(upbeat music) This podcast is brought to you by Free Buddhist Audio, the Dharma for real life. Our work is funded entirely by donations from our generous listeners. If you would like to help us keep this free, come and join us at freebuddhistaudio.com/community. Thank you and happy listening. - I realize right at the beginning that the title, the self, this mind could be confusing. It sounds a bit like compassionate, as you say. I'll explain what I mean by selfless, and I hope we'll come back to an understanding of why the word selfless in the everyday sense, meaning compassionate, meaning altruistic, is related to the subject of this talk. So how would it be, imagine how it would be, if the origin of all of your difficulties, the origin of all of your sufferings was based on some misunderstanding. On a misapprehension, it's all been some terrible mistake. If only we could understand something correctly, then all this suffering would vanish. How would that be? That's kind of what I'm pedaling this evening. It sounds a bit like snake oil, doesn't it? Snake oil, the supposed cure for all physical ailments. And I'm pedaling something which is the cure for all emotional ailments. But I hope it's rather more effective than snake oil. So it's this understanding or the appreciation of this misunderstanding that is what was the key for the Buddha to understand, well, to awaken. We believe that he awoke into a state that we call enlightenment, he's turned 1,000 years ago. He discovered this root problem, this way that we see ourself. He saw that the way that we understand ourself is wrong. And because of that, we get ourselves into a mess. So let's just use an example, an image. And this is an image from the Buddhist tradition. Imagine that he locked into this small room and it's really dark and it's dingy. You can barely see anything. It's just maybe a few feet square. And as your eyes start to acclimatize and you see in the corner a snake and you realize that it's a cobra coiled up and just about to strike you. Imagine what that would be like. There's no way out, you're stuck in there with a snake that's just about to attack you. What would arise fear, I presume, terror? And then imagine that someone flicked on the light switch and what you actually see is a coil of rope in the corner. What would that be like? I presume there'd be a tremendous relief, I presume. So seeing a snake is equivalent to understanding ourself incorrectly. The fear that we experience is equivalent to all our emotional ills that arise out of that wrong understanding. The light switch flipping on is equivalent to the light of understanding with which we can see the rope, which is, you could say, the correct understanding of who we are. So I'm going to come back to this image through the talk. So what I'm going to do this evening is explore, first of all, what is the nature of this snake? What are the qualities of this wrong understanding of ourself? How do we tend to think of ourself? Secondly, why that understanding is incoherent? Why the snake is not actually a snake? Thirdly, what are the effects of that understanding? The fear that we see, the fear we experience in seeing a snake, what's the effects of seeing ourself in the way that we tend to see ourselves? Fourthly, what is the rope? What is the correct way of seeing ourselves? And fifthly, how do we go about developing the wisdom to see ourselves correctly? And what's the effect of that? Quite a big scope. This is many talks in one here. So first off, what are the qualities of this wrong understanding of ourself? Let's first off begin by trying to evoke the everyday sense of ourself. Okay, so you need to do a bit of work here. Imagine you're in the supermarket, you're in a hurry. And there's been this big long queue and there's someone in front of you who's taking ages, maybe they're having a natter with a cashier or something like this, the cash out person. They're just faffing around and there's that urge to just get out of my way. Or consider sometime when someone criticized you, something you said or something you did, and you felt upset by it, what's that like? Consider a time that you felt ignored or your opinion ignored or criticized or ridiculed. Imagine a time that you maybe feel embarrassed with people, maybe you're in a party and you're standing on your own and you don't know who to talk to or maybe you're standing with someone and you don't know what to say, that embarrassment. Imagine a time when you broke wind in polite company. Imagine a time when you want someone to do your will, when maybe it's your kid or your partner or someone you are in charge with at work and they refuse, they block you. Imagine a time when you felt really bad about yourself but not being good enough in some way. Or imagine a time when you were caught out doing something rather embarrassing. So for me, these situations bring a really strong sense of me. I, it's like it comes into a sharp relief and it's that sharp sense of me that is in some way connected with all of the embarrassment, pain, anguish that arises out of it. So let's try and get a feeling for the qualities of that me. That's I. So when I look at this sense of self, this is what I think I see these qualities. You have to try and work out for yourself, if this works for you. Firstly, in some way, this sense of self is fixed. It's the same essential self that I was