This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Healthy Identities. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
Good morning, everyone. Is this loud enough for everyone? Hello.
So I have one announcement, the same I did last week. Last week we launched this fundraising drive for Save the Children. And so, it’s partly a follow-up and announcing it again. For this week, for these eight days or so, we are focused as a community on supporting Save the Children. This is a long-time, one of the premier, best-rated charities or humanitarian organizations in the world, focused on caring for children, especially in areas of great distress. They have an emergency fund for those who are in overt distress and great emergency, places like Gaza and Sudan.
We raised money for them three years ago, and I was surprised—I didn’t know what to expect—but there was $70,000. I thought that was pretty cool coming out of our community. So we’re doing it again now, and we’re close to that goal. If you donate, you’ll end up on a page, and if you follow the links on IMC’s website, you’ll get to a page on Save the Children which is for IMC, so they’re tracking how much is coming in from us. Right now, there’s about $53,000, and then another $10,000 or so has come in in other ways that are not listed there. So that’s like $63,000, and that’s pretty close and kind of inspiring.
The $70,000 is arbitrary, so it’s all fantastic what we’re doing as a community. It seems more invaluable to do this for the children who are going to be supported, but also because so many nonprofits like this who are doing really important work in the world have now been defunded by the current administration, including Save the Children. So now, I imagine the donations are worth much more than what comes in because they’ll probably put it to really high use. It seems like a particularly important time to support these things. So if you’re interested, it’s on IMC’s homepage; there are two different places to connect to it.
For the last two days, especially yesterday, I’ve been teaching day-long retreats on the topic of identity. It’s still fresh in my mind, and it’s such a phenomenally important topic to address and become wise about because it follows us everywhere we go. In all situations, down through time, people have struggled and caused a lot of pain through the topic of their identity and their identity in relationship to other people. So to have some focus on it, I think, is to focus on one of the core human dimensions of being a human being.
Yesterday, my co-teacher Vanessa Abel read this poem by David Whyte1, and so I’d like to start with reading it.
The sound of a bell still reverberating, or a blackbird calling from a corner of the field, asking you to wake into this life, or inviting you deeper into the one that waits.
Either way takes courage. Either way wants you to be nothing but that self that is no self at all. Wants you to walk to the place where you find you already know how to give every last thing away. The approach that is also the meeting itself, without any meeting at all. That radiance you’ve always carried with you as you walk, both alone and completely accompanied in friendship by every corner of the world, crying Hallelujah.
One of the reasons I like this poem for now is David Whyte is going back and forth with different ways of understanding the self, different kinds of identity. At times identifying with everything, at times being nothing—there’s nothing here to identify. We find that the whole topic of identity is really a fluid phenomenon that comes and goes, disappears and arises, and exists in so many different ways as we go through our day. Any attempt to solidify it and make it into “this is how it is” is bound to dissolve at some point, or crack and break.
The other thing about this topic of identity is what we’ll do today is talk a little bit about how the Buddha addressed this issue, because the topic of identity was very big in his time as well, and there was a lot of suffering around it that he wanted to address. The way he addressed many things, including this topic, could be understood to be both spiritual—from the Buddhist point of view, which is pointing towards the possibility of some kind of profound, deep liberation—but also he addressed it ethically. Over and over again, you see him pointing to living an ethical life as being at the heart of it all. It comes together with liberation. Liberation itself is a source for an ethical life for people.
In this last while, with what’s happening in our world, I’ve been wanting, inspired, to replicate what the Buddha did and really to emphasize ethics, the Buddhist approach to ethics, over and over again. It seems like this is really a key time to emphasize it as a response, as a way of responding to what’s happening in the world where there’s so much of it which is unethical, where there’s so much cruelty and hostility, and so much creation of “us versus them,” which has to do with identity in a way that is creating more suffering than it’s alleviating. This topic of ethics is addressing the issue of how we cause harm or how we stop causing harm. That’s the simplest definition of ethics from a Buddhist point of view: ethics is the study of how not to cause harm in any kind of way.
