The Middle Way and the Doctrine of Not-Self
El Camino Medio y la Doctrina del No-Yo
A wide-ranging dialogue about the mind's compulsion to land on conclusions, the relationship between "waking up" and "growing up," and how Buddhist and Advaitic teachings on self both point to the same inexpressible reality.
The Middle Way and the Doctrine of Not-Self
A wide-ranging dialogue about the mind's compulsion to land on conclusions, the relationship between "waking up" and "growing up," and how Buddhist and Advaitic teachings on self both point to the same inexpressible reality.
I can see how the mind really wants to resolve this by landing somewhere.
That's exactly it. And the middle way is always seeing: no, no, no. This is a very rational recognition, because you can start to know rationally that the mind is doing this, and that it is not as close to reality as it pretends to be. The mind is trying to reduce reality to something far from what it is. It's rational to look at that and say, "That's not the best way to operate." And then, as you said in the beginning, it's like an exercise, like a workout. As you start to see that, you start operating from a place that is prior to that thought process.
Because you are no longer attached to that thought process, and that thought process is what is self-involved. That is what self-protection is: trying to land so that it can define self, define other, define world, define the path it will follow to preserve self. But that self is a thought.
The middle way feels almost scary, because it's like not knowing. It also can feel natural, but it's like not knowing.
The only true statement
You could also call it truth. Because if you follow the path of truth, you will realize you cannot know in any final way. All knowing is relative. It is only ever a map, an approximation, a prediction. It's all probabilities and maps, everything, all knowing of that kind.
There is a knowing that realization brings, but it is not knowing within the mind. When we talk about uncertainty and not knowing, we are talking about not knowing at the level of thought. And there is only one statement we can make with thought that is correct and true in somewhat of an absolute sense. It comes from Parmenides: there is something rather than nothing. That is thousands of years old. It is the only statement that is absolutely true. Everything else is a map, an approximation, and therefore in truth and reality unknowable.
There's something in that middle way that feels almost holy, or humble. Because trying to land somewhere is almost like, to use more religious language, claiming to know what God knows, claiming something that's not of your domain.
That's exactly it. And that is where I find Christianity and Advaita touch, because they are ultimately completely different maps of the same thing. It's the humility. The recognition that "my will is thy will" is, to me, the same as "atman equals brahman."
But in my experience, those words had a meaning before, which was my interpretation: "I have a will, and my will and yours, God's, can be the same." And then the realization was: I don't have a will. What I believe to be my will is thy will. That is a truth, but it is also something that can be forgotten every second. It has to do with what you're describing: "I know better than." In that moment, that "I" is the definition of a false self. The "I" which knows better is a belief, and it is very dangerous.
Confusion as the beginning of freedom
I have been confused by these two different teachings, but I am clearer now, after you explained the two different ways of pointing to this reality. The confusion has been significant.
That confusion is not a bad thing. It is better to be confused than to be convinced about a false belief.
I agree. But then you're experiencing life with confusion.
That's great. My teacher would say the job of the spiritual teacher is essentially to infuse confusion into the minds of the students. Because the problem is the belief systems. What creates the ultimate suffering, and all the problems, is all of the beliefs. The beginning of the ending of beliefs is confusion.
But it is a bit tricky, because you can go into confusion and then switch to another belief. For example, you are convinced there is a self, then you hear a spiritual teacher say "no self," and then you are convinced there is no self. So you walk around telling yourself there is no self, but that is not coming from the realization of seeing through the belief system of self. It can be problematic. At the same time, it is better, because at least there is a shaking up of the belief system. At some point, if there is enough looking at one's own mind, without blaming the teaching, things begin to shift.
There is a lot that happens where people say, "The teachers and the teaching have done it wrong, they've done this to me." There are teachers who teach from intellectual knowing and not from realization. There are probably quite a few, probably most of them. I just don't listen to them.
Waking up and growing up
I feel like I am putting distance between myself and teachings now. It feels like listening to more speakers isn't really the point. In the end, you still have to go to the truth of life, to experience and embrace the conditioning, whatever is happening with the people around you, and to see through where the trick comes. Really see where it comes.
Just a note to complement that: when you look at the trigger, when you look at yourself as this body and mind with its triggers, what is it that is looking?
That is where there's no answer.
Yes, but that is what is called the other thing.
The nothingness.
Yes. But you said that if you do the work of looking at triggers, then you're not doing the other approach, the "everything" and "God" approach.
I didn't articulate it well. I was saying that there are two different paths. One is experiencing life, seeing through it, facing triggers, living with triggers, and seeing where triggers come from, because triggers always link to this center in the body. The other is people who listen to non-duality teachings and hope to see reality as it is, which is already just the mind mapping. Nothing can truly be described. Even after reality is seen, you still have to live the life, to go through the conditioning. The conditioning still expresses itself. It's never going to be perfect. You have to embrace the messiness, even after truly seeing that what I am is not what I think I am.
