Hmm. Today is Sunday, April 27 2025 and the title for my talk today is the delusion of a separate self just chanted when we turn inward and prove our true nature, our true self is no self.
So we'll be talking about today. Want to start out with a metaphor. This is something I got from Joseph Goldstein. He's one of the teachers, the Vipassana teachers in this country,
and he this is what he says, says you go out at night, and if it's a clear night and the stars are out, most people can recognize the constellation of the Big Dipper, hoping, most people here know what the Big Dipper is. You never know anymore. It's up there in the sky. They say. The question then is, is there really a big dipper up there? Big Dipper is a concept which we're overlaying on a certain pattern of stars, but there's no Big Dipper. So self is like the Big Dipper. The notion of self is a concept, just like Big Dipper is a concept, and we're overlaying that concept of self onto this pattern of mental, physical, emotional content, putting a name, giving a designation of Joseph Bob, Big Dipper, Big Bopper.
But what's interesting is that even though we know Big Dipper is a concept, and there's no big dipper in the sky to go out at night, look up at the sky and see if it's possible not to see the Big Dipper, it's very difficult, because we've been so conditioned to see in a certain way, it's helpful To realize that the concept of Big Dipper can be useful, just like the concept of self can be useful. One of the stars of the Big Dipper actually, one star can't point, points to the North Star. There are two stars. It makes a line out on the outer edge of the dipper, and that points to the North Star. So if you're out in the ocean and trying to decide which way to go. The sky is clear, and maybe you can figure it out we're not suggesting suggesting either with the Big Dipper or the self to get rid of the concept, but to understand that that's what it is. Of course, even, even the pattern of the Big Dipper is a function of the angle we're looking at those stars, we have the idea that they're painted across this panel of the sky. Actually, some of the stars are seven times farther away than others, and if we moved out into the galaxy, the whole constellation would simply fall apart, disappear.
So most people can get that that far, can realize that what we call a self is a lot more complicated. It's not a simple thing. There isn't there are no things. Everything, every so called thing is a process. It's more space than material. Material is mostly space. We get to concepts like self intention, goals get pretty vacuous, pretty empty. You it. One of the koans that people work on in Zen practice is, who am I? What is this? This is awareness doesn't have we're going to we're going to go a little bit into the science of not being there. But to understand what we are can't really be done with the intellect the great Tai. For us, Master. Ajahn Chah said, when one does not understand death, life can be very confusing. If our body really belonged to us, it would obey our commands. We say, don't get old, or, I forbid you to get sick. Does it obey us? No takes no notice. We only rent this house, not own it. We think it belongs to us. We will suffer when we have to leave it. But in reality, there's no such thing as a permanent self, nothing solid or unchanging that we can hold on to. Buddha made a distinction between ultimate truth and conventional truth, the idea of a self is merely a concept, a convention, American, Thai, teacher, student. All are conventions. Ultimately, no one exists, only earth, fire, water and air, elements that have combined temporarily call the body a person, myself, but ultimately there is no me. There is only anata, not self. To understand, not self, you have to meditate. If you only intellectualize, your head will explode once you understand not self. In your heart, the burden of life will be lifted, your family life, your work, everything will be much easier when you see beyond self, you no longer cling to happiness, and when you no longer cling to happiness, you can begin to be truly happy.
The this word anata is one of the three conditions, one of the three characteristics of existence. According to the Buddha, can say, we start with impermanence, one of the three, Nothing stays the same. Everything is shifting and changing, because that's the case, because we don't see that clearly. We suffer. Everything we try to get falls apart, and in the end, we ourselves fall apart. This body is going back to earth, fire, water and air.
It's interesting when people get old in this idea that they'd heard of before they knew, yeah, yeah, I'm gonna die. Starts to get real. Shit got real.
Roshi used to be fond of saying that zazen was a preparation for death, learning to let go on the mat, when you sit down, you see all the things that you cling to, you begin to see some of them take a long time to see,
especially the third characteristic of existence, which is no self.
