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December 11th 1986, Serial 01884A
AI Suggested Keywords:
The talk explores the concept of selflessness in Buddhist psychology, focusing on the interdependent origination of the self and the absence of inherent existence in both persons and the elements of experience. The discussion emphasizes understanding selflessness at multiple levels: firstly, the selflessness of the personality (pudgala nairatmya), and secondly, the selflessness of the dharmas (dharma nairatmya), which leads to liberation through realizing the emptiness of these aggregates. The teaching highlights how anxiety and suffering manifest from the misapprehension of self and guides practitioners to experience enlightenment through realizing the interdependence of the five skandhas (form, feelings, perceptions, formations, consciousness).
Referenced Works and Teachings:
- Heart Sutra: The text referenced as central to understanding selflessness and wisdom in Buddhist practice.
- Five Skandhas: Form, feelings, perceptions, formations, and consciousness are discussed as components of existence without inherent self, key to understanding Buddhist psychology.
- Book of Serenity: Mentioned in reference to a teaching about non-attachment and the practice of presence.
These references provide a pathway to deeper insights into selfhood and liberation as discussed in Buddhist teachings.
AI Suggested Title: "Embracing Selflessness: Path to Liberation"
The date is not obvious from the photograph of the tape
In wisdom, I'll just call it beyond wisdom. The content of the object of that wisdom, to the extent that it has an object prior to its full realization, the object of it in this section of the aggregates. Although the things, what I hope you will get a sense of, in your practice, will be how you can see that deep agapists are lacked inherent existence, that you will actually be able to see this, and thereby be released from also bringing distress and becoming When I think of talking about this, I feel like I'm standing right here at the edge of the great ocean.
[01:19]
We walk into the ocean a little ways. Our feet are wet. And I wanted to tell you that this is a big ocean. And I keep walking out into it. But don't expect that we'll be able to cover the whole ocean with nice cherry glasses. We could get out into it. We could come back and dry our feet off. We can go home and rest. By coming back to the ocean of dharma, and getting retreated, and moving back in, knock back with your form of ability, and place up as they fall up in sand, the whole ocean of dharma. It is discernment of the process of the potential arising of the self and the interdependence of all the others.
[02:49]
That's what the problem of Buddhist psychology is about. So I'd like to tell you now, over and again, about two kinds of selflessness. One kind is called number one. The other kind is called number two. Number one is the selflessness of the person.
[04:01]
The selflessness of the personality. It's called purgala. Pudgala nai-rat is nai-ratya. Pudgala nai-ratya. Pudgala means person or personality. Nai means no. Nair means no, there isn't any. And akhya is a derivative of akhya. The lack of opulence, the lack of self, of personality. First kind of self-discipline. That kind of self-discipline is called zharmas.
[05:03]
Nair opulence. Nair opulence. the nair-papman, the know-self of the dharmas, or the elements of experience. In a sense, there's a third kind of emptiness too, which is the emptiness, the nairagmiya of the nairagmiya. This Nairobium of Nairobium was born tonight. For the first time it was written on a blackboard. First time I ever wrote that on a blackboard.
[06:11]
Okay, so the political of Nairobium, the realization of the selflessness of me and you, of the individual person, that selflessness is born of seeing that the self-dependently colorizes from various elements of experience. For example, to see if the self-dependently colorizes with the five aggregates, or to see if the self-dependently colorizes with the 18 doors of arrival. I mean, it's 18 elements of the 12th floor of the arrival. You can see how yourself is born in conjunction with these elements of experience. You understand and will realize the selflessness of the person. Yourself first. Okay? I'll say this again.
[07:14]
The realization of the selflessness of the dharmas, in other words, the emptiness of the aggregates, the emptiness of the scholars, the emptiness of the doors of arrival, the ayatans, the deftiness of the elements of experience, the elements of experience adoptives, the emptiness of those is realized, again, by seeing how they dependently co-arize with each other, how they are interdependent, naturally creating each other, and they also lack apparent systems. This level of insight, this level of wisdom, this level of understanding selflessness, it's the understanding of selflessness, which is in the heart sutra, which all of the testers saw. So some Buddhist meditators see the selflessness as a person and realize liberation from individual belief and individual selfhood. The next level is you realize liberation from that level of liberation. by understanding the selflessness of the elements which led you to understand the selflessness of your person.
[08:22]
And then the final liberation is the liberation from liberation from liberation. and now cover through it in more detail. So again, I can start with reminding you of your ongoing work of a president.
