This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Mindfulness with Self; Insight (29) Awareness Without the Overlay of Self. 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.
Hello and welcome.
One of the aspects of insight meditation is to delve deeply into the source of our experience of life, where the experience of life begins before we add a lot of interpretations, before we add a lot of concepts on top of it. And one of the concepts that we add is the idea of self, me, myself, and mine. It can be innocent enough and appropriate enough. Nowhere does the Buddha say there is no self, though that’s a very popular idea that many people and some teachers still teach.
But what we should focus on for today is how we add self on top of our experience. So for example, if we have pain, there’s a world of difference between experiencing the pain carefully, respectfully, wisely, and living close into the idea that it’s my pain, I’m feeling pain. As soon as we say the word I or me or mine, it becomes a magnet for all kinds of cultural ideas, religious ideas, philosophical ideas, personal ideas, commercial ideas, ideas coming from advertisements about what the self is and how the self should be and what the self is, and judgments and fears and all kinds of things.
Some people find that when they feel something uncomfortable especially, but it could be something also pleasant, that they can experiment with going back and forth between saying “pain” to acknowledge the pain in the knee for example, versus saying “my pain.” And if you’re really attentive, very, very quiet and still, not kind of thinking about it and trying to figure it all out with your thoughts, but really still and quiet like you’re giving lots of space, silent space to feel this, you might feel that it’s easier when the pain is just pain than when it’s my pain. There might be little micro muscles that contract around the pain even when we identify with it in some kind of seemingly innocent way. There’s an extra mental activity that’s a little stressful when we say my pain, and it’s just simpler and quieter for a quiet, settled mind and samadhi1 to just recognize pain. Pleasure, just pleasure.
And where it gets particularly interesting is around thinking. Rather than saying I think or judging oneself, “Oh no, I’m thinking again. I shouldn’t be thinking. I have to do something about my thinking,” I, I, I, I keeps coming in over and over and over again. And maybe once or twice it’s innocent, but when it’s a constant stream of this I, I, I, chances are it’s not so innocent. A better way of saying it, chances are it doesn’t come with an absence of stress, absence of tension.
And so rather than I’m thinking, thinking is occurring. Discomfort is occurring, not liking is occurring. It’s time to return to the breathing is occurring. Returning to the breathing is occurring. Now there is breathing in and breathing out, and keeping it kind of airing, moving in that direction of not adding the unnecessary I’m doing. And it doesn’t have to be with words like saying I. It can be a sensibility, a sense we’re kind of organized around me, myself, and I as the agent, as the experiencer, the victim, all these things. And with insight meditation, the idea is to be radically simple and know thinking, feeling, sensing as a simple experience, and let the self take care of itself. Don’t think about it right now. Don’t bring it in as best you can because chances are if you bring it in, either subliminally or consciously or even with the words that you say when you’re thinking, you’re adding a level of tension, of pressure. You’re adding a sense of narrowing down the field of attention, and the field of attention can stay bigger without that.
So to assume a meditation posture and to kind of sway back and forth, rock back and forth, to sense and feel how the body wants to be positioned. So, you’re shifting a little bit out of the thinking mind that says, “How should I be positioned?”
Finding a stability in your posture.
And if your eyes are open, lower the gaze gently, and then in a simple quiet way, close the eyes.
And to be in no hurry, to meditate with a kind of expansive sense of time. And with no hurry, just in its own time, gently take some deeper breaths. Deeper breaths that remain comfortable, and letting the exhale maybe extend a little longer. But as you exhale, relax your body. A release into a more stable, grounded attention within the body.
And letting the breathing return to normal.
And to sense, feel into your body, but without the I or your. Feel into the body without an agenda, without trying to do anything more than just sense what wants to be sensed, what wants to be felt in the body.
And if what you feel is tension, tightness, breathe into it with the inhale and soften on the exhale.
An open awareness to the body to feel whatever is most predominant, whatever sensations are loudest in your body, and allow them to be there. And if there’s any tension associated with them, either in themselves or in your relationship to them, breathe into the tension. Breathe with it on the inhale, and on the exhale, soften, relax.
And then in the same way as you did for the body, let there be an open awareness to your mind, to the mental activity, and to feel, sense the sensations, the ones that are loudest or strongest or call your attention. Less focused on what you’re thinking about, but rather the sensations and feelings in the mind.