What you're describing is what I call waking up and growing up. They are not separable. It is a useful way to talk about things because they have different natures, but they are really inseparable. They are not two ways. It's like two legs: you can't just exercise one of them, and you can't walk with only one.
For example, when you look at triggers, the more you look at them, the more you realize non-duality. The more you look at a trigger, the more you see the object of thought, which is self. The more you see the trigger as coming from the belief system of self, the more you realize it is a thought and not what you are. So the more you do that, the more you implicitly realize no self, non-duality.
Vice versa, the more you look at and realize non-duality more deeply, the more you are able to look at the mind and the triggers without collapsing into identification.
The delay between realization and well-being
The well-being that comes from deep realization often takes time. The realization can come first, progressively, at different levels of depth. And then the well-being, which is really what we are longing for, that peace, just takes time. It is partly a process because it involves the processing of triggers, pain, and fears, and changes in the body and in the mind.
In my case, just as an example, that peace and well-being came many years after very deep realization. Only then did I realize the realizations had happened quite a long time before. But because there hadn't been a permanent or profound change in my mental and emotional state, I discarded it. I didn't count it as profound or real realization. In a sense, it didn't really matter. My teacher had actually told me I had had those realizations. I just didn't believe it. I still felt like I was miserable.
I was still in a sense of "nothing real or profound has happened to me." That was a belief I held because I still felt miserable. And then the peace and well-being came quite suddenly. I realized it was the consequence of realizations that had happened many years before, some even over a decade earlier.
So I say this as encouragement: be patient, trust, and keep looking. Stay open. You're looking at things in a really rich, open way, curious about truth and reality and non-duality, and also curious about triggers and the personal work. That's really it. It's not one against the other. For some people these shifts happen fast, and for some they don't. I think it's more rare that it happens fast. It's just that those people become a little more famous, and then we think that's how it is. But for most people, I think it is more slowly and progressive. You have the rare cases where someone is miserable at twenty-three and then, boom, all done, cooked. But I think that's not normal. The more common path is progressive shifting, realizing, deepening.
Freedom beyond landing in emptiness
What we're looking for seems to be freedom. And what is often referred to as non-duality can become a stuckness in the emptiness part, the emptiness stage. To me, that is no freedom. It's like a jail of landing into "I cannot be disturbed," a wall between your emptiness and what's happening. What's been opening up lately for me is a fundamental okayness with whatever is here, a deep felt knowing that it's okay. That just opens things up. It feels a bit more chaotic and unpredictable, but there is aliveness in it, and freedom. Not being landed in "I'll be okay if I'm not bothered by life."
Also, about the "no self" you were talking about: I think when people say "no self," they can mean different things. There's almost a no self with a small "s" and a no self with a capital "S." The first realization is: no separate self, not what I think it is, no person inside. And then I've met some teachers who talk about a realization that happened to them after many years in what they call unity consciousness, divine consciousness. Then they realized even that was a very subtle landing place. Something snapped, and there was no ability to self-reflect anymore. That would be called, I guess, anatta in Buddhism, liberation. Am I getting this correctly?
You're describing a map you're picking up from different teachers. I'm not going to have an opinion on whether you're describing it correctly. It's just a map, so there isn't any absolute truth in what you've just described. It's teaching. That said, I roughly agree with that perspective broadly. But again, these are maps. They're useful in the context of a question, a problem, or something that is happening and true right now. Otherwise, we become philosophers of maps, which I can do, but it's not really what I'm here for. If we say, "Let's philosophize about maps," then I can do that. Or it might become part of a process in a moment where a map is so ingrained in somebody's belief system that we need to talk about it. But just talking about it in the abstract is a bit too far removed.
What "no self" really points to
My question was more about what you mean when you refer to "no self."
I'm referring to all of those teachings and approaches that point to something having to do with the belief in self. Because there is belief in self, there are potentially valuable teachings around no self. They are only valuable if they work, and that is a moment-by-moment thing. It's like asking, "What is a loving action?" If I write in a book, "Putting a coffee cup on a coaster is a loving action," then we need more rules, and now we have forty-five million rules of loving action. Those are not loving actions. If we try to define what a loving action really is, we have to bring it to the truth: it is only a loving action in the moment, and no particular action is always a loving action. Nothing that can be written in a book qualifies, because I could put the coffee cup on the coaster with rage.
The same applies to the teaching of no self. Is teaching "no self" a true, valid, correct teaching? That is the same question as "Is it a loving action?" When the words "no self" are said in a teacher-student context, is it correct, appropriate, and skillful? Maybe, maybe not. It is potentially skillful and correct and valuable when the student listening has a belief in self. But that is not the only requirement for it to be a correct teaching, because one can have the belief in self and then be taught "no self," and that could be unskillful, creating unnecessary confusion rather than awakening confusion. This is why in most traditions these teachings were kept until later in the process of awakening.
