Welcome to Delusionville

We all feel a sense of self. Proprioception, awareness of the position and movement of the body, informs us that we are an entity with flesh boundaries, but our awareness extends beyond it somewhat to give us a sense of personal space. We may not like it if people get too close to us before we’ve assessed their intention. Our impression of uniqueness is reinforced by the mirror. And yet, our awareness itself is curiously complex. Unlike a hand, foot, liver, or spleen, science has never discovered either a location or anything resembling an organ for the self. Its color or form has never been discovered. Despite this lack of concrete evidence, most folks remain convinced that “we” reside inside this sack of flesh and “the rest of it” is out there. Quite a puzzle.

Even a brief scrutiny will reveal that we are not and have never been as separate from the rest of the universe as we believe. Believing that the “I” we refer to as our “self ” is a discrete isolated entity is the central delusion of humankind, and the fixity of that conviction leads our species into all sorts of difficulties. Much of Buddhist practice centers on examining what the self actually is—the self that desires enlightenment; the self that seeks to maintain happiness as a permanent condition; the self that feels it’s missing out on things; the self that wants to fix, alter, or dispel its moods; the self we imagine is seeing, smelling, tasting, and hearing the world we move through.

The Buddha refused to say explicitly whether the self did or did not, or did and did not, exist. When Vacchagotta the wanderer demanded to know whether or not a self existed, the Buddha remained silent. He cautioned all monks to avoid the dispute, explaining to his disciple Ananda that answering either yes or no would reinforce extreme and erroneous views. He refused to answer questions as to whether the self was or was not “real.” He observed, instead, that the universe is perpetually changing, which is to say, impermanent.

The Buddha was more concerned with people clinging to the idea of a self and fixating on a personal identity as a fundamental problem. He employed the idea of “not-self ” as a device that was useful for regarding the “outside” world and acknowledging the vast variety of entities our “self” is attached to and dependent on. Everything we can assert about the self, we can assert about a “not-self” and begin to experience our thoughts and feelings as passing before us on the screen of our awareness, like clouds. We don’t need a fixed self to account for reality.

On some level we know this. We can no longer find the child we used to be. Impermanence remains a truth for moods, feelings, impulses, and sensations, as well as the life span of everything from amoebas to mountain ranges. Lines appear in our faces, mottled areas discolor our skin, as we age and move inevitably toward no-being. Unless we can discover and ground contentment within the kaleidoscopic variety and ceaseless change, with lives, moods, and events ticking on and off multiple times a moment, all our efforts to flee anxiety and discontent will remain estranged from the way the universe operates.

As you read about Buddhism you may encounter the phrase “not one, not two” as a way of describing the relationship between the mind and body. It is a useful concept for regarding relationships in the material world. We understand that mind and body are not identical, but we can’t actually separate them or discern which one is feeding us information, or in control. Our self-awareness exists similarly. On the one hand, there is our familiar array of habits, impulses, memories, likes, dislikes, desires, and anxieties we regard as our personality, or “self.” And on the other hand, our body, and what Buddhists describe as our true self, is not different from the generative energy of the universe itself, ceaselessly expressing itself as forms, feelings, impulses, sensations, and consciousness, and every nameable thing in what we refer to as reality. Like it or not, we have never existed independently of this larger world, so it is not precisely untrue that we have a separate reality; the distortion arises when we consider that is all we are.

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Ordinarily, we perceive our colloquial “I” as our personality. It presents as separate and generally more important than everything else. It would conflict with our experience to pretend otherwise. All humans possess a common sense of the body, its capacities and limits; we are familiar with our seeing, hearing, tasting; and we have some self-image and a narrative about our personal history. Arguing that they don’t exist would be as foolish as arguing that any and all have ever existed separately from oxygen, water, and sunlight. We all have a sense of the exterior boundary of our bodies—whether it’s our flesh or some energy field slightly beyond that. Setting aside certain peak experiences, we usually feel that “I” exists in here and the rest is out there.

This view serves us with efficiency in navigating the material world, as language and naming save us from constant detailed scrutiny of each object entering our awareness. Once we know the word “tree,” we don’t necessarily need more detail unless required by our work. However, language also has a shadow side that demands a tax. That is its hypnotic ability to transform the perceiver (us) into believing we are a separate and independent object from everything that does not have our name. The personality usually responds to this sudden eviction from the universal domain by either suffering fear at its own insignificance against the immensity of the world or seeking to bolster itself with various strategies, amongst which are wealth, fame, status, and political power. Sometimes self-importance (whose evolutionary benefits should be obvious) dominates all our concerns, and narcissism may overvalue our own importance and devalue others’ importance. Some people simply take the self as a given and never question it at all, building up a detailed inventory of what they are and are not. It may be useful, but it is not freedom, and the “are-not” side of that definition often holds treasure of immense value.

Once we identify and name something, we no longer have to consider it as deeply again, so it affords us efficiency and saves energy. We have identified a few essential characteristics of thousands of things and ideas in the same way, and once we have learned the words for them and their references, we rarely consider the named object beyond its superficial distinctions. We do this with our “self” as well, naming, cataloging, and simultaneously concretizing as physical, an assembly of data points—things we have been told about ourselves; things we have inferred about ourselves from the responses of others; habits we’ve made and observed; self-reflections and the like—and from that point onward, we may consider the self a more or less known quantity, possessing the characteristic fixity that might correspond to an organ.