When the Buddha taught, offered the teaching of no self or not self. He took the he took the approach of saying, if, if there was a self, if you had a self, if you were a thing, you'd be able to control that thing. Be like the king controls his his land, his kingdom. Of course, when you take a look, you realize, no, I can't can. I can barely control whether to get up in the morning or not. So many things out of my control. Certainly can't stop from getting sick or dying, as Ajahn Chah put it,
how much agency do we have? It's really a fraught question when you look into the science of decision making agency, it all starts to get pretty sketchy. We'll get into some of that as we go along. You. I'm going to go for a little bit to guy named Robert Wright. He's a practitioner, as well as an author of a number of books. Evolutionary psychology is one of his areas, and that's the study of how the way we evolved human beings, obviously, are shaped by the need to preserve ourselves, to pass our genetic heritage on to our descendants. And we're all the descendants of people who were good at doing that, the people who weren't good at doing that there. There is no trace of them anymore. And so a lot of the things that come naturally to us are for that purpose, for us to get our genes into the next generation. It's not for the purpose of us to know the truth or for us to be happy. Those are totally irrelevant to nature's so called plan. Of course, there's no plan. It's just causes and conditions playing out
and Robert Wright talks about, there's a chat section here called the Darwinian benefits of self delusion.
He says, Why would natural selection design a brain that leaves people deluded about themselves. One answer is that if we believe something about ourselves that will help us convince other people to believe it, and certainly it's to our benefit, or more precisely, it would have been to the benefit of the genes of our hunter gatherer ancestors to convince the world that we're coherent, consistent actors who have things under control. And then he brings up an experiment which he outlined earlier, where they took people with a split brain, that is for some reason or other, often because of intractable brain problems. People who have the word, who have intractable seizures, they actually have to cut the corpus callosum, all the wiring that goes from the left hemisphere to the right hemisphere, and vice versa. So when you have somebody like that, and you show them something which they see with their right eye, which, of course, connects to the left side of the brain, the left hemisphere. When you show them something to the left hemisphere, they can read it. They know what it is. It's conscious. But when you show it to the right hemisphere, the right hemisphere knows about it, but the conscious mind does not. So it opens up the possibility to do some really, really fascinating experiments. So they did these they I've read a couple accounts of it, not only the one from Robert Wright. And in one, I guess the experimenters were outside a guy's house. They had him in a van, and they were showing, don't know if the van had windows either. Anyway, they were showing him words that only his right brain could see. So one of the words they showed him was walk. And at this point, he got up and walked out of the van, and they said, Where are you going? And of course, he had no idea why he'd got up to walk. He'd got a command. He didn't know about it, and his right brain was taking him off on his walk. So he on the spot, said, I'm going to the house to get a coke. He made up a reason. This happens again and again. There's another experiment where they show people pictures. These are, again, split brain people, so new category of people, so they need their rights protected, not be subject to cruel experiments. These aren't cruel. They showed they showed someone a bunch of pictures, and on the left side, they saw a chicken claw, and on the right side they saw a shovel. And then they were given a bunch of pictures and asked which one related to what they'd seen. All they'd seen was the chicken claw. So the let's see the left brain, right hand, the right hand pointed to a chicken, and they were able to explain that chicken claw chicken, the left hand was pointing to a shovel, because that's what the right side had been shown. Why are you pointing to the shovel? Well, you need a shovel to clean up the chicken shit afterwards. So this is something that we do without think. About it. Roshi Kapleau used to always say, the reason people give for things are not the real reason we make our decisions. We choose what to do and what to say based on input that we're not always aware of. Sometimes we are, but more often we're not, and we come to our decisions by processes that we're not aware of. We all tend to react well to people who seem to know what they're doing, who are decisive. I remember Roshi saying about somebody often wrong but never in doubt, more than one person, but there is, there's something exhilarating about being sure of yourself. It's definitely a good strategy for getting your DNA where you want to get it, or maybe where you don't want to get it. Yeah, yeah.
We we begin to get in touch with the tenuousness of our understanding when we do Zazen, when we sit and observe what happens to the mind when we're on the mat given this simple task, let's say, to follow the breath, or to count the breath, it's all we need to do. It's so simple. You hear about it, you think, yeah, yeah, I can do that. I have a friend who was introduced to Zen by Roshi Kapleau, way back in, I don't know, 1967 1968 he went to a little college in Florida, and the entire freshman class went to seshin. It was, those were the days, the careless joy of the unaware. And I remember I had a friend who had been there, and he was talked into doing zazen by one of the senior guys who actually ended up being sort of one of the three people who lived here with Roshi Kapleau. He was pretty, pretty interesting fellow. I won't go into more of it than that. What an interesting fellow. Anyway, he he told, he told my friend David. He said, I bet you can't count from one to 10 and keep count without losing it. And she's, Oh, of course, I can do that. And when he got on the mat and found out he couldn't he was hooked. That's when he decided, Okay, I'm going to do this.