And if any of that has tension or pressure or contraction as part of it, inhale feeling it and sense it. Exhale, soften, relax the mind.
And then having an open awareness to the body breathing, and noticing, feeling whatever way, whatever sensations are strongest or call attention to themselves in relationship to breathing.
Sensing and feeling the experience of breathing from a place in the mind that’s quiet, still, open.
To be embodied with the breathing. Maybe instead of an open mind, an open body, where awareness, open awareness throughout the body, feeling, sensing the parts of breathing that occur without the need of ideas of I am breathing, it’s my breath.
And as we continue, let every experience that occurs just be itself without the addition of I or me or mine.
Breath is simply breath.
Sensations are simply sensations.
Thoughts are simply thoughts.
Ideas of self are simply ideas.
Moments of awareness are simply moments of awareness.
Nothing more, nothing extra. Each thing occurring without an added tension, pressure, narrowing of attention.
And in the last minute or so of this sitting, to have an open awareness, to allow yourself to sense and feel places within you, maybe cozy places within you that are content to exist without the intrusion of me, myself, and mine, and to operate without the need to be identified as I and me.
Where in your body, heart, and mind is there a place of comfort that selfing has no need to interfere?
And then from this place, open awareness, where open awareness itself, open sensing, feeling, knowing can exist without being appropriated by self, without the extra layer of I’m aware. Simply aware.
And to have this simple awareness be open to the world around us, to other people, to the natural world, to anything and everything we see and sense and smell and hear, so it can be a channel for goodwill.
And as we end, bring forth whatever feelings or attitudes of goodwill you have for others in whatever way is easy for you. It doesn’t have to be universal. It doesn’t have to be your goodwill that you identify with the effort and that it says something about you. Simply goodwill, well-wishing that can be radiated out into the world, carried by these words:
May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free.
And to bring the self into it, may we each dedicate ourselves to the idea that may I be a conduit for goodwill into the world.
Thank you.
So hello and welcome to this series of talks on insight. There are three major insights, and we’re in the middle of exploring the insight into not-self. But we’re not really addressing that directly this week; we’re preparing the ground for it. I think that when we go too quickly to try to explain the Buddhist teachings on not-self, too much gets left out. It becomes a little bit too reductionistic. It’s a profound insight, the insight into not-self, but it occurs in a wider context of experience, a wider context of understanding that is useful to have first. And so I’m trying to offer this over this week.
Today’s emphasis is how often we overcomplicate our experience when we bring or apply or assert or interpret it through the lens of me, myself, and mine, through the lens of I, my identity. “This says something about me,” “I’m the one who is,” and “How will other people think of me now?” There’s a lot of self-referencing that goes on.
One of the big surprises and powerful insights around this that I had, which I’ve talked about before, so bear with me, was when I was living in Japan. I was living in a Japanese monastery only with Japanese men, and in the monastery, there was maybe one or two people who spoke English. So everything was in Japanese, and if I wanted to speak to people, I had to speak in my partial Japanese the best I could. At some point, even the abbot forbade the people who spoke English from speaking with me in English. He wanted me to learn Japanese.
I enjoyed being there. I enjoyed my efforts to speak Japanese. But one of the big surprises is that in Japanese, one very rarely uses the word “I” or “me.” It’s understood. And sometimes you don’t use the word “you” or “we” even. Pronouns are not used very much, but it’s understood in context who the sentence is applied to. So there’s no need to say, “I’m thinking something.” One would say, if someone asks you, “What are you thinking?” they would say, “What are the thoughts?” kind of pointing towards you. And the reply would be, “So and so are the thoughts I’m having,” or “So and so is the thinking.” Everyone understands it’s in reply to the question that it’s self-referential, but you don’t use the word “self.”
If you do use the word for “I,” in English it’s so easy, it’s a single syllable. In Japanese, it’s three syllables, but you need a kind of preposition following it, so it’s “watashi wa”2. It’s a mouthful in a sense, rather than just “I.” So what I saw when I started speaking Japanese, I was trying to speak it as an English speaker, and so I would start so many of my sentences with this extended word, “watashi wa,” because in English we often start that way, at least I did. But in Japanese, it just started to stand out and highlight how odd that was, how disharmonious it was to keep referring to that over and over again. No one corrected me, but I could hear it, you know, that it was not needed. It kept the focus in a particular way. It kind of reified me, myself, and mine. I became the focus of attention, at least for myself, as I was speaking.
