, ‘I’m glad I’m me.’ It was a new thought, not that I’ve especially objected to being me in the past. But there’s a deeper sense of making peace with myself and my story so far.

I like myself and my story more and more, is that the same as clinging to a ‘self’?

Insight into not-self

Does insight mean I lose the self I’m glad to be?

Insight, as the name suggests, is a seeing. We see what’s actually happening.

To see through self-view is to see that what we thought of as ‘me’ was simply a tendency to identify with experience. We see how we’ve completely bought into what are, in reality, just passing thoughts and feelings. And we understand how much unnecessary suffering this creates.

But when we realise the truth of ‘not-self’ everything continues just as it always has. Except now we see the story of me as a story. And instead of feeling trapped by it, we find a playful lightness to the whole notion of ‘me’.

Nothing is lost.

Much love from my playful ‘self’ to your’s,
Vajradarshini