In the time of the Buddha, there was a class of people who called themselves Brahmins2. Brahmins considered themselves to be the superior class. It wasn’t just that they were off by themselves happily thinking about themselves as being superior; they also had all kinds of ideas how everyone else was a lower class than them. They had various classes that they distinguished in their time, and they had a hierarchy of it. At least from the Buddhist texts, how the Buddha is described, sometimes when the Brahmins wanted to be critical of the Buddhists, Buddhist monastics, they put them at the very bottom of that hierarchy and had various not-so-kind things to say about them.
This was a topic of issue in the Buddha’s time, and it was an issue among the Brahmins themselves. There was a debate between two friends who were Brahmins. One of them made the claim that one becomes a Brahmin by birth, that it’s a hereditary phenomenon, a biological thing. You are a Brahmin, and then you somehow pass on that Brahmin-hood to your children, and to their children. In other words, superiority in society is a genetic thing, a biological thing that gets transmitted through birth only, meaning anybody who’s not born as a Brahmin does not deserve to be in that superior class. That was what one of the friends was claiming.
The other one was claiming, “No, one is a Brahmin by action, by how one lives one’s life, what one does.” So if it’s by action, then anyone can be a Brahmin, even the people who may be considered to be the lowest class—sometimes the Buddhists, maybe even they could be Brahmins by what they did, how they acted. They were having this debate and they couldn’t come to an agreement, so they went to the Buddha to ask him. What is interesting to me, one of the interesting things about that, is the Buddha took sides. He was very clear and quite strong in taking the stand that one is a Brahmin by action. He did not stay above the fray. He did not stay somehow detached from it all without taking sides and somehow taking some kind of other third position. In this kind of situation, he took a clear stand. Given how the Buddha often teaches, I suspect it was very much because the approach that you’re a Brahmin by birth was causing a lot of harm, and he saw that harm that was being created in his society.
Then he went on to say that a Brahmin, the word Brahmin, is simply a verbal designation. It’s just a word. It’s a word that’s applied or defined in a certain way. There’s nothing inherent and absolute about the word, and it’s just a convention. The Buddha felt quite free with these conventions, so he simply redefined it. He used the title Brahmin, but he said, “Let me tell you who’s really a Brahmin,” since he was going to talk about it from the point of view of action.
Before he does that, he did go through, in responding to these two Brahmins with their debate, saying that in human life, among humans, there is no kind of biological, visible way to really distinguish people from each other. Human beings, we’re all human beings together in common kinship. So he first made clear, in his view, that’s what he believed. And then he went on to say, “Well, now I’ll tell you who a Brahmin is.”
He does this in a series of, I don’t know, maybe 27 verses. These verses are then kind of canonized or held up in high respect in Buddhism. They appear at different places because they’re so important, maybe. One of the places is in the Dhammapada3; it’s at the end of the Dhammapada. But here it is in this other text:
“Having given up violence towards living beings, both timid and strong, whoever kills nor causes others to kill, I call a Brahmin.” “Whoever speaks what is true, informative, and not harsh, who harms no one, I call a Brahmin.” “Whoever endures abuse, assault, and imprisonment without animosity, and who has forbearance as one’s strength, as one’s mighty army, I call a Brahmin.” “Whoever is wise, of profound wisdom, understanding what is and is not the path, and who has attained the highest goal, I call a Brahmin.”
He goes on, there are a lot of verses like this, ending “I call a Brahmin.” So he’s not shying away from using a term that implies an identity, a Brahmin. He’s defining it in a way that fits a life of not causing any harm. Some of you might not agree with that strategy, to use an identity to apply that to people the way he chose to do, but that’s what he did. It’s a definition of identity based on action, what people do.
And then he goes on to say, in the same context, that just like Brahmin is a verbal designation based on what a person does, we call someone who farms a farmer. We call someone who is involved in commerce a merchant. Someone who is a craftsperson, does craft, a craftsperson. So people get an identity based on the activity that they do, which has functional value. If your neighbor ordinarily works as fixing cars and is known as a car mechanic, and your car doesn’t start one morning and you need to get someplace important, it might be useful to remember, “Oh, there’s this car mechanic next door.” That’s a useful identity at that time. You could not have that word “car mechanic” because you think it kind of oppresses people to be narrowed down to such a thing. You could just say it more complicatedly to yourself: “There’s a person next door who’s able to fix cars.” But in shorthand, you do everyone a favor sometimes to have a single word for what’s going on. But it’s also understood to be contextual. It’s a verbal designation that has a functional role that is not necessarily who the person is.
