Self and Self-Naughting
Ajahn Sumedho

You need not seek for it outside, you need not think that it is something faraway or inaccessible to you. It comes through the willingness to calm downand stop resisting and to listen and awaken to your own conscious experience.

I think something that interests us all is ourselves - because we arethe subject of our lives. No matter what you think of yourself, there is anatural interest there because you have to live with yourself for a lifetime.The self view is therefore something that can give us a lot of misery, if wesee ourselves in the wrong way. Even under the most fortunate circumstances,if we don't see ourselves in the right way we still end up creating sufferingin our minds. So the Buddha was trying to point out that the way to solve theproblem isn't through trying to make everything right and pleasant on theexternal dimension, but to develop the right understanding, the rightattitude towards ourselves. This is the whole thrust of his teaching.

Living in Britain at this time, we expect comfort and all kinds ofprivileges, rights and material comforts. This makes life more pleasant inmany ways, but also when our every need is provided for and life is toocomfortable, something in us doesn't develop. Sometimes it is the strugglethrough hardship that develops and matures us as human beings. I rememberwhen we lived in London, we used to take walks up on Hampstead Heath in themorning and watch these well-off people taking their pet poodles for walks onthe Heath. We'd start thinking that it wouldn't be so bad to be born as a lapdog here in England: have some nice lady constantly pampering you, making youlittle jumpers for the winter, and finding tasty little dog biscuits to feedyou. It looked like a life of affection and comfort could be rather pleasing!But the truth is that most of us would find that suffocating: we need tomeasure ourselves against something, we need to struggle and to learn how toget beyond the limitations that we think we have at this time. Where we getdefeated is where we give up to the limitations that we have throughresignation and apathy. Then of course we just get depressed and miserable.

But when we give up or surrender to restriction and to restraintthrough wisdom, then we find liberation! Life is the experience ofrestriction and restraint, being born in the human body and having to liveunder the laws of nature on planet earth. Mentally we can soar up into thesky, we can go up into the heavens, but physically we are bound tolimitations that get increasingly restrictive as we grow older. This need notbe seen as suffering because that is the way things are. You can develop adifferent attitude and learn to accept the limitations - not out of anegative resignation but just because you realise that what you really arelooking for is within you. You need not seek for it outside, you need notthink that it is something far away or inaccessible to you. It comes throughthe willingness to calm down and stop resisting and to listen and awaken toyour own conscious experience. But of course the big obstruction to that isthat we have the sense of ourselves as being this or that or the other.

The sense of oneself is something that we become conscious of when weare children; when we are born there is no sense of a self as being anything.As we grow up then we learn what we are supposed to be, if we are good orbad, if we are loveable or not, if we are approved of or disapproved of. Sowe develop a sense of ourselves. We also often compare ourselves to othersand have role models of what we should be when we grow up. I noticed from myown experience that the ego really started consolidating when I was sent offto school: I was thrown into those classrooms with all those strange childrenand then I started noticing who was the strongest, who was the toughest, whowas the one the teacher liked the best. We saw ourselves in terms of ourrelationships to others. This develops through a lifetime unless wedeliberately choose to change and start looking more deeply than just livingour lives through the conditioning of the mind that we acquired when we werevery young. Even when we get older, sometimes we still have very adolescentattitudes or childish emotional reactions to life that we have been unable toresolve except by suppressing or ignoring them. And these can be veryembarrassing or shocking to us.

Every religion has its self-naughting teachings: in some ways religion isabout relinquishing the selfish tendencies of the mind, so before we can,say, realise the Kingdom of God we have to let go of our selfish fascinationsand obsessions. Or, if we are going to realise the true Dhamma, we need tolet go of the self view. So this can be another command from above, like "Youshouldn't be selfish! Get rid of any selfishness and try to become somebodywho is pure!" We would all agree with that, nobody here would relish the ideaof becoming more and more selfish, but sometimes we don't know how not to beselfish. We may have grand ideas that we should give up all our wealth, nothold on to anything; then we're getting closer to not being selfish - but thestrange thing is that when you become a monk or a nun, sometimes, althoughyou are thinking you are getting rid of selfishness, you find yourselfgetting more and more selfish. Your selfishness becomes very concentrated,because you can't spread yourself over such a wide area as in lay life. Soyou become much more aware of it. And if you condemn it, then it seems to bea hopeless situation, because you begin to interpret life from that sense of"I'm selfish and I've got to get rid of this selfishness." And one of thebiggest problems in our way of thinking is to relinquish that basic premisethat "I am this person and I have got to do something, in order to become anunselfish, enlightened person in the future."

