Today is February 11 2024. Sunday and tentative title for this talk is no self and habits as far as the eye can see. And I want to start out talking about the Buddha's teaching of anata, or no self. I'm going to be reading a bit from a book called Why Buddhism is True by Robert Wright. Read from this before, but it's been a long time. And we're just going to dip right back into it.
This is from a chapter entitled The alleged non existence of yourself. And he says I John Cha, the 20th century time monk, who did much to spread awareness of the positive meditation in the West, used to warn about the difficulty of grasping the Buddhist idea of anata, or not self. The basic ideas of the self yourself myself, in some sense, doesn't exist. Many quotes by John Cha, to understand not self, you have to meditate. If you try to grasp the doctrine through intellectualizing alone, your head will explode.
And that's that's one of the dangers when we get into elucidating. This doctrine is it's subtle. It's there's a lot to think about. And as John Chow recommends, the best way to understand no self is to meditate to quiet the mind to let the thoughts settle, and to look into the stillness that remains. But we need to do we need to know what we're doing, especially as Westerners. And there's, there's an awful lot that you can understand. If you really look closely at what it is that we call ourself. It's kind of its kind of mysterious, and ridiculous. Baffling our picture of ourself, I like to say is, is kind of like a child's crayon drawing, we might hang on the refrigerator, doesn't begin to match up with our true experience. And the Buddhist doctrine of no self was one of three characteristics of existence that the Buddha proclaimed, the first was suffering or dukkha. Second was the impermanence. fact that nothing lasts everything is in constant flux and change. And the third is that there is no self.
When the Buddha first preached his first sermon on this doctrine of no self, he preached it to the Famous Five ascetics, the ones to whom he preached the Four Noble Truths. This was the the monks who had been with him during his long quest to deny the body and to find the truth through a form of asceticism. And they had abandoned him when he'd taken food and adopted the Middle Way taking care of the body, meeting its needs and looking into the mind.
So this is from my early texts called discourse on the not self which is said to be the Buddhist Buddha's earliest utterance on the subject. At the end of this discourse, the five monks are all said to have transitioned from being mere monks to being our hearts, that is truly enlightened beings. They are said to be the first five people to have attained that rank aside from the Buddha himself, I think we can just leave that aside, and look at what the Buddha had to say.
The Buddha's strategy in this discourse was to shake the monks confidence in their traditional ideas about the self, by asking them where exactly in a human being, we find anything that warrants the label self. And he does this search systematically, he looks through each of the five aggregates. And according to Buddhist philosophy, that's all human being is these five aggregates and they are in brief, the physical body or form basic feelings, perceptions, that is sights and sounds. Fourth is mental formations. Robert Wright said this is a big category that includes complex emotions, thoughts, inclinations, habits, decisions, and finally, five consciousness or awareness. Notably, the awareness of the contents of the other four aggregates are Skandhas. So the Buddha runs through this list, and asks if any of these qualify as a self. And his criterion is, do you have control over any of these? Here's what he says about form. If form were self, then form would not lead to affliction. And it should obtain regarding form may my form be thus, they may form not the thus. But he notes, our bodies do lead to affliction. And we can't magically change that by saying May my form be thus. So form, the stuff the human body is made of, isn't really under our control. Therefore, it says the Buddha, it must be the case that form is not self. Or we could say I am not my body. And then he goes through all the other four aggregates. And it's the same with all of them. It's sort of like what's given, we have a body, we have thoughts, we have perceptions, we have feelings, all of them enter the mind, we become aware of them, but we don't control them, we may try to control them, but each one of us runs up against that difficulty. Top down does not work very well. And what the Buddha is saying is there is no top from which to control it top down.