And when I started to learn to not say that big word “watashi wa,” there was a kind of, it wasn’t dramatic, but there was a more sense of ease, more sense of openness, more sense of, I wasn’t the center of my own attention. I wasn’t so important in a way that was kind of a wind drag, a contraction and narrowing of the situation and narrowing of myself even.
I also saw how much I did that by living in the Japanese community so intimately. We all slept in the same room, we ate together, we took breaks together, we meditated together. We were really immersed in that community. I also saw how deeply the Japanese monks that were there kind of knew themselves as an integral part of the community. I first really saw this clearly when I was working. We all worked together. We had a period every day where we all worked together doing the same kind of cleaning activity. At some point, I saw how clearly they were all working not exactly as a team, I would say, but as a unit, as an organism. And I was working as an individual. I was working as an independent operator.
I didn’t feel like one was better than the other or one was right and one was wrong. It was just different ways in which societies have organized themselves in order to get along and make things work. I had grown up in an individualist culture, and they were growing up in a collectivist culture. They both have their strengths, they both have their weaknesses. But to see how it operates kind of broke the hegemony for me of the individualism of me, myself, and mine. I saw that it was conditional, it was contingent, it was situational, it was learned, rather than it was inherent in the universe that this is how I’m supposed to be.
So as we practice insight meditation, the movement is towards simpler and simpler knowing of the present moment experience. And as we do that, at some point we feel how the assertion of self, the assumption of self, measuring things, thinking about things in relationship to self—me, myself, and mine, my identity—it’s not like we’re doing away with those things, not denying that those have a place, but we start seeing how frequently they make the situation more complicated than it needs to be. And that there’s a simpler, cleaner, more peaceful way of experiencing.
A sound is just a sound. A taste is just a taste. A sight is just a sight. A thought is just a thought. And we could feel, and this is the power of mindfulness, we can feel and see when the idea of self, me, myself, and mine is a wind drag, is a resistance, is a tension, is a narrowing of attention. And when it’s actually the opposite. There are ways of very innocently using the word I, me, mine that has no glue in it, has no tension in it, has no baggage with it. And it’s just very loose and light and open. And it’s okay to use the word, but it’s not this baggage.
So what I’ve learned is that using the word “I” or living with the assumption of me, myself, and I, the selfing that we do, is often not so innocent because using the word “I” is a magnet for all kinds of other assumptions, beliefs, conditionings, memories around what this “I” is. If we can be innocent and simple with the word “I,” so many of our problems will drop away. But it’s rare that that happens because of this magnetic emphasis or this contraction around this word, which is often invisible.
The benefit of sitting quietly in mindfulness meditation is we can start seeing how this works. And we can see the peace that’s possible, the simplicity that’s possible to allow each thing that we experience to be its own pristine experience without the overlay of identity, without the overlay of “this is mine,” “this says something about me,” “I have to do something.” I, I, I, I. “My life is hard for me. This is one more time it’s showing me how difficult my life is and I have to do something about this.” I, I, I, I. To watch the regularity, the frequency in which we think and feel I, I, I, I, to really see it can be exhausting. Wow.
But to see there is an alternative, a very simple alternative. Pain, just pain. Joy, just joy. Thinking, just a thought. Feeling, just a feeling. Love, just love. Generosity, just generosity. And then what follows is whether there needs to be action, there needs to be something done. What follows maybe also doesn’t have to come with self. It’s just generosity, the desire to give a present, getting up to get the present, coming back, handing it. And there’s still a chance for choice, for movement, for activity, to take care of things. And of course, in some simple innocent way, I’m the one who went to get the gift and came back and gave it. But it’s very peaceful to operate without glomming the self onto everything we do, measuring everything against how other people will see it, react to it, believe it, what it says about me, what I’m trying to prove.
So the simplicity of experience without needing to add a self, me, myself, and mine—this is one of the great joys of mindfulness practice. It’s not addressing the question whether there is or is not a self. It’s just saying it’s a wonderful thing, a freeing thing to live in a simpler way where self is not asserted and overlaid all the time.
So thank you. We have one more day on laying this foundation for next week, where we’ll address a little bit more directly the topic of not-self. Thank you.