I tried to post this through email, but it
has yet to show up in the index, so I am
posting it from the WebBoard interface. A
duplicate posting may show up with the
same message. Again, my apologies for
technical difficulties which are not under
my control. I've also attached an .htm file
which you can open with your web
browser if you have trouble with the .rtf
attachment. Or you can simply read the
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For this week, comment on the below
reading and/or revisit any of the material
in Chapter Four. A Study Guide will be
posted here tomorrow or Thursday. The
First Midterm Exam will run from
Thursday, January 30th at 7:30 AM to
Wednesday February 5th at 7:30 PM. The
exam should take an hour or less. See
syllabus for important details concerning
lab hours, lab location, notecard use, etc.
If the formatting of the in-line text is bad,
try viewing or downloading the .rtf
attachment. Open it with Microsoft Word
or Wordpad if it doesn't open
automatically.

The Nature of Selflessness
Jack Kornfield

When the Buddha confronted the
question of identity on the night of his
enlightenment, he came to the radical
discovery that we do not exist as separate
beings. He saw into the human tendency
to identify with a limited sense of
existence and discovered that this belief
in an individual small self is a root
illusion that causes suffering and
removes us from the freedom and
mystery of life. He described this as
interdependent arising, the cyclical
process of consciousness creating
identity by entering form, responding to
contact of the senses, then attaching to
certain forms, feelings, desires, images,
and actions to create a sense of self.
In teaching, the Buddha never spoke of
humans as persons existing in some
fixed or static way. Instead, he described
us as a collection of perceptions, of
responses, and of the flow of
consciousness that experiences them all.
Our sense of self arises whenever we
grasp at or identify with these patterns.
The process of identification, of selecting
patterns to call " I," "me," " myself," is
subtle and usually hidden from our
awareness. We can identify with our
body, feelings, or thoughts; we can
identify with images, patterns, roles, and
archetypes. Thus, in our culture, we
might fix and identify with the role of being
a woman or a man, a parent or a child.
We might take our family history, our
genetics, and our heredity to be who we
are. Sometimes we identify with our
desires: sexual, aesthetic, or spiritual. In
the same way we can focus on our
intellect or take our astrological sign as
an identity. We can choose the archetype
of hero, lover, mother, ne’er-do-well,
adventurer, clown, or thief as our identity
and live a year or a whole lifetime based
on that. To the extent that we grasp these
false identities, we continually have to
protect and defend ourselves, strive to
fulfill what is limited or deficient in them,
to fear their loss.
Yet these are not our true identity. One
master with whom I studied used to
laugh at how easily and commonly we
would grasp at new identities. As for
himself, he would say, " I am none of that.
I am not this body, so I was never born
and will never die. I am nothing and I am
everything. Your identities make all your
problems. Discover what is beyond
them, the delight of the timeless, the
deathless."
Because the question of identity and
selflessness is subject to confusion and
misunderstanding, let us go into it more
carefully. When… Buddhists speak of
emptiness and no self, what do they
mean? Emptiness does not mean that
things don’t exist, nor does " no self"
mean that we don’t exist. Emptiness
refers to the underlying nonseparation of
life and the fertile ground of energy that
gives rise to all forms of life. Our world
and sense of self is a play of patterns.
Any identity we can grasp is transient,
tentative. This is difficult to understand
from words such as selflessness or
emptiness of self… However, the
experience of selflessness in practice
can bring us to great freedom.
In the chapter on dissolving the self, we
saw how deep meditation can untangle
the sense of identity. There are, in fact,
many ways in which we realize the
emptiness of self. When we are silent
and attentive, we can sense directly how
nothing in the world can be truly
possessesed by us. Clearly we do not
possess outer things; we are in some
relationship with our cars, our home, our
family, our jobs, but whatever that
relationship is, it is " ours" only for a short
time. In the end, things, people, or tasks
die or change or we lose them. Nothing
is exempt.
When we bring attention to any moment
of experience, we discover that we do not
possess it either. As we look, we find that
we neither invite our thoughts nor own
them. We might even wish them to stop,
but our thoughts seem to think
themselves, arising and passing
according to their nature.
The same is true of our feelings. How
many of us believe we control our
feelings? As we pay attention, we see
that they are more like the
weather—moods and feelings change
according to certain conditions, and are
neither possessed nor directed by our
consciousness or desires. Do we order
happiness, sadness, irritation,
excitement, or restlessness to come?
Feelings arise by themselves, as the
breath breathes itself, as sounds sound
themselves.
Our body, too, follows its own laws. The
body which we carry is a bag of bones
and fluid that cannot be possessed. It
ages, gets sick, or changes in ways we
might not wish it to, all according to its
own nature. The more we look, in fact,
the more deeply we see that we possess
nothing within or without.
We encounter another aspect of the
emptiness of self when we notice how
everything arises out of nothing, comes
out of the void, returns to the void, goes
back to nothing. All our words of the past
day have disappeared. Similarly, where
has the past week or the past month, or
our childhood gone? They arose, did a
little dance, and now they’re vanished,
along with the 1960’s, the nineteenth and
eighteenth centuries, the ancient
Romans and Greeks, the Pharohs, and
so forth. All experience arises in the
present, does its dance, and disappears.
Experience comes into being only
tentatively, for a little time in a certain
form; then that form ends and a new form
replaces it moment by moment.
_____________________
Excerpted from A Path With Heart, by
Jack Kornfield, Bantam Books, 1993, pp.
199-201. Edited by Dale Lugenbehl.


Buddhist Concept of Self*
by Ram Dass and Paul Gorman

If we imagine that our mind is like the
blue sky, and that across it pass thoughts
as clouds, we can get a feel for that part
of it which is other than our thoughts. The
sky is always present; it contains the
clouds and yet is not contained by them.
So with our awareness. It is present and
encompasses all our thoughts, feelings,
and sensations; yet it is not the same as
them. To recognize and acknowledge
this awareness, with its spacious,
peaceful quality, is to find a very useful
resource within. We see that we need not
identify with each thought just because it
happens to occur. We can remain quiet
and choose which thought we wish to
attend to. And we can remain aware
behind all these thoughts, in a state that
offers an entirely new level of openness
and insight.

___________________
*Excerpted from How Can I Help; Stories
and Reflections on Service, by Ram Dass
and Paul Gorman, Alfred A. Knopf, 1991,
p. 102. Edited by Dale Lugenbehl;
excerpt title was not part of original text.

Prof. Borrowdale
borrowdalej@lanecc.edu