This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Insight into the Three Characteristics (5 of 5): Not-Self - Mei Elliott. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Mei Elliott at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
Good morning, folks. My name is Mei Elliot, and today we’ll be studying the third of the three characteristics, known as anattā,1 or not-self. I want to begin by saying that not-self teachings can often be perplexing for people, so please don’t feel like you need to have a deep understanding after today’s session. A 15-minute dharmette doesn’t really do it justice. So, it’s okay if it doesn’t quite land yet. Just allow not-self teachings to seep in over time.
One way to begin exploring not-self teachings is by noticing when “selfing” is present. By that, I mean noticing when we’re feeling strongly identified with some aspect of our experience and when we’re not. We even might think of selfing as on a spectrum. Maybe on one end of the spectrum, it can feel like there’s a really strong sense of self at times. Maybe there’s a lot of identification, a lot of defensiveness, a really strong sense of “I,” “me,” or “mine.” On the other end of the spectrum, we can notice when it really feels like the sense of self is absent or very thin. Maybe there’s a lack of reactivity, an absence of defensiveness or possessiveness. Typically, when there’s less selfing, there’s less suffering. So this can be an interesting and very fruitful area of investigation.
In our meditation today, we’ll be exploring two different aspects of our experience that we typically identify with quite strongly: our body and our mind. Specifically, we’ll be investigating our sense of identification with the body. Is there selfing occurring in relationship to the body, the physical sensations? Then, when we switch to looking at our thoughts, this is also an area where there’s often a lot of identification. Thoughts can really run the show. So we’ll do a practice where we’re noticing, seeing if we can notice when thoughts emerge. Sometimes being able to see the arising of thoughts can help us see that they’re less personal than we often think they are, that we didn’t put them there or ask them to visit. They’re just kind of arising on their own based on conditions—just, we could say, selfless phenomena coming and going. A thought can be like a bird traveling through an empty sky.
During the meditation today, I’ll be offering some questions for investigation. You can allow these questions to drop into your experience, kind of like dropping a pebble in a pond. Just dropping the pebble in, dropping the question in, and checking for ripples. So that’s one way to receive the prompts. Another is that I might ask you some questions that invite you to investigate your own experience. As you investigate, you don’t need to think about it to cognitively come up with an answer. Instead, you’re exploring your direct experience. And during any of this, if you discover there’s identification present, there’s a sense of selfing present, a sense of self, that’s fine. That’s great. You’re seeing it. So remember that we’re not trying to get rid of the sense of self. We’re not trying to get rid of that sense of identification. We’re just wanting to bring our mindful attention to it, just attending to it and sensing what we find.
Remember, there are many ways for insight into anattā to be revealed. This is just one way to explore it, one way to deliberately investigate this insight theme, but there are many others. So with all that said, let’s begin our meditation. Please find your meditation posture.
Connecting with what’s happening for you presently. Just feeling the body, inviting relaxation.
And connecting with some sense of okayness with the way things are. You have the capacity to allow things to be. And there might be some sense of contentment, some sense of goodness in realizing that we don’t need to tamper with our experience, that in our meditation we can just allow.
When you feel ready, connecting with the breath or your other primary anchor, and allowing yourself to settle on the home base. To connect with the felt sense of breathing. We’ll take some time now to collect and gather the mind, allow ourselves to settle.
We’ll let go of the focus on the breath now and widen the aperture of our awareness, widening the spotlight so we can see the whole body, can take in the whole body at a glance. So we have a general sense of the body, and within it, we might feel sensations sparkling, coming and going, tingling, movement.
And as you feel these different sensations in different areas of the body, you might ask, “Can I control these sensations?” Just dropping the question in and letting it ripple through. “Can I control these sensations?”
“Can I control when this body sickens or ages?”
“Can I control when this body sickens or ages?”
The sensations that are presently arising and changing, “Did I create these sensations?”
“Did I create these sensations?”