born with. It's the same essential self that I'll die with. Of course, I appreciate that I change. Of course, I change. Of course, I'm not the same kind of person I was 20 years ago. But somehow, somewhere, there's an essential eye that is underneath that change. But that change relates to, in some obscure way. It's a little bit like a thread joining up beads into an necklace. It's as if all these beads are separate episodes of my life, which are different to each other. But something connects them and what connects them is that fixed sense of myself. Secondly, this sense of myself is in some way unitary. It's in some way all of one piece. It doesn't make sense for there to be several of me. I must be one. Thirdly, it's independent. It's separate from what is not I. I have a sense of a partner from what is not I, a sense of a partner from you. I have a sense almost of self-createdness, as if in some way I am responsible for being here now. Which leads on to fourthly, I am in control. This eye is somehow in control of me, let's say. It's the origin of my choice. It's the, these decisions, these actions that I make must come from somewhere. Where do they come from? They come from me, from that eye. Now we get a bit more metaphysical. It's in some way the subject of all my experience. So I am like this point which all of these impressions converge. All of these sounds go into me. All of these sights go into me. All of my body experiences go into me. All of my thoughts somehow converge on me. And sixthly, I am, I hope you appreciate, supremely important. So what's the problem? The problem is that they are incoherent. What they refer to does not exist. It cannot be found. And because of this, because of this confusion, we suffer. So here's a little quote from a, I think an eighth century, Indian Buddhist called Shanti Deva. The calamities that happen in this world, the sufferings and the fears, many as they are, they all result from clinging on to the notion of self. So what good is this clinging of mine? If one does not let go of self, one cannot let go of suffering. As one who does not let go of fire cannot let go of burning. So we can apply some fairly rational, reasonable arguments to try and follow up and see if these are actually coherent. So for example, Einstein seems to have worked this one out, famous quote by him. A human being is a part of the whole caused by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings is something separated from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. And we'll come back to the rest of his quote later on. But first of all, let's get a feeling for that optical delusion. I find this a really interesting notion that our sense of self is in some way an optical delusion. So let's have a look at an optical delusion. Here we go. So, a chessboard and does it or does it not look like this? Does it not look as if it's some bowed or distorted in some way? It does, doesn't it? Now, because you know the nature of optical illusions, you probably know that it's not. You probably know that all of these lines are parallel to each other, but it's almost impossible to see that. Until you actually put a straight line against them and you realize that actually all those lines are parallel. And it sort of seems counterintuitive, doesn't it? You can sort of look at that and think, they're not parallel, but I know they are somehow. And the Buddhist teaching of the lack of any sort of fixed self that we've been talking about is equally counterintuitive. It's equally difficult to get your head around. It goes so much against that everyday experience, that everyday perceptions of ourself. But it was this realization that constituted his breakthrough. So, let's pick through these assumptions of the nature of ourself and see if they hold together. Let's look at the incoherence of our sense of fixed selfhood. So, here we are. So, what the Buddha did in order to try and pick through these different qualities of self is he divided up our total experience, some total of our experience, into different categories, different components, and look to see if he could find himself in any of them. Traditionally, he did this into sort of five or six different parts. I'm going to take quite a simple delineation of body and mind. But the reason he did this analysis is that usually our sense of self lurks about in unexplored corners, lurks about in rather vague, shadowy regions that we don't really check out properly. And so, by analyzing our experience systematically, the Buddha shined a light into all these little corners and said, okay, is there anything that can be called a sort of fixed, independent self there? Well, how about here? Well, how about here? Well, how about here? So, let's start out. I say we can look at body and mind, form and consciousness as he put it. So, let's start off with our body. So, to some extent, we all identify with our body. Imagine that, what I said about breaking wind in public. I mean, why should that be embarrassing if we're not identified with our body as in some way me? How much do we identify with our looks? Do we invest in looking good? How much do we feel threatened by aging? How do we feel when we have a large spot on the end of our nose? So, yes, to the extent that we identify with our body, these things will be uncomfortable. Although, rationally, there should be no reason why they would