Right goes on to explain that control isn't the only property that people attend to associated with self. And it isn't the only property the Buddha examines in his discourse. And he says of himself, when I think of myself, I think of something that persists through time. I've changed a lot since I was 10 years old, but hasn't some inner is essence. My identity myself, in some sense endured. Isn't that the one constant amidst the flux? Of course, the Buddha taught that everything is in flux, including our so called self
is discourse he says, What do you think of this, oh, monks, is feeling permanent or impermanent? obligingly, the monks reply, impermanent Oh, Lord, he continues, is perception permanent or impermanent, and so on through mental formations the body consciousness, none of the aggregates is permanent, the monks agree. So two of the properties commonly associated with the self control and persistence through time are found to be absent, not evident in any of the five components. This is the core of the argument the Buddha makes in this first and most famous discourse on not self. And it's commonly taken as the core Buddhist argument that the Self does not exist.
Of course, Robert, right. Being a scientist is going on in the book, to show what we've been able to learn Studying the mind studying our, our neurology how our brains are wired. That also converges on this Buddhist understanding that there is no such thing as a self that's acting on other things
basically, that our image of itself doesn't hold up to scrutiny. One obvious thing that always strikes me is, we have absolutely no control over what thought is next is going to pop into our mind. It's impossible, how can you know what your next thought is going to be? We talk about them as my thoughts. And there is this tendency to think well, I thought that so that must be what I believe. But the thought the fact is, if you keep any kind of inventory of the things that run through your mind, there's all sorts of things that turn up there that you don't believe and that you would disavow.
Right turns to leader in the book experiments that were done back in the 1960s. With people who had split brains, in other words, because of some sort of disease process, typically, epilepsy, the only way to stop the electrical storms in the brain was to cut through the corpus callosum, the bridge between left brain and right brain and left people with no communication between the two sides of the brain. So for instance, everything that goes into the left eye goes to the right brain, which then controls the left hand, the left leg, and vice versa. And the two hemispheres the right and the left are a little different. For instance, language exists only in the left hemisphere, which enabled them to do some really interesting experiments.
These studies were done by two neuroscientists named Roger Sperry, and Michael Gazzaniga. And the key is to confine information to a single hemisphere by presenting it to only half of the patient's visual field. So for instance, if a word is presented only to the left eye, you won't enter the left hemisphere at all, it will go to the right hemisphere, it's a little confusing because they cross. But that's just how we're wired. And of course, again, that's the hemisphere that controls language. And he says, sure enough, patients whose right hemisphere is exposed to say the word not report no awareness of this input, yet their left hand, which is controlled by the right hemisphere, is the hemisphere that was exposed that saw the word will if allowed to rummage through a box containing containing various objects, choose a nut that finding alone could make you start questioning traditional notions of the conscious self. Now consider this one. When the left hemisphere is asked to explain behavior initiated by the right hemisphere, it tries to generate a plausible story. If you send the command walk to the right hemisphere, these patients they will get up and walk. But if you ask them where they're going, the answer will come from the left hemisphere, which wasn't privy to the command. And this hemisphere will come up with what from the from its point of view is a reasonable answer. One man replied plausibly enough that he was going to get a soda and the person who comes up with the improvised explanation, at least the person who's left hemisphere, the part of the person who's doing the talking, seems to believe the story.
There were other studies done later, where, rather than dividing the hemispheres, that gave people either visible cues or subliminal cues, that is something flashed on the screen so quickly that you have no conscious aware of awareness of it. They had some sort of setup where you would earn money by squeezing something tightly. And before the test there'd be flash up an image of a coin, either a penny or a pound. Sounds like this was done in Britain. Yes, it was. And they found that even when the image couldn't actually be seen by the conscious mind, the stakes influenced how hard subjects squeezed in their grip.