There’s a strong relationship between our sense of control and our sense of identification. Can we see whether we’re in charge of what happens in this body?
Is there any specific place in the body that the sense of self resides? And you might investigate, look for yourself. Is there a specific place in the body that the sense of self resides? Where the sense of “I,” “me,” and “mine,” the sense of “I,” a sense of “me,” where does it reside?
Often people report that the strongest sense of self seems to reside behind the eyes, the top of the head, in the brain. And yet if we investigate that area of the body, the space behind the eyes, can we find a self there?
Being with whatever we find in a soft, open way, not judging or interpreting, just noticing.
When you’re ready, returning to the breath again, settling and stabilizing.
Shift the attention now to the emergence of thoughts. Letting go of the breath and instead imagining something like a blank screen in the mind, like a movie theater screen. And we’re sitting on the edge of the mind, watching this screen to see if we can see a thought emerge. So see if you can notice the first thought that arises on the screen after I finish this sentence.
Then letting go of any thinking, connecting with a few breaths.
Again, imagining this blank screen, sitting on the edge of the mind, seeing if you can watch a thought arise. See if you can notice the first thought that appears on the screen after I finish this sentence.
You might watch out for sneaky thoughts like, “Wow, there aren’t any thoughts coming,” or thoughts like, “I’m not very good at this,” or “This is fascinating.” There’s no need to stop these thoughts. Instead, just know them as thoughts, not getting lost in the content.
On your own time, continuing this practice of bringing up the blank screen and waiting for a thought to arise, maybe waiting to watch a few thoughts arise before returning to the breath to stabilize, and doing it again. It’s often not easy to see thoughts, so if this doesn’t feel available to you, it’s fine just to stay with the breath.
If you’re continuing to observe thoughts, you might notice that some are loud and clear, while others might be faint, barely noticeable. Try to catch the very moment a thought arises. You might notice, is the thought made of words or pictures? Is it spoken, and if so, does it have a tone of voice? Can you get to know what a thought is made of?
When we see thoughts clearly as thoughts, over time we begin to divest them of their power over us. We have more agency to choose which thoughts we want to act on and which we don’t. Rather than so strongly identifying with thoughts, we can skillfully employ them and let go of the rest.
Welcome back. Again, my name is Mei Elliot, and here we are continuing on our theme of the three characteristics, with today’s focus on anattā, or not-self. While it can be relatively easy to see impermanence, to see change, and we can certainly sense what suffering is like, the first two characteristics are a little more available. Teachings on not-self may be a little less accessible. My hope is just to provide an introduction. If this teaching doesn’t make sense or doesn’t quite land, just let it wash over you and give it time.
I should also note that my intention in sharing these teachings isn’t to get you to believe there’s no self. This isn’t about you needing to believe anything. And I’m actually not even here to tell you that there’s no self. In the suttas,2 the Buddha was asked point-blank, “Is there a self or no self?” and he actually refused to answer. He wasn’t interested in getting hung up on philosophical views, in perpetuating beliefs. Instead, anattā teachings point us towards investigating what we identify with as a means of reducing suffering.
So this term “not-self,” this translation of anattā, can be used to investigate our experience. For example, “Is this emotion who I really am?” Well, this emotion, it comes and goes, so that’s not-self. “Is my career who I really am? Is my job title or my role?” Well, that changes when I come home from work, so that’s not-self. “Is my physical appearance who I am?” Well, that changes too. I’m not in control of that, so that’s not-self either. All of these things change, so what we find is that we can’t quite put a finger on any fixed, unchanging core within us that we can call “I,” “me,” or “mine.” So we can use anattā teachings as a means to explore what we identify with, to see what we take as a self, and to invite us to look a little closer.
