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Self and No Self | Otter.ai

Self and No Self

John Pulleyn44min

Speaker 1

00:05

Good morning, everyone. And special welcome to those of you who are joining us for the first time, following yesterday's introductory workshop. Today is October 19, 2025 and this morning, I am going to start us off with a story about something extraordinary that happened earlier this year. It's something that happened in a split second act of letting go. And it's a story about Pedro arieta, who's a 34 year old elite runner from Brazil. He had trained for months and months toward a single goal to set a personal record in the Boston Marathon.

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It's very difficult to qualify for this marathon acceptance is based on speed,

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and if you're lucky enough to get a spot, your training needs to factor in a course that has a lot of hills and also the unpredictability of April weather. And for Pedro, it was his first time running in the Boston Marathon. Now, training for a marathon involves, certainly a great deal of determination and a strict regimen in order to improve and fine tune your distance and your pace. And although I've never run one, and I've never had an aspiration to I do have a friend, a close friend, who has done several marathons, she's preparing for one right now, and I witnessed how her preparation consumes her daily life. It involves not just the time that she commits to running every week,

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rain or shine, no matter how hot or cold it is,

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but also eating the right foods, staying hydrated to maximize her performance. And also on top of the running, there's this routine of other kinds of exercise and stretching that helps prevent injury and also helps with recovery. And as for Pedro arieta, on race day, everything was going great. His stride was strong. The weather was decent, and with a finish line in sight, his personal goal of completing the race within two hours and 40 minutes was attainable, and it would place him in the top 1% of runners. But then all of a sudden, he witnessed another runner who was ahead of him collapse to the pavement, overcome with fatigue, clutching his legs in pain, and in that instant, with just 200 more meters to go to the finish line, and in a race where every second counts, Pedro's attention shifted. It shifted from his personal ambition to helping. This random guy make it over the finish line. So without hesitation, Pedro stops in his tracks, stoops down, and helps to lift up Sean Goodwin. He places his arm over Sean's shoulder, literally lifts him up, holds him in place long enough for him to get stable on his feet, and then together at first, very gingerly, they walk, and then they Joh, and they finish the race, cross The line, side by side. It was such an incredible act of no self, of letting go the pursuit of a goal, and of seeing clearly, seeing what's needed, and responding with the heart, not with the head.

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06:30

You could say that running is its own kind of zazen,

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06:41

and any activity really can be a form of zazen if we completely lose ourself in it, playing an instrument, painting, dancing, chanting, you and also washing the dishes, taking out the garbage,

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when done purely with full presence, just for its own sake, without trying to reach a goal or earn a reward, without thinking of it as a box to check off on your to do list or your bucket list, any activity can transform into something truly wondrous when we're fully Present, when we get ourself out of the way. With this in mind, I'm going to read an excerpt from Charlotte Joko Beck's book everyday Zen love and work. And for anyone who is unfamiliar with her, she was a contemporary of the founder of our center, Roshi, Philip Kapleau. She was born in 1917 and died in 2011 Joko, as she called herself, was one of the first females and teachers in the US, and she had a very practical and down to earth style that focused on integrating practice into ordinary, everyday life. And that's reflected in all three of her books. Now, this book, everyday Zen, covers a lot of ground, but the section I'm going to read from is it's about no self, and it's titled The reward of practice and of course, the reward she speaks of is not in the ordinary sense of achieving a goal or gaining something that you Don't already possess. Has more to do with losing than gaining

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09:51

a reward that's no reward. She begins. She. We are always trying to move our lives from unhappiness to happiness, or we might say that we wish to move from life of struggle to a life of joy. But these are not the same. Moving from unhappiness to happiness is not the same as moving from struggle to joy. Some therapies seek to move us from an unhappy self to a happy self, but Zen practice and perhaps a few other disciplines or therapies can help us move from An unhappy self to no self which is joy. So you. So this is such an important distinction. The purpose of practice is not to make us feel better about ourselves and our life, to feel less stress and anxiety and instead more calm and more peace. These are the kinds of things that lead us to this path, and that certainly was the case for me, but it reflects a goal, seeking attitude, seeing zazen as a strategy, to get something or get somewhere that we

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presume to be down the road at a distance from here, and then all the while, we're missing out

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on the joy that is available. It's available to us right now.