And what they found was that it didn't matter. It didn't matter whether the queue was subliminal or conscious. The motivation was the same, people would squeeze harder if it was shown to them subliminally. And so there was no difference, they reported no difference in their motivation, their conscious motivation. And right says, Use conscious motivation really the right term, that could be taken to mean that the motivation originates with conscious volition. And this experiment suggests a different scenario. The actual brain machinery that translates incentive into motivation is the same regardless of whether you're consciously aware of the incentive, and consciously experiencing the translation. So maybe the conscious awareness doesn't really add anything to the process. In other words, maybe it's not so much conscious motivation, as consciousness of motivation, you've been subliminally motivated, and you're aware of it. And so you think you did it. With or without conscious awareness, the same physical motivational machinery, it is the same wiring in the brain seems to be doing the heavy lifting. This study, the studies, of course, are commonly known. I mentioned in last teisho, I gave the studies done by a guy named Benjamin Libet, a neuroscientist at the University of California, who was able to show that actions we take for instance, if someone is told to press a button, the action is initiated before we make a conscious decision to do it. So if you're standing on a diving board, and you decide to jump in, before you make that decision, your body is already in action. In response to that, that teisho One of our members sent me a sci fi story that set up where artificially intelligent robots are confronting human beings about the ridiculousness of their consciousness. And too long to read it all. But here's a little snippet. This is the robot speaking, make a conscious choice. decide to move your index finger too late, the electricity is already halfway down your arm, your body began to act a full half second before your conscious self chose to, for the self chose nothing. Something else set your body in motion, sent an executive summary, almost an afterthought to the homunculus behind your eyes. homunculus of course means a little man Latin. That little man, that arrogant subroutine that thinks of itself as the person mistakes correlation for causality. It reads the summary it sees the hand move, and it thinks that the one drove the other really are conditioned. So many things we do that because we do them we think we decided to do them. Go back again to that quote from Roshi Kapleau. The reasons people give for the things they do are not the real reasons No wonder we can't understand why we do the things we do. The actual machinery is elsewhere than in the so called conscious self.
So right goes on to suggest How it is that we make our decisions. And this is what most scientists studying this puzzle have come to. And I'll read, I'll read a little bit of what he wrote here. If the conscious self is not a CEO, Chief Executive Officer, directing all the behavior, it thinks it's directing How does behavior get directed? How do decisions get made? And increasingly common answer within the field of psychology, especially evolutionary psychology, is that the mind is modular. In this view, your mind is composed of lots of special modules, we could we could also say sub routines are just patterns, ad hoc constellations of nerve paths, that that performs certain actions. So he says modules for sizing up situations and reacting to them. And it's the interplay among these modules that shapes your behavior. And much of this interplay happens without conscious awareness on your part.
Lot of different ways of thinking about these modules and he cautions against many of them. He says here, the modules aren't like departments in a company's organization chart. Maybe this goes without saying, given what I've just noticed, noted about how fluidly interactive and overlapping the modules are. And given that the whole constant text for this discussion is that our minds lack a CEO. Still, it's worth dwelling on how utterly unlike the idealized working of a corporation, the operation of the mind is. Among the traits, modules often lack our obedience and harmony. Yes, the modules may sometimes collaborate, but they sometimes compete, and they can compete fiercely. Someone wants to did a series of jokey organizational charts for major corporations, and Microsoft, famous for its infighting was depicted as a circular firing squad. Our minds aren't that torn by internal strife. But there are some times as close to that as Microsoft's official organization chart in Gaza, nega one of these 2x, experimenters from the 1960s and wrote, while Hierarch hierarchical processing takes place within the modules, it is looking like there is no hierarchy among the modules, all these modules are not reporting to a department head, it is a free for all self organizing system. So basically the way one way of understanding it is we have various below the surface constellations of sub routines, things we could do the mate acquisition routine, run away from danger routine, and basically whichever one rises to the surface, as the strongest signal gets activated. And so there is this sort of competition. And they're responding to the changes in our environment, the various cues, it's a good way to understand addiction, you get into the wrong space with the wrong people, and the wrong stimuli and all of a sudden, what we can call a module swings into action and there is a intense, intense urge to go in a certain direction. This is getting into the habits as far as the eye can see.
