Selves & Worlds on the Path

The Buddha taught that our sense of self is a construct. Some people don’t like to hear this—especially when they hear that the Buddha also teaches, “not-self.” It sounds as if he’s trying to annihilate our sense of self, saying that it’s no more than a harmful fiction. But actually, he wants us to use our sense of self as an important part of the path. After all, we have to desire the path in order to do it, and wherever there’s a desire, there’s going to be a sense of the world in which that desire can be fulfilled, and a sense of our self acting in that world. That’s the nature of becoming.

So basically, when he says the self is a construct, he’s saying that we may have constructed it unskillfully in the past, but we can learn to construct a skillful sense of self as a strategy for the sake of happiness, for attaining the main thing that we desire: the end of suffering.

As we follow the path, he recommends that we create a sense of self that’s capable of doing the path, ultimately to get us to a point where we don’t need that sense of self anymore. It’s served its purpose. And as Ajaan Suwat once said, once you attain the ultimate happiness, you don’t ask the question, “Who’s experiencing this happiness?” There’s no need to ask. The happiness is that satisfying and intense. Even those who come back from their first experience of the deathless have a strong sense of what intense happiness it is. And as Ajaan Fuang said, once you come back from that experience, you realize how much stress there is in the experience of the six senses, even in the pleasures of the senses.

So when the Buddha says “not-self,” he’s not telling us to throw away something of value. He’s basically saying, “Learn how to create a better sense of self—one that’s so good that it’ll eventually take you to a happiness where you don’t need to use it anymore.”

Now, sometimes you hear it said that if you think that you’re doing the path, that’s wrong view, that you should see the path as developing on its own. But how can that be true? If it’s true, then the Buddha had wrong view, because he often talked about the role of a healthy sense of self in developing the path. Even when he teaches not-self, he tells you to be confident that you will benefit from following that teaching. As he once said to the monks, “Whatever is not yours, let go of it. That will be for your long-term welfare and happiness.”

As we said on the first night of the retreat, the path is not a mushroom that sprouts on its own in the forest. It’s not a path of just letting go. It involves developing skillful qualities, and those qualities don’t develop on their own.

For the path to succeed, you have to follow the Buddha’s five-step program for evaluating desires. You may remember the five steps: to see the origination, to see the passing away, to see the allure, to see the drawbacks, and to find the escape. Those steps in turn require that you develop a strong healthy sense of self that can argue the case for the desire to put an end to suffering to defeat your old senses of self and their associated desires that might stand in the way. Now, you may feel some affection for those old senses of you. But when you see that they’re actually placing limitations on you, you’ll be more willing to put them aside.

So tonight I’d like to talk about what the Buddha says about how to develop a healthy sense of self on the path that allows you to sense that you’re capable of much more than you think you are, and you’ll enjoy the results of the path more than you can imagine. In particular, I’d like to consider the themes we’ve discussed so far—the four determinations, the desires of the noble eightfold path, the four bases for success, and the six objects of delight—to see how they can help you develop a strong sense of self that can carry through with the overarching desire to put an end to suffering.

Now, to talk of creating a new sense of self may sound artificial, but remember that your current sense of self is already a construct—actually, many constructs built out of your many old habits. These are the habits you’ve developed in ignorance over many lifetimes, and the results have been at best a mixed bag. It is possible to develop new habits, even when you’re old. In English, we have an old saying, “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks,” but you’re not a dog. As the Thai ajaans like to say, “As long as you’re breathing, you can still learn new skills in the mind.” And as the Buddha says, “To define yourself is to limit yourself.” So why hold on to a sense of yourself that limits your ability to end suffering?

Note that in recommending that you develop new self-habits, the Buddha isn’t suggesting you replace one definition of yourself with another definition, because that might possibly be limiting, too. Instead, he recommends identifying with skillful habits. In other words, he wants you to be less concerned with what you are and more concerned with what you can do: the skillful habits you can develop.

As you remember, we’ve also talked about the three main roles that your sense of self plays in promoting any desire: the agent, the consumer, and the commentator. The consumer is the part of you that says, “This is what I want.” The agent is the part that feels, “I can act to bring that about.” And the commentator makes a running commentary on how well the other two senses of self are doing. The desire for the end of suffering requires that you train each of these senses of self so that it can actually help to attain that desire. When you train all three with the lessons you’ve learned through the four determinations, the noble eightfold path, the four bases for success, and the six objects of delight, they’ll be up to the task.

In every case, you have to remember that when you’re training your different senses of self, you’re actually assuming their roles as they talk among themselves. So you have to use the principles of right speech in every case: You want to say things to yourself—or yourselves—that are true, beneficial, and timely. That helps to make your inner conversation part of the noble eightfold path. How those principles will apply in practice will depend on which sense of self you’re talking to.