[09:38]
Now, a president now was happy to do. And I don't know if you have some experience of self or not. But what I'd like to now do is take me through the process of awareness, of experience of self, and how that experience evolves through the realization of enlightenment. You may not all have a clear, sensitive sense of yourself.
[10:45]
But if you have a sense of the key, that's the key to locating it. Particularly if you have a sense of anxiety, sensitivity and anxiety. Because anxiety surrounds persons, all persons, all individual persons, all persons who believe in their individual existence are nicely surrounded by anxiety. So if you feel anxiety in some ways in your body and mind, then just be present with that. And then gradually you can feel it surrounding around you. Maybe at first you feel it around your heart, or around your eyeballs, around the back of your neck, or around your kneecaps.
[11:59]
Open to that feeling and you're friends with it. You may feel it gradually is developing you from all directions. Someone forced me to... I had experienced top culture last weekend and took me to independence... Anyway, one of the things is that this guy puts a can of coke up on his space jets and asks this guy to shoot it. So he shoots the coke breaks the bottle, which in the coat, or leave the sweaters, and envelops the whole spaceship. Because the spaceship has a protective shield around it. You know, you can't get to, you can't, if you shoot a gun at the spaceship, it bounces off a protective shield, and the protective shield's all the way around the spaceship.
[13:07]
You know, 360-degree sterile coverage of the spaceship, and you throw water To break water on a surface of coke on a surface of a station, it immediately breaks all around it. The splatter goes all around it. Does that make sense? This is very similar to us. We have this 360 degree rejection or 360 degree rejection of the other, as not us. but that's also 360 degrees for a spherical attack front by which people threaten to lie there. You can feel that anxiety that was on the inside of it, which is usually the self, unless you have an inside-out self, and outside is the public. So then you have a sense of yourself.
[14:08]
And if you can feel the pain around there, you can feel the pain in In space, you have a sense of where the body is, and all along the surface, usually, there's a sense for it all along the surface. While they're concentrated on the face, the face particularly is a very common place of identification of the person. We have lots of senses here to sense that this side is itself and other sides are not. It's all around, actually, because the body sense, which is the most fundamental of the particular realms, They take that sense of self, and they start doing traditional exercise, which is called meditation on the calculus. I would suggest that you try to bend your mind into these categories.
[15:10]
I'll tell you about them, just listen to them. So the first category of experience is called form. The second category of experience is called feelings. The next one is called perceptions or conceptions. The next one is called formations. The last one is called consciousness. All of our experience can be accounted for any experience you can tell me about. I categorized these five heaps. This kind of event, you know, he is the, this kind of, we're talking in this way, it's like initiating to your lines to the beginning of, the beauty of the self, of experience, or the experience of self.
[16:22]
You see the two ways? One is the experience of self, and the other is the self experience. We actually, usually, have a self of our experience. We have experience moment by moment, which we are more or less aware of. Again, I'm asking the end to be a resident. I'm asking the British female to experience this. They experience their experience. What most human beings do is they have a stealth of their experience. They like take their experience and they sort of do this wraparound and make it into an individual. their self, their experience, and then they have an experience of self. So, you're experiencing, and then you have a sense of yourself, and almost experience yourself.
[17:31]
And like I said, you cannot experience yourself in the sense of, the self is that surface around which anxiety is passing. That's like an experience of self. and that feeling of anxiety arises from the main experience into the self, or the soul of the experience. One of the basic definitions of suffering, which is in our own culture, like Osama do. is, this is not proper sense to it, okay? But it's something like, . [...]
[18:33]
. [...] We're talking about... But I forgot one word. I think it's... Duca means suffering, frustration. And you know that word duca means? It derived from a wheel inside the ground. Something's off. Something off. What's off?
[19:33]
What's off is the first kind of car getting duca done. What does duca done mean? It means rest. Rest. deep breath meets your experience, that causes, that is suffering. It's not like that causes suffering, that is suffering. It's not like you do that and then you're suffering, that is suffering. To grab your experience, to grab your experience as a self. That's the basic definition. That's the basic thing that's wrong. So if you've got suffering, the suffering is rising right around the queen to the experience that you're having. Now, if you start tuning in to the experience, you can just be present with it.