Doesn't he also says whichever notion you happen to be conscious of it, a particular particular moment is the one that comes bubbling up the one that becomes dominant. It's a doggy dog world going on in your brain, with different systems competing to make it to the surface to win the prize of conscious recognition. I always get a little quibble a little bit with the idea of imputing intent to processes like these. It's like saying that evolution wants to do this or that is just a pattern that produces a result
It says Gaza nega is talking more about struggles that get resolved at an unconscious or barely conscious level, the things I pay attention to the stories I tell about the things I pay attention to the stories I tell about myself, all these results from choices getting made, and I, the conscious I, the thing I think of as myself is by and large, not making the choices it's almost enough to make you wonder whether the thing you think of as yourself deserves the label. Another professor at the psychology written named kurtsan has written in the end, if it's true that your brain consists of many, many little modules with various functions, and if only a small number of them are conscious, then there might not be any particular reason to consider some of them to be you are really you are yourself, or maybe anything else particularly special. When Kurzban wrote that in a book called Why everyone else is a hypocrite, evolution and the modular mind, he wasn't conversant with the Buddhist idea of not self. But millennia after that idea arose, science had steered him towards it.
So we're left with the issue of how do I get myself to do the things I value to do what I want? How do I get myself to do the things that are going to make me happy that are going to help me help others?
The story in the popular media is it's a matter of willpower, isn't it? Just do it, put your mind to it. Anyone who struggled to get themselves to do what they know they want to do, realizes that it's not that easy. And a lot has been written on the whole difficulty of working with patterns with habits
going to read a little bit from a book called Good habits, bad habits, the science of making positive changes that stick.
See if I can find the author of this book which I have on an iPad here.
Somebody named Wendy would don't know much about her but pretty good book.
She She begins the book by giving the example of a cousin of hers who went onto Facebook and announced that she was going to be starting a diet. And of course, she did it so that she would raise the stakes. And because everybody knew what she was trying to do, she would be so afraid of failing, that surely she would push through and lose the weight that she had decided she needed to lose. Don't want to get into whether she really needed to lose that weight or not just use weight loss as one of the things that people find that they try to do and fail at. She says How hard is it really to change ourselves? Like most of us, my cousin intuitively knew the answer. It's pretty hard. So she came up with some proactive ways to commit to that change. She bound herself to her plans and raise the costs of failure. She went beyond simply choosing to change. She started to craft her own social environment into one that made it harder for her to not lose weight. This should have worked. It did Two weeks after her first post, she updated down to pounds. That's a great beginning. But then silence. A month later, she posted that she was still trying but without much success, no weight loss to tell you about yet. And that was her last post for a while on the topic. When I met up with her again, six months later, she hadn't lost any additional weight. In fact, the only change was it now she had an additional failure to feel bad about a costly public one, the end result for her. And for so many people who tried to change their behavior is that it just didn't happen. She had the desire, she had the determination, she had some peer support. They're supposed to be enough, but they're not.
Right now there are a lot of people doing the term intensive, and I'm sure some of you are running into the limitations of how much you can accomplish. With just just with willpower, its willpower is like a muscle, and it's got so much strength. And then it gets tired, doesn't it? The author makes the point. She's gonna make it here. Yeah, let me go ahead and read the way she puts it here. And then we'll talk about it a little more. She says science is showing that regardless of Nike ads and conventional wisdom, we are not one single unified hole. in psychological terms, we do not have a single mind. Instead, our minds are composed of multiple separate but inner correct connected mechanisms that guide behavior. This will sound familiar Of course, some of these mechanisms, it turns out, are suited to handle change. These are the features we know our decision making, making ability and willpower. These are familiar because we consciously experienced them. When we make decisions, we consciously attend to relevant information and generate solutions. When we exert willpower, we actively engage mental effort and energy decisions and willpower drawn what we call executive control functions in the mind and brain, which are thoughtful cognitive processes to select and monitor actions. We are mostly aware of these processes. They are they are our subjective reality, or the sense of agency that we recognize as me. Much as we experience the stress of exerting physical strength, we are aware of the heavy lift of exerting mental strength. There been a lot of experiments with this where you have somebody do a difficult task, and then put them in a situation that calls for willpower, and lo and behold, they have less of it, they're more likely to have that extra doughnut than if they hadn't