Remember, too, that every sense of self operates as part of a state of becoming, and states of becoming form around desires. This means that your various senses of self are defined by the desires that lie at their core. If you want them to lead to the highest happiness, they all have to be informed by the desires expressed in the four determinations. In other words, you have to identify with the overriding desire expressed in these determinations. Your sense of self as consumer should aim at the determinations expressed as features of the goal, which means aiming at the highest noble truth and calm, i.e., the truth and calm of unbinding. If that seems too far away, then, at the very least, be discerning enough to aim at long-term welfare and happiness. As for you sense of self as agent, that should be defined around the four determinations expressed as means to the goal: not to neglect the discernment; to guard the truth; to be devoted to relinquishment; and to train only for calm.

Those are the general principles. Now let’s look at how they apply in detail.

 First, your sense of self as an agent: The Canon recommends that you develop a healthy sense that you’re capable of following the path, that you’re responsible for your actions, and that your actions can make the difference between suffering and not suffering. In other words, you’re competent to do the path, and you should develop a sense of confidence in your own abilities to do it. Ven. Ānanda once recommended to a nun that she develop this attitude, “There are those who have reached awakening. They’re human beings. I’m a human being. If they can do it, why can’t I?”

And you learn how to take pride in developing skills.

Now, there are two types of pride. There’s healthy pride, comparing yourself with yourself in terms of where you are now as opposed to where you were before you started practicing. You can also compare yourself with others if your motivation is to see what you can learn from them. Here your sense of pride is healthy in that you take pride in how you’re improving and in how you’re always willing to learn how to improve further. Unhealthy pride compares you with others to see if you’re better than they are. So the healthy sense of pride is what you’re aiming at.

To abandon an unhealthy sense of pride, remember from the four determinations that you’re training in relinquishment to let go of the pride that gets in the way. And you learn from the four bases for success that you need to commit to the practice in terms of your desire, your persistence, and your intent.

You also have to see that with competence comes responsibility. You can cause great harm to yourself and to others, not only in this lifetime, but also in lifetimes to come. There’s a passage in the Dhammapada that makes this point. “Whatever an enemy might do to an enemy, or a foe to a foe, the ill-directed mind can do you even worse. Whatever a mother, father, or other kinsman might do for you, the well-directed mind can do you even better.” This is why the Buddha has your sense of self as an agent develop two qualities: compunction and heedfulness.

Compunction is basically the fear of causing harm to yourself and to others. This is a skillful sense of fear, and it comes with a sense of power. You have this sense of power and you want to use it well.

Heedfulness is similar. You realize that there are dangers, especially dangers in what you might do unskillfully. But heedfulness also contains an element of hope: If you’re heedful and careful, you can avoid harm and create happiness.

That’s your sense of self as agent.

You also remember that becoming includes not only a sense of you as agent, but also a sense of the world in which the agent functions, and that you create a sense of the world by the things you desire. So if you focus on the best things to desire, that puts you in a better world. In other words, if all you think about is how much money you can make, you end up in a world where there are just people who want to make money: Either those are the people you actually associate with or that’s how you view people in general. If you want to find the end of suffering, you find yourself associating with better and better people.

So, try to keep this power in mind: that you create your sense of self and you also create your sense of the world you live in. And remember that the best use of that power is to understand the processes leading to becoming so that you can point them in the right direction and then ultimately free yourself through dispassion.

 This relates directly to your sense of self as a consumer. You want to have high standards for the happiness you’re aiming at. Don’t settle for desires that pull the mind down to a low level. At the very least, aim at being able to continue to practice the Dhamma, now and through the end of this life when options are presented to you.

Many years back, I was electrocuted and almost died. The first thought that went through my mind was, “I’m going to die from my own stupidity.” I hadn’t checked the plug. The next thought that went through my mind was, “I can’t think those thoughts right now if I’m dying. I’ve been meditating. I should use my meditation.” Then it was as if a whole series of doors appeared in front of me. I had a few glimpses into the doors, and it was as if there was a separate world behind each door. I told myself, “I don’t want to go through any of those doors, thank you.” And at that point, the electric current stopped. What I learned from that experience was that at death, options will appear to you, based on your past kamma. You have to be careful about which options you go for.