be. When I do yoga, I occasionally try to do yoga. And I'm quite good at doing twists. So, when I do a twist, and I see I can twist further than other people, I feel a bit good about myself. But I'm rubbish at forward bends. I've got really tight hamstrings. I feel bad about myself when I do forward bends, because everyone can sort of fold them too, and I'm just kind of hanging there like that. Isn't it kind of silly, really? It's just the way my body's constructed. So, let's look at our body in terms of these different, or at least some of these different qualities. Is our body fixed? Now, of course, we know that our body changes, that I don't have the same body now as I did 20 years ago. We can even get a bit scientific about it. I believe that the lifetime of a cell in the body is between a week and a few years. So, all of my body's cells have turned over over the period of the last few years. We can imagine the constant flow of food and water passing through us. If you imagine the amount of food that I've ever eaten in my life over here, right? And I know this bit less pleasant. If you imagine not to come out of my body over here in a large pile, not only a feces, but of hair and fingernails and dandruff. You get the picture. All that's passed through me, and this body that's standing here before you know, is just this snapshot. It's a little bit like looking at a wave. You probably know that a wave passing through the ocean. You don't have a lump of water here that moves across the ocean and ends up there. All you have are all the different water particles doing this, and they pass the energy along. It's just a transfer of energy. So you have this pattern passing across the ocean, which is just a pattern in the water. So, a body's like this. There's a kind of resemblance that, you know, is pretty much like I did 10 years ago, maybe. And hopefully I'll look pretty similar in another 10 years' time. No. [laughter] Thank you. So there's a pattern. There's recognizable patterns, but it's pattern within this ever-changingness. And does this pattern really deserve to be identified with as myself? What about myself as unitary? Is this body of one piece? Is it all of one? Can the self be unitary self having a body like this? Well, clearly not. My body can be divided into lots of little pieces. The Buddha even recommended meditations where you imagine your lungs and your heart and your bile and your phlegm and your gallbladder and all the rest of it. Now, I don't know about you, but I believe that you're like that. I believe that you've got all sorts of horrible, slimy bits inside of you. But somehow inside of me, I'm all of one piece. I don't have guts and kidneys, thank you very much. Just a kind of strange sense I have about myself. We can play with this notion of being a unitary self. So, for example, if you had an arm amputated, would you be the same self? If you had both arms and both legs amputated or if you became quadriplegic, would you have the same sense of being yourself? Kidney transplant, heart transplant, face transplant. How about brain transplant? So the body is evidently not unitary. It's very difficult to see how the self can reside in the body as a whole, and it's even harder to see how the self can reside in a little bit of the body. What about the self as independent? The body as a sort of independent organism that houses itself? Well, by exactly the same imagining food, what comes out, we can see that the body is definitely not independent. There's this total dependency on all this food, on all this water, on heat, on air. There's all this stuff, which is not me, passing into me and passing out of me again, that keeps me alive. I'm completely dependent on everyone who farms the food that I eat. I'm completely dependent on the water system, on the whole water cycle. I'm completely dependent on the sun, central heating, clothes. I'm dependent on the air and on all the plants that produce the oxygen. I'm completely dependent, completely interconnected with this vast, vast web of life, infinite web of life out there. And to draw a boundary around myself as being the surface of my skin. It's just a convenient convention. There's no absolute edge to me and my body. Okay, so what about is my body under my control? Well, to some extent it is, I can do this, can't I? Hey, and I suppose this is one of the reasons why our body feels so much like myself, because we have some degree of agency over it. But, I mean, I don't choose to get backache, then my new. I don't choose to have insomnia occasionally. I don't choose to get ill. So the range of our control is actually very limited. Our body is inevitably, I think for pretty much all of us, on a decline. And it's downhill all the way for most of us here, I'm afraid of folks. We don't really choose that, do we? But that's the inevitable fact of it. So I'm going to move on now to consciousness. So we looked at the body. Hopefully it's fairly clear that the body isn't a very suitable repository for any notion of a fixed, independent, unitary, controlling self. So consciousness, that's probably where our self resides, isn't it? Sort of up there, isn't it, somewhere? Surely I'm the person who thinks, surely I'm the person who makes decisions. So what about the fixedness of our consciousness? So is our consciousness fixed in some way? Well, it doesn't take too much investigation, too much