done the difficult task. She says, executive control must be paid as do. Many of life's challenges require nothing more than this. A decision to ask for a raise at work starts with setting an appointment with your boss, you carefully phrase your request, outline your reasons. Or you decide to add some romance to your life by asking that attractive person at the gym to meet for coffee. After some deliberation, you find an appropriately casual way to do so. decisiveness works in these one off events, we make our decision, steal our resolve, and muster our strength to follow through. Then comes the part that we're all familiar with. Other parts of our lives, however, are stubbornly resistant to executive control. And thinking every time we act would in any case be a highly inefficient way of conducting our lives. Can you imagine trying to make the decision to go to the gym every single time you went? You'd be condemning yourself to rekindling the ardor of day one every single day. You'd be forcing your mind to go through that exhausting process of engaging with all the reasons that you felt you should be going to the gym in the first place. And because our minds are wonderfully irrationally adversarial, you'd have to run through the reasons not to go to each time every day. That's how decision making works. You would constantly be in the throes of heavy mental lifting with little time to think about anything else. And that in brief, is the reason why it's so hard to change our habits using willpower alone
Okay, low power mode is now on. Okay good. One of those sub routines I just don't seem to control them. Okay, low power mode is now on you know, the artificial intelligence can always have the plug polled. Okay, there we go
there's an awful lot of material out there about working with habits and this book that I just read from goes into some of it, I don't have time to explain to you exactly how you can turn your life upside down and become a more attractive than happy person by following those techniques, but to give them their due, doing things like thinking about the cues that trigger your actions, putting yourself in a position where it's easier to succeed. Those are all things that an intelligent person is going to do. When we when we have the introductory workshop, a lot of what we talked about at the very end is things you can do to set up your house. So you're, it's easier for you to sit, explain the rationale, the time behind finding a particular time of day when you sit each day, it just makes it easier. It's not something that you have to negotiate every time you decide to sit, it's just like, oh, I woke up, I brush my teeth. Now I sit on the mat. When you get a routine like that going, you find that sitting becomes integrated habit. And it's no longer an effort. If you try to make your mind up each day to sit and argue it through just as the author said, you're going to find yourself short of energy short of willpower. It's not an inexhaustible resource. A lot of times what people do is they replace one habit that they let's call it a bad habit with another one. And it's simply a matter of hijacking the queue. When when suddenly you're in that situation where you want to take a drink, say, instead of drinking a beer, you drink a glass of water, I used to use that method when I was drinking, I was using it to not get too drunk. I wanted to get just drunk enough. And then just coast in. And I was able to do that from time to time, by setting down the beer or whatever I was drinking and slugging water for the rest of the night. It was actually a very skillful little move I had. Everything fell apart one night when the friend who used to remind me that that's what I did wasn't there. And I just kept drinking beer. Thank goodness, because otherwise I'd probably still be drinking.
So a lot of changes we can make, to practical things we can work on how much we eat, how much we sleep when we sleep, how much physical activity we get, how often we use our phones, often we sit can set up routines to come to the center at particular times can make it a point to create a habit of spending more time with close friends and family making phone calls, for instance. But with all of these, we need more than just that executive decision. We need to consider context and cues. We need to understand what drives our behavior. We need to pay attention to how things play out. For just gritting our teeth and trying to do it, we're not going to really understand how it works. So much of so much of spiritual growth. Every kind of growth depends on understanding. Starting with the understanding that we're really not in charge of the process. We have some leverage in some sort of sense. But can't just be the way we want it. Are things over which we are powerless? And yet, and yet things change We're never condemned to any one pattern. One of the big problems is when we try to make a change, we're caught up in what we want and what we don't want. And that, that leads me to a whole nother area of habits. And those are habits of the mind, the tendency to beat up on ourselves, this tendency to see things in good and bad. So, that was sage trongsa, who said, good and bad, is a disease of the mind.
Automatic habits of competing with other people of wanting to be the center of attention, of worrying about what other things other people think of us habits that are expressed simply with physical tension. People have a way of breathing is it completely free and natural? Not very often. Watch a dog sleeping. You see the breath moving freely through a body that's not tied in knots by thoughts of good and bad, has no concern for the opinion of others, other than maybe wanting to be a good dog will grant them that
with a lot of those deep mental tendencies the answer if I can say it, is Zen is awareness.