Years later, I was reminded of this incident by a movie I saw. I was flying non-stop from Bangkok back to Los Angeles, and there was a child sitting in the seat in front of me. He had all the Ice Age movies, so I got to see all the Ice Age movies. One of the best scenes was in the second one. The characters are adrift in a dark, foggy night. All of a sudden, lights appear, so they go toward the lights. And there in the lights are these very beautiful mermaids and mermen. They look very attractive, and all the characters get very dreamy-eyed looking at them. But then you look a little more carefully at those mermaids and mermen, and you see that there are bursts of static. And in the bursts of static, there are fangs. Piranha fish.

So be very careful when alternatives appear to you as you die. Don’t fall for the mermaids and mermen. They might have fangs. Just make up your mind that you want to go to a place where you can practice the Dhamma.

The question came up in the course of the retreat: “Does this mean the human world?” It could be the human world or it could be a deva world, because there are devas who can practice. One evening, in fact, Ajaan Suwat came up to the meditation hall at the monastery. A group of visitors from Bangkok were sitting around talking. And out of nowhere, he said to them, “Don’t aspire to come back to the human world, because in the near future, the human world won’t be a good place to be.” Now, when an ajaan says something like that out of nowhere, people listen. Ideally, as you’re dying, you want to delight in seclusion, delight in the unafflicted, delight in non-objectification, as we said the other night. At the very least, delight in the Dhamma, in abandoning unskillful qualities and developing skillful ones.

Remember that these things are possible, and that if you’re mindful and alert at death, you can actually engage in abandoning and developing up through and beyond the moment of death. You need to keep these possibilities in mind because suffering comes from having a limited sense of your possibilities. Suffering is clinging, clinging is an addiction, and a lesson I learned in dealing with people who suffer from addiction is that they suffer from a lack of imagination. You don’t see the end of suffering as possible or if it is, you can’t imagine yourself doing it.

 Now, to correct these attitudes requires training your self as commentator. You have to train the commentator in two habits.

The first is that you want the commentator to be basically positive: helpful and encouraging along the path. Remember the Buddha’s teaching style. He would urge, rouse, and encourage his listeners. And basically, he would urge, rouse, and encourage his listeners to delight in abandoning unskillful attitudes and to delight in developing skillful ones.

To give you some examples from the Canon:

In terms of urging, when the Buddha would tell his listeners how to talk to themselves, he would follow a pattern. He would say, “Train yourself this way,” and then tell you how to talk to yourself to train yourself—as when he urged his son, Rāhula, to train himself, “I won’t tell a deliberate lie, even for a laugh.”

As for rousing, the Buddha would encourage his listeners to be like soldiers, like well-trained horses and elephants, or like skilled craftsmen.

In terms of encouraging, remember his very first Dhamma talk: Before he delivered the talk, he told his listeners, the five brethren, “Look, I’ve found the deathless. When I teach you, you’ll be able to find it, too.” That gave them the incentive to listen attentively to the talk with the attitude that they could identify in their minds what he was talking about and put into practice what he was telling them to do.

With regard to the forest tradition, you have to remember that the ajaans came from families on the very low rungs of the social order in Thailand. So, many of the Dhamma talks you hear from the ajaans say, “Look, you’re a human being, you’ve got what it takes.” This is not only for the monks, but also for lay women and lay men. All you need is a human body and a human mind, and that’s what you’ve got. It’s because of this encouragement that we have the forest tradition now.

So that’s the first approach in training your commentator: You’re training it to be positive.

The second is to train it to be compassionate. This requires discernment, either in its role of a determination or as one of the bases for success. This means, on the one hand, taking the long view, realizing that you have to understand your occasional lapses. There will be times when you don’t do your absolute best, and your commentator has to understand that.

But the commentator should also hold you to a high standard. Think of the best teachers you had in school, the ones that got the best work out of you by holding you to a high standard. They’re the ones who taught you the most, and they’re the ones from whom you most benefited even though you may not have liked them at the time. So take joy in what you can do well and keep on training. Here again, you want to delight in abandoning and in developing. In terms of the Buddha’s instructions to Rāhula, you should develop a healthy sense of shame when you slip on the path, and a healthy sense of pride as you make progress in your practice.

The Buddha said that the secret to his awakening was discontent with his skillful qualities. In other words, as long as he hadn’t reached the end of suffering, he wouldn’t stop. This may seem to conflict with the idea that you should take pride and joy in the good you’ve done, but actually, the Buddha said you should also take pride in your desire to learn more. This is what it means to delight in the Dhamma, in developing, and in abandoning in the most productive way. You take joy in your progress, but you’re not satisfied until you reach the goal.

When your self as commentator has been trained in these ways, it’s fit to be in charge of skillfully following the Buddha’s five-step program for running a cost-benefit analysis on your desires, especially in comparing the allure with the drawbacks. These reflections change the balance of power between the allure and the drawbacks because you have an expanded sense of the possibilities for good or ill that you can do. For the good, you realize that it is possible to put an end to suffering. For ill, you realize that continuing on in saṁsāra could be a long, painful slog. Your determination on discernment induces you to view things in the long term and to look for the best possible happiness.