introspection, to discover that actually our mind is rather fluid. It's ever-changing. In fact, the Buddha said it would be much more reasonable to identify with the body as self rather than the mind, because at least the body is vaguely stable over time. Whereas the mind is just this evanescent flow of moods, of thoughts, of volitions, like little breezes in the air. There's never sort of anything that you can get hold of there. It's a river, a river of thoughts and moods. So how can we identify with that? Well, we do, don't we? For the same reason that we identify with our body, because there's patterns within these moods, within these thoughts, there's patterns. I'm afraid there's quite a lot of patterns within my thoughts. Repetitive thoughts, repetitive moods that keep cropping up. And we can identify with these habits of mind. We can identify. So, for example, I think I'm a thinker. I think I'm a thinker. I identify with the thinking faculty. Other people might identify with being a depressive sort of person, or might identify with being, I'm not a thinker, I'm more of an artistic type. We only have to spend a little while sitting down in the chair watching our mind to realize that there's very little, but there's nothing that we can attach to is fixed in our mind. Okay, so it is our mind unitary. Surely it's in some way of one piece. Well, have you ever said to yourself, or have you ever heard someone say, "Oh, I just couldn't get myself to get out of bed this morning. I just couldn't bring myself to do it." So, okay, so I couldn't get myself to get out of bed. So, who is the "I" that couldn't get myself out of bed? Isn't it actually the case that there's a whole great bundle of selves occupying this consciousness of ours? We can get internal conflict. We can get confusion. We can make a decision to do something and then change our mind the next day or completely forget about this decision the next day. So, our consciousness isn't a unitary, I'm afraid. Is it independent? Surely this consciousness of mine is a bit of a secret cave. You don't know what's going on in my mind. It's inaccessible. It's cut off. It's independent in this way. Well, we can feel that, but we're forgetting the fact, or I'd be forgetting the fact, that I'm constantly recycling all the impressions, all the ideas that have come in from outside of me. These words I'm spouting. I'm afraid I didn't make this up. I'm afraid this isn't my discovery. I'm just recycling a whole tradition of Buddhism here. Even the very words, the words of the English language I'm using, these, I didn't make these up. I'm just recycling this language here. So, we are the product of all of these impressions, all of these experiences that we've lived through throughout our life. We've been conditioned in all these various different ways to be the kind of person that we are now. We like this great big collage of recycled material. And, I mean, this consciousness that we've got, I didn't make up mine. I don't know if you made up yours. It's just something that kind of appeared. It didn't appear out of my own volition, out of my own power. So, our consciousness is completely porous. It's completely not mine in this way. It's not me and it's not mine. And the extent to which we are identified with the independence and self-generated nature of this consciousness, to that extent, these reflections will be a little bit of a dent for our pride, I suggest. Okay, now we really get down to brass tacks. Surely, I am in control of this consciousness. I am the thinker. I am the person who generates these thoughts. I have this little voice talking to me, telling me what to do. Surely, that's me. So, okay, let's try a little experiment. If you are, if it's the eye that is in charge of the thoughts, okay, then just don't think for the next ten minutes. Just tell yourself, I'm not going to think for the next ten minutes. You can try this at home. It's a good one to try. See how far you get. And when you've done that, you can ponder who was the eye who told myself not to think in the first place. You can start to see we get into all sorts of strange problems when we identify a center of thought and the eye as a center of thought. Okay, so when I do this, what starts happening is I start retreating into rather vague metaphysical notions of what myself is. I think, okay, I agree that I'm not the center of my thought in that way, but I'm the origin of my choices. All of these choices, all these actions come from somewhere, and it's like I am the point source origin of all of my decisions, all of these actions. Or alternatively, I am the point source convergence of all of these experiences registering on the subject of self of me. And when you start talking like this, you've got a metaphysical position. And here, at least I'm coming up with a sense of myself, which is inaccessible to observation, you cannot, by definition, observe a subject. It's like the eye cannot see itself, the hand cannot grasp itself, the eye that does all this perceiving, can't perceive itself. So there's a flavor of "there, you can't get me there, no, no, no, no". It's sort of retreated behind the, behind the battlements. This kind of idea of ourselves can only really be dealt with in deep meditation. But it's also worth reflecting, if that's really your position. It's only a supposition. This is a metaphysical theory we have about who we are