We are conditioned to think this way in our culture: be a good boyand therefore you do this and you do that and in the future you will becomesomebody who will be worthy and acceptable in society. This makes sense onthe worldly side of life, because we start out illiterate, so we have tolearn, and from then on we have to study all the different subjects in aschool in order to become someone who can get through the system. If we failthen we become someone who fails. And failure is despised. It is interestingin teaching meditation to people who have this fear of failure, they fearthat they are going to fail in meditation. But there is no way you could failin meditation. It is not about failure, otherwise even meditation becomesjust another way for us to prove ourselves. "I can't do it now. If I practisehard, I will become a good meditator and I will become enlightened,hopefully..." And then the doubt comes: "But I don't think I could ever getenlightened. Who is enlightened?"

People like to check us all out to see if Ajahn Sumedho isenlightened or whether Ajahn Viradhammo is, or whether we have reached somekind of advanced level. Or are we just blokes who haven't quite made it? Butthere is a different way of looking and thinking which is the opposite ofseeing ourselves in terms of being somebody who has to do something to becomesomebody who is better than he or she is right now. That is the worldly wayof thinking. That's what people like to hear isn't it: "I had all kinds ofproblems and was a very miserable, unhappy man and then practising meditationI saw the light and now I'm happy and fulfilled." From the worldlyconditioned attitude, "I am this person, I am this personality, I am AjahnSumedho... I am all kinds of things... I should be and I shouldn't be." Butthe aim of Buddhist meditation is about changing one's attitude by using thereflective or intuitive function of the mind.

When we go into the stillness of meditation, often times the sense ofoneself will take us over, we'll be filled with all kinds of memories andideas about ourselves. We sometimes wish that... "if I go and meditate thenI'll go into stillness and I'll get out of this ugly scenario of myself."Sometimes the mind will suddenly just stop and we'll experience a kind ofbliss, or a peace that we have either forgotten or never really noticedbefore. But the sense of oneself will still operate because of the force ofhabit. So we develop an attitude of listening to this self, not in terms ofbelieving or disbelieving but in noticing what it really is that arises andceases. Whether we think of ourselves as the greatest or the worst doesn'tmatter, the condition itself comes and goes. Through letting go or`self-naughting', not trying to get rid of it but allowing it to go, then webegin to experience the true nature of mind which is bliss, silence.

So there are moments in our lives when the self does stop functioningand we get in touch with the pure state of conscious experience. That is whatwe call bliss. But when we have those blissful experiences, immediately thedesire to have them again takes over, and no matter how hard we try to haveit again, as long as we're attached to the view of wanting bliss again, wewill never get it. It doesn't work that way. Wanting it means that we havealready made it impossible, so the attitude then is one of letting go ofdesire. Not trying to suppress desire, because that is another kind ofdesire: the desire to get rid of desire is still the same problem. So ifwe're trying to suppress or annihilate desire, it doesn't work. Nor does justfollowing desire. But in this state of attentive awareness, we begin to seewhat is actually taking place, then we can let go of the causes of oursuffering. We see how it actually is, and we have that intuitive wisdom tolet go. So in this life as a human being from birth to death every moment isan opportunity for understanding in the right way. Success or failuresuddenly doesn't mean anything because even if we fail, we learn from that.This doesn't mean that we don't try or put ourselves forth but that our aimis no longer to succeed but to understand things.

It takes a long time to get underneath this self view because it isan all pervasive influence on our conscious experience. With meditation also,we bring attention to very ordinary things like the breath and the body, andso we learn how to bring our attention into the present moment, to sustainour attention rather than be caught up in trying to become something, ortrying to get something out of our practice. This `trying to get something'doesn't work because whatever we get we are going to lose; so if you feelyou've got samadhi that means you are going to lose it also. When we go on avery formal quiet meditation retreat, we can get into a blissful state. Butthen when the retreat ends, we lose it. This doesn't mean to dismiss retreatsbut to try to look at these opportunities, not from the worldly, self-centredposition any more but from observing how things are when we remove sensorystimulation, or when we get out of the sensory deprivation tank and walk outinto the street, with the traffic noises, the pollution, and people rushingby - we can feel even worse than before because now we have become refinedand the coarse world is too unbearable. But if we contemplate in the rightway, we see the sensory deprivation or the sensory stimulation as `the way itis'. Then it doesn't stir up or aggravate the senses and we're more or lessin touch with the mind that is blissful. It's always present: but when we'recaught in irritation and agitation, we don't notice it.

So the Buddhist approach to this, rather than going off and living ina sensory deprivation tank, or becoming a hermit, is to develop thatawareness, because through mindfulness we begin to realise that the purenature of the mind is always with us, even now. Even though we might beagitated or irritated, if we are mindful we'll experience a natural blissbeyond that. And once we realise that for ourselves, then we know how not tosuffer. The end of suffering is in seeing things as they really are, so thatour refuge isn't in this reactive excited condition of the eyes and the earsand the nose, the tongue, the body, the brain, the emotions. In these are theconditions that are irritating, agitated. Through mindfulness we realise thatwhich transcends these conditions. That is our real refuge. This we canrealise as human beings through wise contemplation of our own personalpredicament.