Our standard view of ourselves is that I am a specific individual that is in control of experience, and this self persists through time. In other words, the standard view of ourselves is that there’s a continuous “me” moving through time and space. That’s kind of the given. However, when we investigate the nature of self, when we look a little closer, we see there isn’t a solid, permanent, fixed thing that we can call “me” or “mine.” What we call ourselves is much more amorphous than we typically think and much more difficult to pin down. And when we see this, when we see this really clearly, we can feel a lot more free.
When I talked about anicca3 a few days ago, and I talked about impermanence, I shared that insight into impermanence is one of the inroads to the other two insights. It’s one of the inroads in that it opens the door to seeing unsatisfactoriness, suffering, and to seeing not-self. So I’d like to extrapolate a bit on how impermanence helps us see not-self. Namely, this is because when we see inconstancy, when we see impermanence, it begins to erode our sense that there’s a fixed self. It erodes that sense that there’s that continuous, permanent “me” that moves through time and space.
Instead, we humans are a little bit more like rivers than a fixed entity. In other words, we change, and this change undermines that sense of permanent “me-ness.” So here’s a classic analogy of a river to help demonstrate what I mean. Just like, say, the Mississippi River, we humans have names and certain qualities, right? Each river has its own unique nature. Some rivers are fast and clear, other rivers are slow and murky. Each river has a specific geographic location. The banks of the river have some semblance of continuity. But if we look a little closer, if we kind of zoom in on the Mississippi River, what we see is that it’s just a constant flow. There’s actually nothing fixed there that we can point to. There’s new water flowing through every millisecond.
So we humans are the same. We’re like rivers. You know, there’s the Mei Elliot River and the Gil Fronsdal River and the Taylor Swift River and the Dalai Lama River. And conventionally, these names are useful and important designations, right? And anattā teachings, I want to be clear, they’re not denying that there is something here. There is something here called Mei Elliot with memories and plans and fears and stories and preferences. Anattā teachings aren’t discounting this. Yes, conventionally speaking, there’s a “me” and a “you,” and it’s useful and necessary to distinguish this. It’s useful and necessary to be able to tell the difference between this being, ourselves, and other beings. We need to still be able to care for ourselves and our responsibilities. You know, if I go to the ER with a broken leg and you’re a doctor, please don’t just stand there thinking, “Well, there’s no self, so I guess I can’t help.” Like, that’s wrong view.
So on one hand, we have these important skills and designations and qualities and personalities, and we’re all unique, just how a river has its own unique attributes. But like a river, there’s nothing we can point to that’s fixed. The water in the river keeps flowing and flowing and flowing. As the philosopher Heraclitus4 said, we can’t step in the same river twice. Similarly for us, we’re just a flow of changing experience. We could think of the water flowing past as being like the mindstream, the waterfall of thoughts, emotions, physical sensations, always changing. We’re just a flow, and we really begin to see this in meditation. We begin to see this constant flow. We see there isn’t a fixed core. There’s no little person sitting in the control tower pressing buttons and pulling levers. We’re conditioned. We begin to see that we’re more of a process than a fixed entity.
So what’s the impact of this? Why is it useful? As we begin to see that there’s no solid, continuous “me” that persists through time, we become less concerned with promoting the self or defending the self, less concerned with praise and blame, with reputation or criticism. So much energy goes into trying to be seen as competent and good and likable. We can still be good, we can still show up in the world in a way that we end up being likable, but not so much energy goes into trying to perpetuate this self-story for others. As craving subsides, selfing subsides, and that means that suffering falls away.
As we consider anattā teachings, please remember we’re not trying to get rid of the self. That would be kind of like trying to extinguish a wraith. There’s no need to try to get rid of something when there’s nothing fixed there to begin with. We don’t have insight into not-self through aversion to self. So please don’t weaponize anattā teachings and use them as a new reason to hate your humanness. That’s actually not effective. We don’t get to not-self through denying ourself or neglecting our needs or boundaries. We’re not destroying the self, but instead, we could say we are ennobling the self. We’re studying the self, and it’s through that study of the self that we see through it. So we could say instead, this is a practice about love, about careful, loving attention.