[20:35]
You hear that there's form, feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness, you may start noticing that that counts for your experience. Form is colors, sound, smells, tangible things, and taste. As you say body on your legs, those are actually more like concepts. An actual simple physical experience is part of what your experience is, and there's feelings. positive, negative, neutral sensation. And there's perceptions, things you actually perceive as objects of awareness. And then there's mental formations, which includes reading, reading, delusion, or also concentration, decision, faith, or lack of faith, diligence, or laziness, hypocrisy, dishonesty, honesty, non-ethotocracy, laziness, effort, all kinds of
[21:45]
possible mental factors are included in the fourth diagram. The fifth diagram is consciousness itself, which embraces all things that are happening in all our consciousness. So, if you feel P, P is in a rather particular moment of experience, in a particular moment of experience contains some unique momentary manifestations of these five channels. However, this grasping is suffering. And in a sense, the grasping is suffering because the grasping is extra. The five families do not need to be grasped. They do not need to be held with the other little unit. There are just five things that come up and five things that go away. If you can start tuning into this process, you can notice that the grasping is a problem, is the pain, and you can notice that the body don't need you to grasp.
[23:01]
The grasping is a habit, this don't happen. But then somehow, it actually doesn't need to happen. Then also one thing, where this is, is this wrapping, partly because there's two kinds of phrases for this wrapping. self-pad, who gets projected onto experience, making this experience into the self. And the other thing is that because of, you might say, an unthorough presence, by not thoroughly experiencing it, we're driven to creating an attachment. and then we project this attachment onto our experience. All this, how this all works, it will reveal itself to you if you can just be present in the middle of this self-experience.
[24:18]
and or experience itself. If you can be present in the middle of this gravity, if you can be present there with the key and all that, this situation will naturally prevail itself. And you know, the person, which we're going to realize, the selflessness, person means the word person comes from persona. And persona means math, right? Another meaning of math, however, is... Another meaning of persona is the characters played by actors. A person in a sense is a character played by an actor. It's also a master. If you can stay present in the middle of this self-cleaning escape, the mask will be dropped.
[25:26]
The person will be dropped. And elements will just stand alone. The experience will just be there unmasked. In order to witness this revelatory unmasking of our experience, depersonalizing our experience, which happens spontaneously all the time. We have to do the hard work presently with our experience, which, as long as they're suffering, will be painful. It's not just okay now. Now I'm going to, like, take two more steps in this process.
[26:27]
From this point here, where you're starting, you're just settling into your experience, and the revelatory process starts to happen. So we'll go from there to complete perfect enlightenment, and then come back again to this point, and I'll go through this again in more detail. All right? Ready? So then, once they unmasked it, how the experience starts to happen. In other words, the covering overall guard of the shield around the theory starts to drop away, and the elements start to appear by themselves, like they're basically now experiencing pain, pleasure, anger, confusion. self-centeredness, anxiety, faith, diligence, jealousy, envy, hypocrisy, dishonesty, and so on.
[27:36]
These kinds of things you're experiencing. Then you start to see how they are relieved to the mass, which is now somewhat dropped away. And you see how the mass even come back in conjunction with And you start to see that the mass really doesn't account for them, and yet the mass can be experienced in terms of combinations of these building walls. And you start to see an interrelationship of all this, and then you realize, even when the mass comes back, the mass doesn't really have any independent existence from elements. Since these five adjectives countable experience, whatever sent you out of yourself, must be one of the five categories. And of course, none of the five categories are the self. You see, that happens. We put the self on the five categories, and that's the suffering.
[28:37]
If you sit with the suffering, the self-powering, the self-powering and cleaning to the whole group of the unit starts to move away and drop away. But this sense of self can re-emerge. And then again, it can be reapplied. But if as it arises now, you see now, this is now, instead of the self of the experience, this is now the experience of the self. You now see a self arising, you know, the experience of a self. There's a self, you kill, there's a self. But then you look at the self and you say, well, what kind of experience is this? Which of the fire is it? It must be one of the fire. And it will be one of the fire. It would be a concept, it would be a smell, or a color, or a taste, or an odor, or a touch, or a concept, or an emotion. We actually use these kinds of things to make us up on average that we are to make us up.