And a lot of it was one-to-one, master-to-student interaction too.
Those teachings were specifically private, because they were secret teachings only for those who were ready. "Ready" means that the teaching would have been misinterpreted, misunderstood, and turned into belief systems that would have done more harm than good. Today, all those teachings are out in the wild. There are no secrets.
But back to the question of self. If I were to simply state it: anything that appears to be, and is believed to be, a self is not a self. That is my definition of the no-self teaching. Anything that in this present moment is appearing to you as a self is not a self.
"Not self" versus "no self"
I think more correctly, in the translation from the Buddhist texts, the expression is not "no self" but "not self." In Advaita Vedanta, you will not see the expression "no self," but you see it in Buddhism. And it actually is "not self." So: this is not self. Not just "no self" as an absolute declaration that there is no self. It's called the doctrine of no self, but in the texts, when there is a thought, that thought is not a self. When there is a sensation, a sensation is not a self. And then you have these repetitions over and over, and I'm reading them in English, but the originals are very repetitive.
Is that the same as the neti neti practice?
Yes, it's the same approach, but with very different language. In Hinduism, you have the question: who am I? And then the answer is neti neti, "not this, not this." The practice is: Who am I? That which appears as the answer of "I," of self, that which appears: not this, not this. Who am I? The person, the body, the mind, this name: not this. That's not who I am. Who am I? Sensations in my chest: not I. Who am I? This world: not I, not I, not I.
But it is always the echo, the answer to the question "Who am I?" It is not telling me there is no self as a truth. In Buddhism, it is actually the same. The wording is "the doctrine of there not being self," but if you see how it is taught in the texts, it is the same: there is an appearance of a thought that appears to be a self, and that is not a self.
The metaphor of the chariot
There is a metaphor of a chariot in the Buddhist texts. There is the appearance of the chariot as a thing, as an entity. The metaphor deconstructs what makes it a chariot. Is the chariot the wheel? No. Is it this part? No. Everything is "not, not, not, not" until you find there is no such thing. "Chariot" is only a concept, which is a thought, and the thought is not the chariot.
That is used as a metaphor. You can then use the same approach with the appearance of self to realize that ultimately the only thing you can call a self is the thought. But that does not mean there is a truth that there is no self. That's the misunderstanding. It is basically saying: anything that you believe to be a self is not a self. Period. Once you undo that, there is the realization of truth, but that cannot be put in words. If you then say, "Oh, there is no self, and that's absolute truth," you're back to defining self.
The "no self" becomes a self in a way.
Yes. And that is why Buddhism and Advaita have gone into polar opposites in language. You go one way or the other. "Everything is self; there is one self that is all": that's Advaita, that's Brahman, an ultimate self. Buddhism says, "No, there is no ultimate self; there's only emptiness, there is nothing." Both are true, because that polarity exists only in the mind.
Then you go to that felt sense, and it's more of an inclusive thing happening.
That's an approach, but ultimately you're not the body at all.
Or there's no body, or whatever. You can't really pin it down.
You could say the body is a part of me. But still, there's a deeper realization where the body is absolutely not self. It's not a part of me.
So anything that appears in this moment would be not self.
That exact point is where it becomes philosophical, trying to define what is self.
No, what I meant is that it feels like it on a felt level. It's more inclusive for me now. I can go neti neti, because in this moment it does feel like yourself, but not just that. It's the surfing thing you were talking about.
The subtle trap of the perceiver
What can happen with neti neti is a subtle construct of a subject that doesn't appear as a thought. You say "no" to everything that is more obviously appearing and create a very subtle thought-construct that doesn't appear to be a construct, which is then defined as self: the perceiver. The subject that is empty, perceiving, aware of everything. "Everything else is not I, and I am that which is the perceiving." That is not truth. That is a belief.
But it is a good step along the way, because now the identification has happened with something more centralized. Instead of the sense of self constantly jumping around in narratives and sensations, it has come to one place: the thought-construct of the perceiver. That can then be looked at directly and seen as another thought.
This can happen progressively, alternating with what you're describing, which is the sense that what I am is everything that is appearing. At times it can happen more dramatically: first there is a separating toward the ultimate perceiving subjective thought, and then that is seen through, and a very quick release into everything can occur. The subject is seen as false, as not there. It disappears because it is seen to be empty. Then what happens is that everything one was feeling as a self is now known to be everything that is appearing. That has more to do with what you're describing around the heart and the sense that everything is I.
And this can happen the other way around too.
Yes. One can have a propensity toward that unity but not realize the emptiness. Then there can be a lot of contraction and longing for that unity, which isn't stable, because there is still the belief: "I am entering and leaving a state of unity with the universe and objects."