On one hand, I care for this being called Mei Elliot. And on the other hand, when I look closer, I see that this being is ever-changing and it’s not fixed. It flows like a river. And this insight provides a lot of freedom.
Having very lightly touched on insight into anattā, I’d like to zoom back out to look at this week’s teachings as a whole. We talked about samādhi,5 concentration, and how samādhi stabilizes the mind, how it helps to quiet the blizzard of the mind so we can see clearly enough to see the three characteristics. But I want to be clear that insight into the three characteristics is not an end in itself, but rather it facilitates letting go. When we talk about letting go, what we’re letting go of is our greed, hatred, and delusion—the kilesas,6 the three poisons. We’re letting go of our craving, our aversion, our confusion.
This form of letting go doesn’t mean we can’t respond to suffering in ourselves or suffering in the world. On the contrary, when greed, aversion, and delusion subside, qualities like love, kindness, compassion, and generosity can emerge in powerful, transformative ways. So the form of letting go that we’re practicing is one that relieves suffering, and it actually makes more room for skillful, compassionate response. It makes us more available to respond to harm and injustice in the world. And sometimes it’s said that the most powerful way to be in service is when we can get out of our own way. So this is one way that seeing through the self can provide so much more freedom, not just for ourselves but for others as well.
This is a short piece of a poem by Mary Oliver:
to live in this world you must be able to do three things to love what is mortal to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it and when the time comes to let it go to let it go
If this possibility is inspiring for you—the possibility of deepening insight into the three characteristics, of freedom from suffering—I have a practical suggestion for you. And you may have already employed this suggestion in your life, but I’d like to suggest that you consider silent retreat practice. Insight can certainly occur in daily life, and if you’re available to sit a silent meditation retreat, it can be really fruitful for depth of insight. So if you’d like to deepen in this way, if you want to provide these supportive conditions for insight, you might try a retreat.
Insight Retreat Center, a sister center to Insight Meditation Center, is a great place for this. So if you’re not already familiar, you can check out insightretreatcenter.org. There are many retreats at that site. On the drop-down menu on that page, the “Residential Retreats” menu, you’ll also see “Off-site Retreats,” “Hidden Villa Retreats,” and often there’s more availability for these retreats. They don’t fill up quite as quickly. So there’s lots of options. I’d be delighted to sit a retreat with you. You’re welcome to come sit with me. I teach at Insight Retreat Center, retreats at Spirit Rock, and there are so many other centers you can sit at as well—IMS, Insight Meditation Society on the East Coast. Lots of options to pursue this if you want to explore the three characteristics in this deeper way.
Thank you so much for joining me this week. It’s been lovely to be with you, to support you in your practice. And may the three characteristics bloom in your own heart to support you in letting go, to support you in complete freedom. Thank you so much for your kind attention. Take care.
Anattā (Pali): The doctrine of “not-self,” one of the three marks of existence. It posits that there is no permanent, underlying substance that can be called the soul or self. ↩
Suttas (Pali): Discourses or sermons of the Buddha. They are collected in the Sutta Piṭaka, one of the three “baskets” of the Pāli Canon. ↩
Anicca (Pali): The doctrine of impermanence, one of the three marks of existence. It states that all conditioned things are in a constant state of flux. ↩
Heraclitus: A pre-Socratic Greek philosopher (c. 535 – c. 475 BCE) known for his doctrine that change is the fundamental essence of the universe, famously expressed in the saying, “No man ever steps in the same river twice.” ↩
Samādhi (Pali): Concentration, unification of mind. It is a state of deep meditative absorption and a key component of the Noble Eightfold Path. ↩
Kilesas (Pali): Mental defilements, impurities, or poisons that cloud the mind and manifest in unwholesome actions. The three primary kilesas are greed (lobha), hatred (dosa), and delusion (moha). ↩