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So what this is, is duality, a self trying to become a different self,

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a self that is lacking, living a life that is lacking,

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and all all The while not seeing what's right under your nose, you

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just just to be alive, to be breathing,

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is wondrous,

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and it's right under our nose, just to experience life going beyond any thoughts or concepts we might

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have about it or about what we're experiencing, beyond the idea that life is something that happens to us as if it's coming at us from The outside,

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to be fully in and of it, you it Joko says,

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to have a self means we are self centered, being self centered, and therefore opposing ourselves to external things. We are anxious and worried about ourselves. We bristle quickly when the external environment opposes us. We are easily upset and being self centered. We are often confused. This is how most of us experience our lives.

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Our self centeredness is something that we really begin to notice when we start practicing zazen, we notice our habitual reactivity.

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15:42

The things and the people that set us off when we don't get our way, all the assumptions that we make that turn out to be wrong or to come from a place of bias,

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the inner critical voice that says you're not worthy or good enough and also the prideful voice that congratulates you for a job well done, or for surpassing others.

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These kinds of thoughts all come from a place of self centeredness, and it's really eye opening and quite freeing actually, to notice them to and to own up to our own habits of mind. We may not like what we see, but we do have to

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notice our reactivity before we can let go of it.

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Otherwise, it just continues to have a hold on us, our relationships with others, with family, spouses, co workers, that can really transform and open up when we get better at catching ourself in the act of relying on our go To reactions. But in order to do that, the mind really has to be settled enough that we can notice what's going on. And of course, that's where zazen comes in. Johko then says, although we may not be acquainted with the opposite of a self that is no self, let's try to think what the life of no self might be. No self doesn't mean disappearing off the planet or not existing. It is neither being self centered, nor other centered, but just centered. Just centered,

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unified with whatever presents itself.

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Our tendency is to pick and choose. We prefer some thoughts, some mind states and some bodily conditions over others. We

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and we tend to identify with with them in a very personal way, making them into a story about me and. In me and my life.

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As Roshi often says, in this practice, we've got to develop our attention muscle to keep bringing our awareness back to the practice to the present. And it's not enough to just develop this muscle. We have to keep at it so it doesn't atrophy. So it doesn't matter how long or little you've been practicing,

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there's no end point you

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and as for Pedro arieta, he he could have so easily done what Most of us would have done in that situation, which is, pick up your pace, continue to the finish line and achieve that personal best time that you set out to meeting the goal that you trained so hard for, and receiving the recognition and the self satisfaction that comes with it.

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And not surprisingly, in the aftermath of the race, Pedro got a lot of media attention for what he did. And if you watch the video, It's so heartwarming, such a beautiful, random act of compassion, but still, some wondered why he would sacrifice his record to help someone else make it across the finish line. It's not like there weren't any medical personnel or bystanders around that could help runners who needed it along the course. Here's what Pedro said in an interview. I He said, When I saw him fallen, I stopped. It seemed like a normal thing to do. There was no way we could just pass him by without doing anything. There was no way we could just pass him by without doing anything, and by we presumably he was referring not just to himself, but all the other runners around him that did pass him by. He

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Pedro also spoke at length about his faith in God, in something that is bigger than himself.

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24:13

He said he had this realization during the race that a marathon isn't just about an individual, it's about a collective,

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24:35

something larger than himself. So whether you want to call it God, the divine or Buddha nature, there is something bigger, something that's beyond you and me. You.

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As Joh continues, she says, a life of no self is centered on no particular thing, but on all things that is, it is non attached, so the characteristics of a self cannot appear. We are not anxious, we are not worried, we do not bristle easily. We are not easily upset, and most of all our lives do not have a basic tenor of confusion to be no self is joy. Not only that, no self because it opposes nothing is beneficial to everything. So what she's saying is that to to abide in no self is to be in harmony with all conditions, whatever arises, to not reject anything, to flow with life. So again, joy isn't about achieving a goal. We're getting what we want, but just unifying with how things are. And that's not to say that we won't experience anxiety, worry or confusion. These are all normal human emotions. It's also not to deny that there is injustice in the world and problems that need to be solved, that require our attention and our action. So being one with things as they are is not complacency. The point is not clinging, not clinging to anything,

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not dwelling in thoughts and judgments. That's where we find joy.

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28:01

But Joko says, For the vast majority of us, practice has to proceed in an orderly fashion, in a relentless dissolution of self, a relentless dissolution of self, which in other words, means we need to practice with patience and persistence and make it the foundation to our life, it's kind of like the gradual wearing away of a hard, jagged stone in a Fast moving river over time, those hard edges smooth smooth out more and more, because it bounces along in the current. So that's one way to imagine the nature of this practice as dissolving a hard, rigid self, softening it up. Another way, though, is to see it as a process of expanding, opening opening a small self, widening, a self that we have come to believe is quite small and narrow and. And constrained, and ordinarily, we do see ourself as limited. We see ourself as having a fixed identity with a set of characteristics, beliefs, values as a self that has a particular history and a particular future trajectory, and we add all that up to a me that is distinct from you and others, but actually our true Self is much, much bigger than that. It is expansive.