here, the subject to experience the source of all actions. It's metaphysical, we cannot access it. And as a supposition, we don't have a lot of weight on that particular assumption. We don't have to go to a lot of energy to keep bolstering up that assumption, as we'll come onto in a moment. But finally, I just want to say something about this self being supremely important, which is, of course, more of an emotional assumption than a rational belief. I understand that it's no less tenacious for all of that. I put to you that one of the prime qualities of yourself is that it's supremely important above all other selves. And the trouble is everyone else thinks the same thing. And all six billion of us can't be right at the same time. So this is naturally the origin of all our interpersonal problems. Okay, so what's the effect of this wrongly understood self? What's the analog of the fear of the snake? Well, if the self is cherished as being supremely important, and yet it doesn't exist in any stable or independent substantial way, then we have a problem. It's going to take a constant effort to bolster up this sense of our self, which is constantly crumbling. It's like building on quicksand. It reminds me a little bit of the invisible man. I don't know if you saw any of the films of the invisible man, so he is invisible, but you can see him. You can only see his effect when he knocks into something, or when he puts clothes on and you see the shape of him. It's a little bit as if we have to keep on putting clothes on in order to feel real. We have to keep on clothing ourselves. Unfortunately, in this analogy, the clothes keep falling off, so there's nothing for them really to stick on to, so they're constantly clothing ourselves by hanging on, by identifying with elements of our experience, body or mind, or even, as you'll see, things which are not body or mind, like clothes. So, literally speaking these clothes ourselves for very good practical reasons, but also what do your clothes say about you? What do the clothes of the people around you say about them? It's not a completely random choice. But even metaphorically, the way we clothe ourselves, the way we bolster up this sense of our self. We've talked about it, the way that we identify with our looks, the way that we identify with our intelligence, with our initiative, with our opinions. We bolster ourselves up with all sorts of interesting opinions to sort of parade ourselves with political opinions or with religious opinions, social opinions, supporting football clubs. You name it, there's all sorts of ways that we can add these little adornments to ourselves to reinforce the kind of person we feel we are. Our hobbies that make us interesting. I always feel very embarrassed when people ask me what my hobbies are, so I don't really have any, and that makes me feel really uninteresting. And I think, that's just really, that's just really strange where I'm thinking, isn't it, to feel uninteresting because I don't have hobbies? Or what about our objects? What about the objects that accumulate the car we drive, the house we live in, the taste of furniture? What have we got on your mantelpiece? What do they say about you? I used to be a very avid music collector, record collector, and sometimes people would come around and say, "Wow, you've got such great taste in music." Does it mean I've written it all myself? I was completely identified with my taste in music. And then of course there's these deeper qualities of ourselves that we identify with. I'm the sort of person who is kind or intelligent or good friend. And we can feel good about ourselves by having that reflected back from people and saying, "Oh, thanks very much for helping me out, helping me move the other day." "Oh, I was such a brilliant talk about your prayer, that's a brilliant talk you gave." Or, the opposite. When you get the brick maps instead of the applause, you could have done a better job today. Or whatever it is, criticism we receive that undermine our deeply cherished sense of who we are. And it feels to me as if we constantly need to bolster this sense of ourselves. Because we only ever as good as the last compliment, as the last project, our success. Before it sinks back into the quick sound and we need to stick something else on. And this is because there's no referent. There's no person that these things actually stick to. So what happens is life becomes this process of desperately hanging on to reference points, looking for solid ground under our feet. And what this brings is a sense of constant anxiety that losing that ground could be quite low level anxiety, or it could be very pronounced if that ground is about to be ripped out from under our feet. Because we know everything can and will be taken away from us. We cannot own anything. I might say this is my watch. I could lose at any moment. This is my body. It could be taken away from me at any moment, cycling home, who knows, because everything will be taken away at death. And if we're not realistic about this, we suffer a double whammy. We suffer the anxiety of losing the things that we cherish, losing the things that we identify ourselves with. And then the actual experience of losing them. So that's all a bit grim, isn't it? So let's move on to the correct understanding of self. What's it like to actually see this rope? There's an analogy here. It's an analogy