[29:47]
But we do have to use those kinds of things directed at a fire cell, say, this is my skin, that's in my case, that's in my smell, well, that's not my smell, that's not my smell, therefore that smell tells me what my smell is, that's not my taste, or that taste tells me what it is, that's not my touch, and so on. That concept is not my concept, that's the concept of Bruce Lee wrangling, that's not my concept. And so on. All the ways you experience having streams caught the cell are run by. So then you start to see the self also is nothing other than one is by, and nobody is by on the self. So you see the emptiness of the experience of the self, and you see the trouble and unnecessariness of the self of the experience. So in both these ways you start to be loosening the sense of the self, and see how the self, the experience of the self arises as one of these categories, and also how the self of the experience
[30:50]
It's actually just suffering. That's all it is. It's nothing more than suffering. All the self adds to your experience is suffering. Take away the self. Keep a perfectly nice experience. Put the self back on the experience of yourself. That's all it adds. There's nothing more to it than suffering. But as an experience of the self, that's not suffering. Because the experience of the self is not suffering. That's not suffering. It's the self of the experience. It's the self of the experience itself. It's the grabbing the experience and making it to a self. That's a self. But just thinking that a smell of the self, a self, that's just a little bit silly. Which you don't want to make it work. You can pull out very long. But by being unclear about that, you take that self in a map path out of the theory. So you have to empty both selves. And seeing how the self depended core rises to it, that is actually what they want to do.
[31:57]
That empties the self. It's called a person. And also seeing how the suffering from the experience causes pain and there's nothing more, that empties the self. In this way, you see the dependent polarizing the self, the dependent polarizing from suffering. You see all working together and you realize the emptiness, the solidness of the person. and you experience this first level of selflessness to the first level of insight and liberation and enlightenment. Then, imagine you stay present with that enlightenment, which again, because of that habit of suffering things, and you can make a self of that liberation. Again, to simplify that liberation is still caused, and much more so, and more sedious stillness than you had before. Because basically you're liberated, but now you're stopping the liberation and you're stopping the selflessness.
[32:59]
See, now you don't have a personality cell anymore, you've got the cell of the elements, of the Christophones. Now they have a liberating principle, and you can cell them too, because the whole cell has still functioning. There's still not much more soul, there's still kind of stuff in there. Then you have to, again, stay present with that person more soul, which is more difficult to stay present with, because basically, you're kind of list out now. This is a time when you really need a teacher. Yeah, a pretty good one, too. There's two times when you should go to see a teacher. One is when you're so harassed by yourself playing And you're in such pain, you can't be depressed with it. Plus, you think you're not depressed with it. And you never wait with me as it has to be depressed with the stone. So you get caught. And you should go see it. Also, when you have become liberated from believing in yourself, and this is a real liberation, and you think you can put that, also then you go.
[34:08]
So you go between those two, but those that's what happened, you must go. Otherwise, there's a real problem that happens. So you stay present with your insight, with your realization of the emptiness, of the selflessness of your personality, and the suffering that is happening there. Whatever it says, you're letting yourself out of that. And that, again, will unveil a more subtle level of self And then you'll start to see the elements, the viseconders, the elements in the viseconders, the elements in the 12 doors of arrival, where the 18 elements of the system, you'll see them interrelating. And you'll see the emptiness of each one of those. And you'll see the emptiness of your liberation too. And that's .
[35:13]
Great. Now back one more time. Coming through, self. Suffering, suffering, [...] Now, first level to notice this is, again, the body. And body is touch of your body. That's the first kind of thing to be aware of. If you're not aware of your body, it's gonna be hard for you to be aware of the next level of experience, the feelings. Okay? I'll use an example of the physical sensation of
[36:18]
wanting to, particularly wanting to urinate, but it will also apply to wanting to do number two. In the big or little evacuations, this sensation arises in your body when you walk and you feel that fall, that virginity of your body is a physical sensation. You're familiar with it? This is a physical sensation which It's one of them to be aware of when you have to see police. Now, if you're in a conversation with somebody, or I don't know what, like doing your homework, or meditating, or getting a walk to a busy city street downtown, maybe they're going to be dressed up, you might not want to notice that since then. And you don't want to take your attention over your conversation.
[37:38]
It's like directed towards the lower area of your body. You want to get more of your eyes and your mind. But there's a hole in another part of your body that you don't want to get attention to. But it's hard to constate during the conversation because of this other thing. You might even in this conversation deal with some anxiety and you want to pay attention to the anxiety. You see, you're a meditator, right? You want to take attention to that. This is a good, meeting this person, this particular person, a very poor person, so this is a person that you may feel like this is somebody other than you. This is a good chance to study yourself through the feelings I have of this person. I don't want to feel this. But unless I actually do go down there and feel that, I actually can't feel these other feelings that carry on something in discord, even though I'd rather... If I didn't get my full attention and give
[38:42]
that's part of the following experience is doing, it may lead me in something simple way. Or just giving full attention. You may find that as soon as you give full attention, then you can participate in the other role of awareness. But sometimes you don't want to give something full attention, and you're trying to be on the other level, but you can't. On the other hand, we don't want to give full attention because we think we do give full attention and we won't give full attention to the other world. But that's the wrong thing. Giving full attention to one thing helps give full attention to another. It's just that you have to start, if there's an order, if you start to grow starts. If you try to give the subtle attention before it grows, you can. First, it grows, then the subtle, and more subtle than the more subtle. That's why the standards are in order to be.