We all are aware to some degree, another or another, of how much the mind jumps around. I'm going to skim through a passage from a book called The elephant and the blind by a German philosopher named Thomas Metzinger. And I do this with some trepidation, because Thomas Metzinger is a fine philosopher and also a meditator, very impressive guy, and very hard to follow philosophy on the level he's practicing it is, is not easy. And, you know, I'm running into terms like epistemic agent, and not quite sure what that means. And so I've had to sort of take my time going through it. This particular book is between six and 700 pages long, and I'm somewhere in the three hundreds at this point. Robert, who probably read it in German, has finished it. Robert Sensei, I'm just going to read from I can't read. I'm not going to read very many of these 700 pages. I'm just going to take a little bit from the middle of the book, where he's talking about this tendency we have to jump from self to self. He says, I think that in normal life, many of us alternate between rapidly changing units of identification, for example, during dreaming at night, or when we drift off into a short, short episode of day dreaming and come to again when haunted by unbidden memories, or when sudden attacks of automatic planning and mental Time travel into the future make us briefly lose touch with the present moment. One thing that meditators often begin to see is the utter unpredictability, the volatility and the degree of discontinuity in the neural processes that create ever new units of identification simulated. Future cells and sudden trains of thought like a fountain sputtering out wastewater in the middle of what otherwise would be a large, Clear Lake. One thing that Medicaid meditators can begin to see is that the fountain isn't them. At times, they may find that one can actually embody the lake even while the fountain is still active. Of course, that's a quite advanced stage of meditation. And he says under normal conditions, all we can ever do is waste water surfing. And often this actually gets us somewhere where it's functionally useful, but in terms of content, every onset and every ending of an episode of mind wandering is characterized by an unexpected shift, or sudden switch in what I will call, quote, The phenomenal unit of identification. And then he gives an example. Really what I'm looking for. Let's say that at first, you identify with the conscious content of an internal model of the self as driving a car currently waiting at a red traffic light to turn green. Then an internal simulation of yourself as buying tofu and bananas pops up as you remember quote that you need to buy tofu and bananas. Now you identify with the protagonist of this shopping narrative, jumping into the virtual self that constitutes the center of an automatic interaction simulation. Phenomenologically and for a very short moment, you literally become someone else. For a brief moment, you zone out completely, which constitutes an involuntary and unexpected shift in the unit of identification. And a few minutes later, perceptual coupling may quickly be restored and you re identify with the driver quickly checking whether the lights have turned green. This is the end of your first mind wandering episode. Now the driver is real again. Shopper is only virtual, because the shopper is no longer the unit of identification, but just the retrospective content of a sun or sudden memory popping up leading to a decision and an action plan. However, in the very moment where you remember that you also wanted to buy almond butter and raisins, the unit of identification switches again, and you quickly zone up for a fast update, an enriched mental simulation of the shopper and its now extended task list, perhaps involving mental images of shells and aisles. Traditional phenomenologists might say you had an afterthought, but my point is that really the afterthought swiftly created a new virtual self. I
It says there have now been two episodes and four switches. This way of applying our new concept yields another entirely phenomenological way of understanding what the cycle of death and birth is, reincarnation, the functional embodiment of a new unit of identification, is something that happens in your brain every minute of your waking life, but it is also Something that can stop happening, for example, during meditation. I conversation.
Think there's some value in reflecting on on the nature of the mind in this way, it's, it's not the same as meditation, but it does, it does lead you to understand, to counteract, to some extent, the sensation of a Solid, permanent self. We're all over the lot, and it's not a bad idea to reflect on that, to notice how quickly we lay this pattern, this big dipper that we call the self, how quickly we lay it over whatever is going on the mind and take ownership of it. There's another point that Messinger makes which I want to bring out, and
this is from a different book of his entitled The ego tunnel. This book I've actually managed to read in its entirety. And here he's talking it's a fascinating book, and I don't think it's quite as hard to follow as the elephant in the blind.