that's often used in the Buddhist tradition. Maybe it came here by car tonight. Your car is your car in the wheels? Is your car in the seats? Is your car in the engine or in the bodywork? Well, no, it's not, is it? If you took your car into lots of different pieces, would it still be a car? No, be a pile of car parts. So what is a car? The car is a convenient label for something that looks vaguely car-shaped and that can transport you along the road. So the car is a convenient label that summarizes a whole great complex, a whole great extraordinary set of parts coming together, conditions coming together in a way that you can transport yourself. Similarly, the body, the person, the self is what we label this extraordinary, extraordinary coming together as all of these biological processes, all of these mental processes, in some completely understandable way linked together. No one has got the foggiest idea how consciousness arises. But somehow we can just talk in terms of a human being as if we know what that means. I can say art of prayer and I've immediately got in buttonholes and I know all about art of prayer. But it's actually missing the point of what is behind this extraordinary being. What's behind this extraordinary being that is myself? Time for a poem from Kathleen Rain. This is called The Moment. To write down all that I contain in this moment, I would pour the desert through an hourglass, the sea through a water clock, grain by grain and drop by drop, let in the trekless, measureless, mutable seas and sands. For earth's days and nights are breaking over me, the tides and sands are running through me and I have only two hands and a heart to hold the desert and the sea. What can I contain of it? It escapes and eludes me. The tides wash me away. The desert shifts under my feet. So that evokes me this infinite process, the cusp of which at the moment we call myself now. And it's this completely ungraspable, unbounded sense of self which I think is more akin to seeing the rope rather than seeing the snake. Because everything that we experience is constantly changing, everything in our experience is constantly changing, body and mind. We are a process of constant change. I am a verb. There is nonetheless continuity of memories of habits of appearance. That's certainly true. So there's patterns within this constant change. And this process is completely relational in the way that I'm saying, these words I'm speaking are becoming part of you now. I am taking you in, you are becoming part of me now. The food I ate a little while ago is becoming part of me now. The tea that you might have just drunk is becoming part of you now. Our whole experience is made up of what is not self. So if this sounds a bit impersonal, a bit bleak, it's not. It's wonderful. A little quote from a Tibetan Buddhist called Sankapa. This life you must know as the tiny splash of a raindrop, a thing of beauty that disappears even as it comes into being. A thing of beauty that disappears even as it comes into being. That evokes me the incredible poignancy of the evanescence of our life which is in its evanescence in its quintessential, fragility, it's so beautiful. And completely ungraspable. It is a great mystery. So another image that maybe I find helpful, the image of a river. If you imagine a river, maybe a river running over some rocky bed, a river bed. And as the water flows past these rocks, you have little eddies forming. And these eddies, they're very clear. You can see definite eddies, little twirls of water which can keep their shape over quite long periods of time. They maintain a stable pattern. So there's clearly something which is worth labelling, eddy. But it's in no way fixed and it's in no way separate from the water around it. So we can awaken to this very porous fluid relational sense of ourself by seeing in this way. That then raises the question, how do we do that? And what is the effect of seeing in this way? So maybe you're already persuaded intellectually that the self can't be a fixed, independent thing. But even if we're persuaded intellectually that a self is a rope, it's not actually a snake, even if we're persuaded, we can't actually experience it that way. Why is that? Well it's like our old optical illusion, isn't it? Even though you know that those lines are parallel, looking at it, for me anyway, it's impossible to see in this parallel. It just doesn't work. I know the parallel, but I can't see in this parallel. I know that myself is fluid, is impermanent, is completely porous to what is around it. But I don't experience it that way. We can't do it by force or will. We can't just sort of pretend that I don't experience myself in that way. But the Buddha laid out a whole path of practice in order to bring us about. Now I can't map out of that whole path now. But I said that what it is that illumines the true understanding of our self is this wisdom. It is a wisdom faculty. It's the light that illuminates the rope. So we develop wisdom. We develop wisdom only through a long process of refining, of purifying the mind, training the mind within meditation. So meditation is an essential part of this path. And our mind is only made stable within meditation by a thorough gang practice of ethics in everyday life. So this is the simplest version of the Buddhist path. We cultivate an ethical relationship with the world. We act as if we see