So what do you want this commentator to do? First, you want it to be sensitive to the origination of what’s coming up in the mind so that you can recognize which mind states you can trust and which ones you can’t. Also you want this commentator to be sensitive to the passing away. This teaches you two lessons. On the one hand, you realize that your defilements aren’t as monolithic as they seem. On the other, you realize that when good things arise and pass away, you should be heedful, that you should act on your skillful intentions while they’re present because they might not always be there.

As for the allure, you want to be very sensitive to the long-term consequences of going for the most skillful alternative, learning how to take joy even in small acts of goodness. As the Buddha said, “Don’t be afraid of acts of goodness. That’s another word for happiness.” And you want your commentator to appreciate the joy of concentration.

At the same time, you want to keep in mind the perspective that comes from believing in the mind’s ability to survive the death of the body. And particularly you want to see the futility of going just for sensual pleasures. You don’t miss out on anything of real value if you don’t get them. As the Buddha once said, if you see a person endowed with all the possible sensual pleasures, remind yourself that you’ve been there, so there’s no need to be jealous or envious. And as Ajaan Fuang once said, if you strongly desire particular sensual pleasures, it’s a sign that you had them in a past life, and you really miss them this time around. He added that if you think about that for a few minutes, you’ll realize if you get them again, you’re going to lose them again. So why get involved?

As for teaching your commentator to look for drawbacks, try to measure the anticipated outcome of a particular desire against the pleasures of concentration and a stable mind, and also in terms of the third noble truth: that there is a cessation of suffering and that it’s the highest happiness. In particular, see the drawbacks of going for pleasures that would require acting against the precepts.

As for being sensitive to the escape, learn to see calm as a good thing, and be ready to put aside your childish obsessions. Remember that the pleasure of dispassion is a happiness based not on fictions, but on realities. In other words, you don’t have to tell yourself stories about your pleasures, especially about the joy of nibbāna, because it requires no delight at all.

When you’ve trained the three types of self—as agent, consumer, and commentator—in line with these skillful desires of the noble eightfold path, the four bases for success, the four determinations, and the six objects of delight, they become a help on the way to awakening. And when you’ve done that work, you can let them go—not with a sense of neurotic self-hatred, but with a sense of appreciation.

You probably know the image of the raft. You’re on this side of the river, which is dangerous. You want to get to the other side where there’s safety. There’s no nibbāna yacht to come over to pick you up, so you have to fashion a raft. And how do you fashion the raft? You take the twigs and branches on this side of the river and bind them into a raft. Then, relying on the raft, kicking with your feet, and swimming with your hands, you get across the river. In other words, you hold on to the path and you make an effort. When you get to the other side, you can let the raft go. Then, as the Buddha said, you don’t carry it on your head or on your back. You let it go. But he added that you let it go with a sense of appreciation. You’re not just throwing it away. You think, “How useful this raft has been to me!” Yet now it’s time to let it go.

The same point holds with your sense of self on the path. It’s made out of the aggregates on this side of the river that we talked about this morning: the five aggregates and the three types of fabrication. Then you use it to get across. When you see that you don’t need those fabrications anymore, you can let them go, but with a sense of appreciation.

One of the problems we’ve found with a lot of people who come to Buddhism is that they hear that the Buddha teaches that there is no self, so they should get rid of their sense of self. Some of them, being Westerners, already hate themselves, so they take that as justification for just throwing themselves away. But that’s not how the Buddha taught. You train yourself—your selves—to be more skillful. When the time comes to let all sense of self go, you do it with a sense of appreciation. There’s no sense of hatred anymore. You see that it has been helpful, but it has its limitations.

So these are some of the ways in which your expanded perspective offered by the Buddha’s teaching can change the balance of power in your mind, especially as it engages in its cost-benefit analysis to sort out which desires are worth following and which ones are not. With this expanded perspective, you’re more likely to want to follow the desires that are in line with the path.

This evening’s discussion has been focused on this issue in general terms. Tomorrow night I’d like to explore this issue further, focusing on a specific case: the desires you need to cultivate in order to practice the brahma-vihāras, sublime attitudes of unlimited goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity.

As the retreat comes to an end, we’d like to tell you, “Don’t think about the end of the retreat, don’t focus on what’s going to happen after,” but you can’t help it. So we’re going to talk about attitudes that you have to take out into the world. It’s a crazy world, but these attitudes will help you survive. And not only survive, but also to flourish inside.