There is a Jesuit priest you've heard from before, and Anthony de Mello. He has one book that I tend to read read from all the time, but he's written other books, or other books have been assembled from things he said. And this is from a book called stop fixing yourself. And this is a chapter entitled, stop fixing yourself. Suppose there is a way to get rid of all that. That is everything that you think you need to fix. Suppose there is a way to stop that tremendous drain of energy, health and emotion that comes from conflict and confusion. Would you want that? Suppose there is a way that we could truly love one another and be at peace, be at love. People ask me all the time, what do I need to do to change myself? If you are one of those people, I've got a big surprise for you. You don't have to do anything. In fact, the more you do, the worse it gets. All you have to do is understand. The trouble with most people is that they're busy trying to fix things in themselves, that they really don't understand. Stop fixing yourself. You're okay. Don't interfere. Don't fix anything. Simply watch, observe. These things in you that you struggled to fix just need to be understood. If you understood them, they would change. The Buddha one time talking about the things that we grab, we grab at talked about the worm and the hook. If you only see the worm of course, this is from a fish's point of view are the worm is something you would like to eat. If you only see the worm, you're going to bite. If you see the hook, you won't. So understanding has a really important role doesn't it? Most people have never stopped to consider the simple fact their efforts are going to get them nowhere. Their efforts will only make things worse, as things become worse when you use fire to put out fire effort does not lead to growth, effort, whatever the form it takes, whether it be willpower habit, a technique, or a spiritual exercise does not lead to change. Like to interject here that there are places for effort. For instance, there may be an effort to get your practice started. But what we're pointing towards awareness is beyond effort. Develop says at best ever leads to repression and a cowering, a covering over of the root problem. ever it may change the outward behavior but it does not change the inner person. Just think of what kind of mentality it betrays when you ask, What must I do to get holiness? What sacrifices What must I make? What discipline must I undertake? What meditation must I practice in order to get it? Think of a man who wants to win the love of a woman, and attempts to improve his appearance, build his body, change his behavior, and practice techniques to charmer. And so it is with spirituality and holiness. It is not what you do that brings it to you. What matters is what you are and what you become. Of course, what we are is a product of what we pay attention to what we're aware of.
What is it? That keeps us from awareness. Demello is on to something when he says it's our feeling that we have to fix ourselves. talked last time about attitudes that we can have that we can bring to practice that are conducive to awareness, contentment, interest, acceptance, to name others, gratitude. Many people are aware of the four Brahma viharas, the four divine abodes compassion, loving kindness, sympathetic joy, and equanimity. All those arise when we're no longer competing, or no longer fighting. All those arise when we're able to say, right now it's like this. Blame and praise, good and bad. They're all meaningless. When there's really no self. If we do well, that's the product of things that are beyond our control. We're lucky, we won the lottery.
And yet, we do have the ability to go in a certain direction. Not going to be able to control every factor. Not going to be able to make ourselves the way we think we should be. We're going to be allowing, we're going to be able to get ourselves out of the way and allow ourselves to grow naturally, in a healthy direction. where that takes us, we don't even know. Others have done it before us. So we do the experiment. aren't any simple answers. There are a lot of things that we can notice. And stop doing. There's that saying, If you keep walking into the same wall, turn left or turn right. Don't try harder. Try different. So promising to have a way of working on the self. That doesn't depend on a conscious director, making decisions. Checking on how we're doing
trust the process. All the things Roshi ever told me that's the one that struck the deepest chord John. Just trust the process. can use your intelligence to arrange things. So the process continues so that you keep hitting the mat. You can use your awareness to see when you're going astray. You Use your kindness and compassion to forgive yourself when you do things wrong as you inevitably well can use your determination to just keep trying. Love the image of determination as a stream, finding its way around obstacles just going on the journey
Well, there's the bell. Stop now and recite the Four Vows right