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Nothing confines or limits it.

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You could say that it was this larger self that was guiding Pedro's actions in that one instant where, without hesitation, he abandoned his goal, the goal he was literally running after to help out another runner.

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And in that moment, he saw that other runner, Sean, as not other, not other than himself.

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Johko says in another chapter in this book that it's through practice that we create what she calls a bigger container, a bigger container,

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but it's a very unusual kind of container, because it doesn't actually have any borders or edges to it, something that can continuously grow.

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33:00

And as she continues, she says, The Way practice works for most of us is again to start off with pursuing happiness seeing ourself as broken or damaged and in need of repair, but eventually we discover that this approach only gets us so far. It enables us to move from, she says, relative unhappiness, to relative happiness. So it's not a resolution, but it's a movement in the right direction. She says, Why do I say relative happiness? No matter how much we may feel that our life is happy, still, if our life is based on a self, we cannot have a resolution. Why can there not be a resolution for a life based on a self? Because such a life is based on a false premise, the premise that we are a self, without exception, we all believe this, every one of us, and any practice that stops with the attempted adjustment of the self is ultimately unsatisfying To realize one's true nature as no self, as Buddha is the fruit of zazen and the path of practice. The important thing because it is the only thing that is truly satisfying. The important thing is. Us to follow this path,

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to simply stay with it, to keep tending to the breath or the koan and a moment by moment, in the midst of whatever arises, without trying to change anything or make something happen or fix anything, without judging how it's going or not going.

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In this in this way, Zen practice runs so counter

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to how we normally operate and how we normally think about ourself, it's really the most radical thing you can do

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in mainstream American culture, we're taught that individual individuality, self reliance and personal achievement Are the ideals that we should all strive for. We Well, the core teaching of Zen practice is that there is no permanent or unchanging Self that even exists in the first place you

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the sense that we have of being an individual, separate from everything and everyone else, is an illusion. It's an illusion that when we cling to it

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is the root of suffering. It gets to the heart of what the Buddha taught.

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Now some of you here might think, Now, wait a minute,

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all my life, I've had to fight to be seen and to be heard, to be recognized and respected as a somebody. And you're telling me that there's no self there in the first place,

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that feeling of not being Seen is quite common, especially for anyone who has experienced racism or some other form of otherism on an ongoing basis, it's the feeling of being invisible, being overlooked, not belonging, and we've all felt that way in some situation or another, but for some that experience becomes hardened into an identity.

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Here's an analogy that might help give some perspective on what it means to say that our true self is no self. It comes from Greek mythology, and it's called the Ship of Theseus. Theseus was this mythical king of Athens who was most known for navigating a labyrinth and slaying a Minotaur, which is a half man, half bull creature that lived inside it, and in doing so, he put an end to years. Of human sacrifice that was being done in service to this Minotaur Theseus is also known for the ship that he used to escape from this incident, which took place on the island of Crete. And according to the legend, each year, Athenians would commemorate Theseus, his noble and heroic act by taking his ship out into the sea on a pilgrimage. But naturally, over time, the ship's wooden boards rotted and had to be replaced one by one, which in turn raised some questions, if no pieces of the original ship make up the current one, is it still the Ship of Theseus. And furthermore, if it is no longer the same, at what point did it cease to be the original ship? And what if a second ship is built entirely from the pieces removed from the original or, what if the removed wooden boards are repurposed into something else altogether? Could we call that the Ship of Theseus? So the Ship of Theseus is a paradox that raises all kinds of questions about what constitutes a self. It challenges the idea of defining the self solely on the basis of its material parts, and that includes all the ways you define yourself and how others define you, your eye color, height, age, race, gender, nationality, abilities, likes and dislikes and so on.

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42:28

It is true that we could say each one of us is comprised of a bunch of parts that together form a whole. But the thing is, they're moving parts. There's no self to hold on to, and when we consider that, our body all on its own, without us even thinking about it or even having any control over it, our body is constantly regenerating itself, cell by cell, part by part, atom by atom, you

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43:23

can we even say that this self right now is the same one from a minute ago? So rather than see no self as the absence of something we need to see it as the great source of freedom that it is. It's the freedom to lose, the freedom to let go and to move with the current of life,

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and it's available To all of us just by returning our attention to this,

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we'll stop here and recite the four vows we're.

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