That was the Buddha’s preferred way of seeing identity. If you behave a certain way, live a certain way, then that’s what you’re called. And if you change, you change, you become something else. So each of us probably has many identities in the course of a day. Some of them are applied to you by others, and some of them are ones that you’re happy to have for yourself. If you’re driving on the freeway and maybe you drive a little funny on the freeway, then someone comes home and says to their friends, “There was this driver on the freeway, he drove funny.” So you were a driver for that purpose. That was your identity that was applied to you at that time. If you were buying food in the supermarket very ethically, very carefully choosing exactly what to do for the best possible thing, someone else might be watching you being so careful and slow choosing what you’re going to buy. They go home and say, “There was a shopper at the store.” You become a shopper. If you’re at home cooking, you’re a cook.
You might not be thinking of yourself that way, but functionally, you’re maybe behaving that way. It becomes more relevant if you’re with your children, you’re a parent. If you’re with your parents, you’re kind of a child or a son or a daughter or something, a sibling. Identity, how we’re seen, how we’re related to, changes many times through the day. Sometimes they have to do with roles we play. Where we earn our living, we have one role and one identity. And then you might leave there and be a coach for the high school volleyball team, and now all the kids in high school think of you as a coach, and that’s your identity there, which is useful in that context.
When I’m here with you all, trying my best to give a talk, I’m a Dharma teacher. Now, if I carry that identity with me like, “This is really who I am, boy, this is it, and people need to know that,” and I go home… this is not good. When I first started to teach a lot, many, many years ago, a couple of times my wife would look at me and say to me, “Gil, you’re using that voice again.” [Laughter] So, you know, I couldn’t be a teacher at home.
So we pick up and we put down, and it’s fluid how it goes. Or we don’t. Some of the identities we have, we need to have somehow or stay close to them because of how society identifies us. It sees us a certain way and treats us through the lens of that identity. And sometimes society causes a lot of harm to people. There are people right now who, for how they live their lives and conduct themselves, the current administration has extreme hostility towards a certain category of people. And so those people who are living their lives are now afraid because they’re being identified and searched out by people who don’t like them. So those people now have to kind of live in the wake of that, live under that. They might have an identity of their own, but now they’re forced to kind of relate to it in a much more solid way and carry it with them just to be safe, to think who they are. So harm is being caused when we have identity and create “us versus them.”
So, action. That’s kind of nice that our actions define us or identify us, but it feels inadequate because it can feel like who we are as a person is much more than a role, much more than an activity. It feels almost like we’re reduced. Certainly, we’re something else, we’re something more, something greater, something more intimate and deeper.
There is a word that I believe the Buddha used for this kind of sense of self, sense of identity. I translated it as “personhood.” He called it atta-bhava4, and personhood is made up of the sum total of all the things that come together to give us a sense of who we are. In some ways, it’s a sum total of all the actions, not just what we do with our bodies—the work we do or the activities we engage in—but also the feelings we have, the emotions we have, the attitudes we have, the mental activities, the mental actions that we do.
There was an idea in the time of the Buddha’s teachings that people could also be recognized by what they were attached to in their mind. Something about being attached, clinging to something—some activity of the mind, some belief, some attitude, clinging to some identity—the clinging created something that had a certain quality, which is an action. It created something that you could say, “That person is clinging, is a clinger.” Not everyone could see that, but in the mythology of Buddhism, there was a mythological figure called Māra5. Māra is kind of like a demigod or demi-Satan or some hybrid of those two. We don’t quite know what this person is, but the primary activity that Māra wants to do in the world is to stop people from getting enlightened, because Māra really likes it when people cling. So the last thing Māra wants is anyone to stop clinging. In this mythology, Māra identifies people by the clinging in their minds. Māra gets confused when he sees a liberated person because there’s no clinging, and you can’t see the person, in a sense.