[39:44]
The purported growth is subtle. Most growth is visible. Colors, cupboards, and so on. Next is feeling. Feeling is a mental phenomenon. It's the grossness of smell. Next is the perceptions. Next is the mental formation. And most subtle is consciousness. It cannot be the object of consciousness. So you start with the grossness, the body. Getting to your body, feelings. Once you're fully aware of those, then naturally the men will be in this tunnel. Like the example I did last week, if you have your hand moving toward your face like this, you know, you try to think, can I try to look at you people without taking this into account? Or let's share examples like if I hit myself in the face and try to have a conversation without taking this into account, I can't pay attention to it. But if I take it into account that I can decide that your face, and I need to stay here and talk while I'm familiar with the sensation, gradually, I can actually see it quite clearly.
[40:55]
So if you take care of your physical sensation, when you take care of it fully, you can see through. Then when you get to the feelings, the next one, the feelings, if you feel your feelings completely, you can see through to the next level of awareness, which is the awareness of the gross aspects of consciousness, whether your mind is concentrated, if you're distracted, whether it's a rough or subtle, whether it's upset or not, whether you're wholesome or not, it's rather gross categories of consciousness, you can see that after you see that you're suddenly, your feelings. So fully dealing with physical phrases, that naturally entails The most subtle discriminations about consciousness, and the five side is Dr. Hager. Already you've looked at two of them. Now, perceptions and immunophilations start to appear and start to notice the subtle change of the quality and the unconsciousness of the hearing formula.
[42:04]
You start to notice and be able to discern This can pull you the five out of the group there. Then in that situation, you start to notice a stroke of suffering, all suffering arises. Again, you're suffering, and it happens that you start to understand from the patients. So, that's the detailed process. some of you need that process about how you settle yourself and be present with your psychological experience in such a way as to have the selflessness of your personal brain when you have the self of your person taken away, the selflessness of your person appears. Your person comes to your bathroom, it just doesn't have to sell anymore.
[43:06]
Perfectly practical person, which is like, you know, what's your name? I use breath. What's your name? Jackie, I turn. Can't work either. Well, I live over there. What's your telephone? 283, so on. Yeah, but practically speaking, I haven't finished my telephone. Perfectly practical person. Not myself. Not a unit, just a person. And now to get to the next level of analysis, I'm going to wait for a while. I'm going to stop now and say one more thing. And that's... In the third case of the book of serenity,
[44:07]
The Boney Tower was teaching it. Part of the Tarant is asked by a garage at lunchtime. I said, Master, why don't you recite scriptures? And the Tarant said, just pull away fairly when breathing in, it doesn't dwell in realms of the body and mind. Actually, he said, I don't dwell in the life's consciousness. And when breathing out, I don't dwell in 18 hours of existence. So he's sitting there, he's having lunch, but because he's trained in Buddhist presence, he has knowledge of the earth and meditation, he's seen those bystanders quite a few times. And he keeps singing all over the room, like, Marcy, the earth, [...] the earth.
[45:10]
It's just the way the world looks to one who's present in our lives, upright, and gentle. And then there's the eyes, and the ears, and the nose, and the tongues, and the bodies, and the minds, and the colors, and the smile. And there's the realm of the eyes, and the realm of the ears, and the nose. That's what they see. They're just sitting in that world. And you're sitting in that world, too, and you see president of the world. You start revealing yourself, too. Just like if we take an old cable strip off while you go and sit out. Just sit out there, you know, they absolutely will come to visit us. Cumps and inks. Old people. Yuppies. Jotters. Bulldogs. Feel it. Perceptions, all this stuff will come to visit you and you just stay present in your experience.
[46:11]
If you make a self in any of that, make a self into the homeless, make a self into the rat food, make a self into yourself, then we're going to have problems. You can see that. All right? This is what appears. So he said, reading again, I do not dwell on it by something. Reading again, I do not get entangled in it.
[46:33]
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