And here he's talking about how we get the idea that we're in charge, that we're making decisions, is there's a lot of neuroscience in this, and it's really fascinating to sort of wrap your mind around, and I promise your head will not explode. He says experiencing yourself as a willing agent has much to do with as it were, introspectively peeping into the middle of a long processing chain in your brain. This chain leads from certain preparatory processes that might be described as assembling a motor command to the feedback you get from perceiving your movements. So in other words, what happens when we decide to do something? There's we've talked about this before. We think that we make a decision, and then the action ensues. But when the brain is monitored, what happens is, there's all kinds of that action is in process significantly before we're even aware of it, and then there's a point at which we become aware of it, to us, that means we've made the decision, and we jump off the diving board, let's say. But we were ready. We were we were, we had gotten on that track before we even knew. It,
says Patrick haggard of University College in London, perhaps a leading researcher in the fascinating and somewhat frightening new field of research into agency in the self, has demonstrated that our conscious awareness of movement is not generated by the execution of ready made motor commands. Instead, it is shaped by preparatory processes in the pre motor system of the brain. Experiments show our awareness of intention is related to the specification of which movements we want to make when the brain simulates alternative possibilities, say, reaching for a particular object, the conscious experience of intention seems to be directly related to the selection of a specific movement. That is, the awareness of movement is associated not so much with the actual execution as with an earlier brain stage,
the awareness of intention and the awareness of movement are conceptually distinct but haggard. Speculates that they must derive from a single processing stage in the motor pathway. And one of the fascinating things is that this is something that doesn't exist in other animals. This is just human beings. So we evolved this ability to see into this preparatory process, which gives us as human beings the sense of agency makes us different. If I asked my dog, why did you do that? My dog has no answer. I asked my dog, don't you feel bad about the things you do? My dog does not i
He says, When this sense of agency evolved in human beings, some of the stages in the immensely complex causal network in our brains were raised to the level of global availability. That means we became aware of them. For the first time, we could experience ourselves as beings with goals, and we could use internal representations of these goals to control our bodies. For the first time, we could form an internal image of ourselves as able to fulfill certain needs by choosing an optimal route. Moreover, conceiving of ourselves as autonomous agents enabled us to discover that other beings in our environment probably were agents too, who had goals of their own. I've read that the explosion in the human brain came from the point where we became social animals, and we had to in order for our for to survive, in order to pass our genes along, we had to be able to suss out the intentions of other people. There's so much that goes into being able to read into what other people are showing us. We're much better at it than people who don't have for creatures that don't have. That insight, especially when dealing with human beings. Of course, that also makes us unhappy, makes us self conscious, makes us awkward. Once, once our movements come into consciousness, it becomes harder to just do what we can do naturally. There's there's the teaching of the Zen master, Japanese Zen master Banke,
whose advice to students was to stay in the buddha mind,
just react naturally, spontaneously. And he used the example of crowd of people, one crowd going one way, one crowd, another meeting on a road, and everybody avoids bumping into everybody else without even thinking about it. You walk up and down stairs, you don't think about where to put your feet. It's all happens automatically. It's all handled. But we have the ability to get in there and try to improve things, which makes them worse. There's almost no sport which doesn't happen better when the mind gets out of the way. You can see people's performance fall apart when they become self conscious. See it in ourselves. I had an experience when I was very young. I was the fastest kid in my class. I could run faster than anybody else. This was in third grade, and then one night, I had a dream. In my dream, I couldn't run. It's like stuck in molasses. And the next day, another kid beat me, a little element of self consciousness had gotten in there. Had another experience at about the same time where we were out on the in the field, and I had a football and he was going to try to tackle me, this friend of mine, and I ran towards him, and I tried to think, well, I'll dodge this way, and then I'll dodge that way. And of course, everything was self conscious and controlled, and when I finally Zig to one side, he did too, and tackled me, no problem. It was like that didn't work at all, maybe when I started thinking about how messed up I am. So it's all proceeded by only a few days by my running down the field and my third grade teacher, who was a guy, which was unusual at the time, I overheard him saying he runs like a gazelle. That was the beginning of the end. It's kind of sad, but then maybe I wouldn't be here now, everything, everything works out one way or another, but it's, it's, it's it's really, there's so much in life can improve when we work our way past this feeling of a solid self, and this feeling of agency that I do what I do because I decided to do it, and we try to stop trying to make it look like we know what we're doing. We're just content to be as we are. You I make a