the interconnectedness that we have with the world. We act as if we realize that other people consider themselves just as important as I consider myself. So we don't go barging around knocking people out of our way, harming people for the sake of feeling good about ourselves. This is the path of ethics. And then on the basis of that, we cultivate meditation. There's a wide range of meditation practices. There's a couple I'll just mention briefly. The mindfulness of breathing, which many of you have learned, we simply focus the mind. We dwell with attention on the breath. And what we realize is that this mind of ours is so fluid, is so porous. Through training a mind in stability and precision, we get to see that more and more closely. It starts to sink more and more deeply in. The second type of meditation that we teach very frequently here is called the development of loving kindness. In this, it's a very practical way of cultivating the attitude and the emotional correspondence of recognizing the importance of other people, recognizing just how difficult it is being a human being. And how considerate we need to be around human beings in order to try and make life a better place for everyone. So I'll read you out the second part of Einstein's quote there. He was talking about this kind of optical delusion, if you recall, that separates us from the rest of the world. This delusion is a kind of prism for us, restricting ourselves to our personal desires and to affection for a few people nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prism by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living beings and the whole of nature in its beauty. Our task to widen this circle of identification to widen our sense of ourself to include all. Sangrechta says something. Sangrechta the man who founded this Buddhist order said something very similar. That central point of reference, the self, that core of the self, is in reality only a fiction. It is more useful to regard meta this quality of loving kindness as an outward movement of the self rather than from the self. When kindness is experienced in a fully expansive mode and is universal in scope, there is no experience of self that is separate from anyone or anything else. Just as a circle that has expanded to infinity is not a circle anymore, so the mind that has expanded to embrace all beings has gone beyond definition. The self is replaced by a creative orientation of being. The self is replaced by a creative orientation of being. So this is where we come back to the everyday notion of self less. If we are self less in the sense of not seeing the snake, if we are selfless in the sense of having this indefinable, expansive sense of self, then we are selfless in the sense of not being selfish. This is why last week, Richard Kaitu could quote the Dalai Lama saying "my religion is kindness". You could equally well say "my religion is wisdom". The two go hand in hand to the extent we have the wisdom that sees the true way that we are interconnected and fluid. To that extent we will have a compassionate response to all that no longer feels separate from us. So what's the effect of this? What's the effect of seeing the snake is actually a rope? Relief. Few. What would it be like to drop the burden of always having to be good, always having to be right, always having to be approved of? Feeling acceptable, looking to other people to accept us. Relief. The removal of our afflictive emotional response to the world. By which I mean pushing away those elements of the world that we hate and clinging on to and pulling towards those elements of the world that we want to adorn ourselves with. And then the world starts to take on a whole new appearance as we let go of all this hanging on, of all this holding on, of all this identification. What happens is we start to see the square chessboard underneath that. If you could imagine blowing off all these little white and black little squares, then what happens is you see the checkerboard in its perfect squareness. So let me just read a few poems to try and evoke that relief. Some of these Zen poets are very good at evoking it. This is a poem, a poet called Reakhan. The rain has stopped, the clouds have drifted away and the weather is clear again. If your heart is pure, then all things in your world are pure. Abandon this fleeting world, abandon yourself, then the flowers and moon will guide you along the way. And another one. If someone asks my abode, I reply the east edge of the Milky Way. Like a drifting cloud, bound by nothing, I just let go, giving myself up to the wind of the wind. And I'll finish with a quote from a Tibetan Buddhist called Kalu Rinpoche. But before I do finish, I just want to point to you one book called "Living as a River" by Bodhi Paksha. I think we've just got one or two copies here if you want to read it. It's a very long, very engaging analysis of exactly what I've gone through here. And it spells it out in vivid detail. So Kalu Rinpoche sums up this whole talk very pithly. We live in illusion and the appearance of things. There is a reality. We are that reality. When you understand this, you see that you are nothing. And being nothing, you are everything. That is all. [Applause] We hope you enjoyed the talk. Please come and help us keep this free at freebuddhistaudio.com/community. And thank you. [Music] [Music] You [BLANK_AUDIO]