This points to another important topic around identity. It’s one thing to have an identity; it’s another thing to identify with the identity. It’s one thing to have an identity; it’s another thing how we relate to that identity, how we hold it, how we are with it. So if we have some sense of personhood, it’s one thing to have it; it’s another thing how we relate to it, how we hold it, how we participate in it. For the Buddha, personhood is something we contribute to and we help co-create. It’s not something that we’re passive recipients of just because we were born some way.
The Buddha wanted us not to not have any identity. Some Buddhists think that if you’re a Buddhist, you’re not supposed to have an identity. Harm has been caused in Buddhist communities when people have said, “Oh, you know, there’s no self, and therefore you’re living in your world from the perspective of your identity should be overcome, should be let go of, and you have a problem here.” I think this is unfortunate that this no-self teaching has been interpreted that way. The way the Buddha talked about identity, and talked about especially personhood, he said there’s a healthy way of doing this and an unhealthy way of doing it. That’s my language. His language was more, there’s a wholesome way of doing it and an unwholesome way. In other words, there’s not a categorical rejection of identity. There’s not a categorical rejection of some inner sense of a person, my personhood, but rather, are we, in the activity of “personing,” the activity of “selfing,” the activity of identifying, is it done in a way that creates health for us, that creates wholesomeness in us, creates goodness in us? Is it being done in a way that is ethical?
There’s one word that covers all these things I’ve been saying—health, wholesomeness, ethics—and that’s the word kusala6. Some of you might know it. It is probably the closest Buddhist word to our English word “ethics,” but it also means wholesome, which kind of means healthy. But I love it that it means belonging to the whole. The issue around identity sometimes is the way in which we select out of the whole a piece of who we are that we hang on to or limit the perspective on. What Buddhist liberation is talking about is dropping the limiting ideas of identity in certain situations so that we can have an experience of the whole. That sense of the whole and that freedom of non-clinging then becomes a reference point for understanding how we participate in identities and personhood, where we hold it as functional, useful designations that have a role, but we hold them lightly. We don’t get attached to them, we don’t cling to them.
This idea of relating to our personhood, relating to even the activities of our mind and assessing, evaluating them—is what I’m doing healthy for me? Is it wholesome? Does it contribute to wholesome cultivation, growth in wholesomeness? Do I grow to become a better person? Do I grow with my mind, my heart? Is it kinder, more generous, more loving, more caring for others? Is it freer? Is it more peaceful? Is it more at ease or not? Which direction are we going?
Sometimes when people attach to identity, to their own or sometimes in their projection of that onto others, it’s clearly causing harm to the person who does it. Some people hold on to identity for dear life in a way that actually harms them. Some people acquire or take on identities that are identities of hostility and hate, identities of “us versus them,” and that creates alienation that is bad for the person who has it.
So the question is, how do we hold identities? That was what the Buddha was most interested in. Is it ethical or unethical? Is it wholesome or unwholesome? Is it healthy or unhealthy? All three of those categories are talking about the same thing. This is where Buddhist practice comes into play, especially a meditation practice, because as we sit and meditate, we become more and more sensitive to what is healthy and what is unhealthy, what is wholesome and what is unwholesome, what is, in a sense, ethical and not ethical, what is harmful, what is not harmful, what brings stress and what doesn’t bring stress. The clearer the mindfulness becomes, the more stable and subtle we are in the moment, the more we see this movement—sometimes very subtle, sometimes not so subtle—of the impact, the effect, the influence the mind has on itself, or the mind has on the heart. In some ways, we’re shaping our personhood by the very nature of what we’re choosing to be involved in.
In ordinary life, we don’t track ourselves so much. We don’t even track not only what the mind is doing to make a choice, but we’re also not tracking the influence it has on us. Not a few people are ruminating and thinking over and over again bad thoughts about themselves, critical thoughts about themselves, seeing it as being the true nature of the universe that “I’m a bad person.” That very activity is making them sick, making them depressed. It has a tremendously negative influence on them. But when we sit in meditation and get quiet enough, we can start seeing these thoughts operating. If we’re lucky enough, we come to a place where we see we have a choice to either continue with those thoughts or put them down. We can even feel at some points that having thoughts as harmful as they might be, self-critical thoughts, just having them is tiring, and it’s just nice to take a rest.