decision, and you can't even remember what it was. Who knows where I put this page, but I've got it now. You are, though the process of zazen really is about dis identifying with our thoughts, thereby lessening our sense of separation, and in the end, making our life better, better for us, better for others, better for everyone. We come to understand the importance of causes and conditions, understand the futility of living from the top down, trying to command the self like a king commanding his kingdom, and we get on the other side of assigning blame, not only blame to ourselves, but blame to other people. When you really look deeply into it, everything we do can be traced back to causes and conditions. And it's very hard to find where we have the leverage to do something other than what we do. There are a lot of philosophers that argue, argue strongly that everything is determined. I've read a lot of stuff by a scientist and writer named Robert Sapolsky, who, among his many books, wrote one called determined, which is basically a 300 page argument for the fact that everything we do is outside of our control. It was given to me by a friend and a center member who read about 40 pages into the book and was so bothered by the argument that he didn't want the book anymore. And I said, Yeah, I'll read that. And and it's, it's, there's so many things that science points to that indicate, really, if somebody, if somebody, hurts us, the problem is often outside of their I say often just to hedge it, but it's really outside their control. Why is Donald Trump the way he is? Well, look into his childhood. Look into his progenitors, there are reasons so much of the harm that we suffer isn't we think it's personal, and it seems personal because maybe the other person doesn't like it us, but even that dislike of us is something they don't have control over. Everything is just acting out. It's so much. It's so different when we realize that all of us are fighting this hard battle now, when we say that things are determined, that doesn't mean that what we do doesn't have an effect if you take up the practice of zazen or if you just start reflecting on the needs of other people, over time, your behavior will change for the better. It's just that our sense of agency at any given moment is misplaced, plenty of room for improvement. So the fear that people have of so called determinism is somewhat misplaced, but they can't help it.
It's, it's, it's just interesting to watch things play out without the preferences, without the wanting, things to go my way.
It's really dropping our demands. Saw a quote recently, order what you like, eat, what you get. And here's another quote, the great way is not difficult for those who do not pick and choose when preferences are cast aside, the way stands clear and undisguised. There's magic in taking our foot off the pedal and pretending to operate ourselves like a puppet. We have the ability to see the effects of our action. We have the ability to course correct. Don't have to map everything out, and we don't have to waste time regretting what we've done. We did it. It's past the reasons we did it aren't necessarily available to us. Can certainly there's value in resolving to do better, but the blame part, the beating up on ourselves part is totally ineffective, often makes things worse.
This is the magic of the first step in AA, which for me, in my life, was an amazing turning point. First step goes like this. We admitted that we were powerless over alcohol, that our lives had become unmanageable. Doesn't have to be just alcohol. Admitted we were powerless over our thoughts, powerless over our emotions, powerless over. Our reactions, powerless over our habitual ways of thinking that that made our lives worse when you when you can accept the fact that you screw up, that you do things wrong, there's a burden lifted, and you actually can experience joy. Everything is open. We're not locked into being a certain kind of person. Some people that's an inadequate person. Other people, other people. That's a superior person. Whatever it is, it's not good. Let it go. There was something I heard in an AA meeting, somebody talking about honesty, and he said, I like to travel light. When you let go of the self. You do. You do travel lighter, even if you let go just a little bit, little bit, brings a little bit of ease. Letting go completely brings complete ease. You
Some people feel that the real founder of Zen as we know it was the six patriarch Hui nang supposed supposedly an illiterate Chinese from the south. When he met the fifth patriarch, his teacher really pushed him, he said, What makes you think that a jungle rat like you can understand really very politically incorrect challenge we Neng Wai nang was able to say the Buddha Nature is the same WA. Uh, here's some things that he said that this is I love. This guy said the object of bowing is to break the curtain of self intoxication. So why not put your head as low as the ground? Cherishing pride is committing a crime while forgetting your merit brings joy beyond measure.
And he said this too, this is really remarkable. He said, When others are wrong, I too am responsible. When I am wrong, I alone am to blame. So much different than what we do, trying to shift the blame, trying to appear as if we know what we're doing. It's extremely liberating when we can say, Yes, I screwed up. And when you can do that, you feel freer. You don't feel worse, you'd think that by accepting the blame, you're going to feel bad about yourself, but it doesn't work that way.
It's amazing how much humility can change your life, realizing we're all garden variety people. So French philosopher Montaigne who said, I'm like everyone else, except for this one thing, that is that I know I'm like everyone else. You
I want to finish with a short quote from Dilgo Kensei Rinpoche, one of the great Tibetan teachers. He said, The Supreme sign of great practitioners is not that they spout halos, have extraordinarily auspicious dreams, experience bliss continuously, or can foresee our miserable futures. The supreme side is that they no longer have any interest in material gain, fame, the respect of others or being the center of attention, they're okay with being who they are, whatever that is okay. We'll stop here and recite the four vows you.