That applies to positive identities as well. You might have done a lot of kind things in your life, and it might be reasonable for you to think of yourself as a kind person. You’re sitting peacefully in meditation and you start remembering, “Yeah, I’m a really kind person. Yeah, I’m a kind person. Yeah, I’m a pretty good, kind person. I’ve been a kind person a long time. Yeah, I’m a kind person. Isn’t it great that I’m a kind person?” And after a while, it’s going to occur to you—hopefully sooner rather than later, but unfortunately many times it’s later because these kinds of things are almost subconscious—”This is tiring. You know, I got the message the first time. I have better things to do than repeating this kind of thought.” So even good identities, at some point, it’s just good to put them down.
It’s nice. And then there are also deeper senses of personhood, deeper senses of identity we have, not involving individual thoughts but kind of a gestalt of it all, the whole. It’s fascinating to watch as that shifts and changes too. One of the places I think some of you may have had this experience of it changing is on meditation retreats, for those of you who’ve been on them. And maybe for those of you who haven’t, maybe there are situations where you’ve experienced yourself in a totally new way that you’ve never had before.
In meditation retreats, people in the course of a longer retreat will get softer, kinder, less attached, less preoccupied with thoughts, less ruminating and caught up in the usual things. There’s a softening of the personality. There’s a feeling of greater kindness and care and preciousness and intimacy with life that happens, that people feel they have a whole different persona, a whole different personality, a whole different sense of self that feels so much healthier than how they live their life usually, where there’s a lot of stress. Some people will say, “This is it. I’m home. This is what home is in myself. This is how I want to live my life.” And then they leave the retreat, and their personality returns before they leave the driveway of the retreat center. The personality starts coming back, and after a while, we know it’s back, but we’ve seen it coming back. But after a while, we just forget that we could be different because we’re so lost in the world of this old persona come back. It’s just how things are.
Sometimes people have that shift when their ordinary life stops in some way. I’ve known people who had serious illness or injuries, and there was something about how much their life changed that they came to terms with, that their whole sense of how to be a person shifted, sometimes in a better way. “Wow, I’m a different person than I was before. I was so caught up in my previous identity. I was so angry all the time. I was so ambitious all the time. And I’m a whole different person now. This is phenomenal.”
Some people, when they become parents, their experience of who they are becomes radically different. There’s a powerful book on parenting called Far from the Tree. It’s about children who are born who are very different than their parents. What’s interesting about this book is the author studies different kinds of different people who were born differently, like people who are blind or deaf, or have different conditions, all kinds of different conditions, prodigies, and then studies their parents. His observation is that parents of certain kinds of children tend to become better people, especially if the kids have great disabilities. Parents of other kinds of children tend to become not-so-good folks, more selfish or preoccupied. That’s apparently especially true when parents have prodigies; that somehow does something to the conceit that is not so good.
So we shape this all the time. It’s shaped and changed, and we’re actually more changeable than we realize in all kinds of different ways. You could wake up tomorrow and find yourself radically changed in unbelievable ways in terms of what you consider your identity, or it might be slow over a long time. I had a new identity recently that I said out loud. I was teaching a retreat at our retreat center for people in their 20s and 30s. You might ask what business I have doing that, but I was invited to teach it, so I had a role. I looked around the room and I was clearly the oldest person there. When I started in Buddhism, I was one of the youngest ones there. So at some point during the retreat, I described myself as a “designated old person.” I had a new identity for that retreat, and I thought it was kind of humorous.
The sense of self… and then when the mind gets really quiet, there’s a very interesting thing that happens. There’s something that gets simpler and simpler and simpler about identity or about this notion of self. If you turn your attention to sense and feel where that sense of self is in us when things are quiet enough and still enough, it might feel like it has a location. There might be a feeling of “am-ness.” That’s all it is, “am-ness,” just that “I am.” It might be a very subtle feeling of a locus, a center someplace. It might be a locus or center that has a little bit of pressure or a nice feeling of tension or a nice feeling of vibration or aliveness or something like that. And it can feel, “Oh, that’s who I am, the core, the center of it all, free of all these identities, free of everything, left alone. That’s who I am.”
Now, you can sit there and spend time hanging out with it, looking at it, recognizing it. And at some point, what will happen is you’ll feel that it’s a little bit tiring to do this, to focus on this place. It’s a little tiring to keep looking at it and thinking about it, just like it’s tiring to keep thinking the same identity. So in meditation, at some point, because it’s tiring to have that focus, there’s a quieting, relaxing, letting go of that activity. And lo and behold, that sense of “am-ness,” that maybe a sense of locus, the center, falls away. It seems that it’s the looking at the self that is the activity that creates that little sense of activity and energy and vibration or pressure. It’s the seeking and searching for the self in the end that creates just a thing that feels like, “This is who I am.” But if there’s no looking for it, no searching for it, where does it go?
It becomes an irrelevant question because what’s left is very peaceful, very spacious, very free. It’s possible to have a tremendous feeling of ease and peace without any reference to any kind of self, any kind of creation of self, identification of self, a sense of personhood. Not to negate any of that, but it’s just like, in context, from time to time, it’s really good to take a vacation from it all. It’s really good to take a break from all this “selfing” that we live in in our society, where “selfing” goes on all the time. It’s really healthy to take that break because then we can see much more clearly how “selfing” is constructed, how “selfing” is something we participate in, and how it comes together and comes and goes and morphs and changes. And we can hold it lightly.
Why? For what purpose? So we can live with it in an ethical way. So we can live with it causing less harm in the world, but actually doing the opposite: live with identity, live with personhood, live with how we see other people in ways that support them, that is beneficial, that sees them kindly, that sees them generously, that sees them with care, sees ourselves with care. And maybe one of the identities we’ll develop over time is we’re a person who cares. We’re a carer for this world. And that can’t be too bad.
So I’ll read this David Whyte poem again, and then we’ll stop. So maybe this poem will have a little bit more meaning now.
The sound of a bell still reverberating, or a blackbird calling from a corner of the field, asking you to wake into this life, or inviting you deeper into the one that waits.
Either way takes courage. Either way wants you to be nothing but that self that is no self at all. Wants you to walk to the place where you find you already know how to give every last thing away. The approach that is also the meeting itself, without any meeting at all. That radiance you have always carried with you as you walk, both alone and completely accompanied in friendship by every corner of the world, crying Hallelujah.
So, I don’t know if we want to say Hallelujah that often these days, but let’s at least be friends. Let’s go into the world ready to be friends with everyone. And may that change the world. If we want to change the world, let’s be the change by being ethical ourselves. And then as we go about trying to make the world a better place, let’s find a way to do it that stays ethical, stays wholesome. And that way, we become better people in the process.
May all beings be happy. Thank you.
David Whyte: An English poet and author, known for his work on conversational leadership and the integration of poetry into professional life. The transcript spelled his name “White.” ↩
Brahmin: In the historical context of ancient India, a member of the priestly and scholarly class (varna) in the Hindu social hierarchy. The Buddha often redefined this term based on ethical conduct rather than birthright. ↩
Dhammapada: One of the best-known texts from the Pāli Canon, it is a collection of sayings of the Buddha in verse form. ↩
Atta-bhava: A Pāli term that can be translated as “personhood,” “self-existence,” or “individual being.” It refers to the composite sense of self that arises from the combination of physical and mental components. The original transcript said “ATA Baba,” which has been corrected based on context. ↩
Māra: A mythological figure in Buddhism who represents temptation, distraction, and the forces that obstruct spiritual liberation. He is often depicted as a demon who tried to prevent the Buddha from attaining enlightenment. ↩
Kusala: A Pāli word that translates to “wholesome,” “skillful,” “good,” or “meritorious.” It refers to actions, thoughts, and states of mind that are ethically sound and conducive to spiritual progress and well-being. The original transcript said “cusa.” ↩