This is like assessing ourselves as a “fact,” observing ourselves from an imagined objective vantage point, as if we were a piece of data and not moving clusters of sensory data, intuitions, memories, experience, and habits (which the ancient Buddhas referred to as skandhas—the impersonal “heaps” of form, feeling, impulse, sensations, and consciousness that constitute a human life). This habitual point of view is compounded by a materialistically oriented culture that so often relies on “facts” deduced by scientific observation. A fact in Philadelphia is the same fact in San Diego, and so we often unconsciously adopt a concept of objectivity as a reliable way of understanding ourselves. We believe the world consists of impersonal objects that can somehow be perceived by an imagined person without prejudices, predilections, opinions, wants, and needs. Welcome to Delusionville, or as I once printed on a gift T-shirt in a glaring violation of Buddhist speech, “Welcome to Dumbf*ckistan.”

Applying such an understanding to ourselves amounts to privileging this hypothetical objectivity over our own intuitions and perceptions of the world. At some point in time, we accumulate enough data about our habits and predilections that we cease further exploration, crystallizing the self into a known entity about which we can say with certainty, “I know myself.” It is at this point that most growth stops. It’s often uttered as a statement of pride and accomplishment, with no recognition of the irony that what is being described is a photograph of moving water and is not the water itself.

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Here is the big picture. Your and my “I” has never been independent of water, sunlight, and oxygen. Our lives have depended on microbes in the soil nourishing the plants and animals we eat. We have also depended equally on pollinating insects and the entire plant and animal kingdoms, which depend in turn on water and sunlight and the Earth’s climate, fixed by gravity into orbit at the optimal distance from the sun. If we were closer to the sun, water would burn off and everything we qualify as living would be gone. If we were farther away, water would freeze, with the identical consequence. The Earth is held in its perfect orbit and distance from the sun by all the gravitational forces of the universe, which, by the way, are also beating our hearts and breathing us. If we need to have faith in something, perhaps that will do.

Yet, with even a brief examination, we can see that we are not and have never been separate from any of this. Everything is simultaneously unique and distinct (sabetsu) and common (byodo). The trick is to be able to see both at once. By extending our awareness (via meditation) to include all of our body we can occasionally end the false dichotomy between body and mind. Extending that to include self and other is another way of describing absolute freedom.

One of the benefits of meditation is the softening and sometimes temporary dissolution of fixed boundaries, including our certainties about who we are. What is the self? Try to find it when you meditate. Try to pin down the source from where your internal speech and bizarre little narrative daydreams arise. Meditating allows the apparent boundaries of distinctions to dissolve and the place from which new thoughts and impulses arise to express itself. When our boundaries are wide open and anything can be included, we really don’t know with certainty who’s sitting on our cushion or who or what is orchestrating our breathing, and surprisingly, it is actually more interesting not to know.

What we believe we know is often largely habit, received information, and perhaps a nonskeptical belief in everything we think. Abandoning the idea of a central controller orchestrating everything, we never know what will happen next—when or where the rabbit will leap from the bush, or when we will be surprised by the next revelation of our identity.

It takes some practice to relax expectations of the future and to keep our awareness in the present moment. This is what we do when we meditate. The Japanese call this shikantaza—just sitting—and mean it to express having no material ideas about advancement or gain but just being willing to “be there,” without expectations. Zazen meditation is not to be confused with seeking to evoke some particular or special state of mind. To pursue the idea that we can always be happy is like willing the clouds never to alter their shapes or the ocean to arrest its ceaseless motion.

Meditating allows the apparent boundaries of distinctions to dissolve and the place from which new thoughts and impulses arise to express itself.

The point is, can we stay upright? Can we remain firm and composed in the face of the peppered winds afflicting us, and what arises within us as a result? Can we resist the entropic forces of gravity, constantly bearing us toward the earth? Can we resist it with the spirit of our posture? Can we maintain our dignity and dedication to helping others and living a meaningful existence? Because attending our lives—the little wavelets on the boiling ocean of emptiness—bobbing along on our exhales, is like learning to surf, with the added insight that our little wavelet has never not been part of the ocean. When we accept the self as an awareness, that simple adjustment offers us a bounty of freedom. If we consider it carefully, it implies that all our known characteristics, obstacles, and impulses, which we might not appreciate about ourselves—shyness, second-guessing, self-doubt, longing, aggression, habits, and learned responses that we duck responsibility for—are not permanently fixed anywhere in our bodies or psyches. The self is not like the fixed armature in a clay sculpture with fixed qualities that we might be tempted to assess as wounded, broken, insufficient, or damaged. These are all learned habits and responses held in place by repetition and belief in a fixed self. We are not inexorably bound to them.

“While mind and body are not the same thing, neither are they separate self-entities” is a phrase that Thich Nhat Hanh coined in his translation of the Heart Sutra. Mind and body are one and two. Suzuki Roshi once said:

When we breathe, our throat is like a revolving door. We inhale, and we exhale. There’s no “I” necessary to that formulation. To say “I am breathing” the “I” is extra. To say “I am walking” the “I” is extra.

To our “I,” every impulse, whim, and desire appear all-important. The “I” identifies with what it thinks and, as a consequence, often believes its mental formulations uncritically. This “I” is not so much the problem as our fixed attachment to it and our fascination with its dramas and narratives. We tend to privilege its perspective over all others, which is why our assessments err so often. Whenever we concentrate solely on the self and its perspectives, we are ignoring the rest of the universe, which remains out of focus, as if we focused on our fingertip held slightly away from our face. The finger is in sharp focus, and everything beyond it is hazy. Our favoring of our own thoughts and beliefs is like this, at the cost of ignorance and delusion.

To be skeptical about who we believe we are is an unusual but useful practice, because when we believe everything we think, moment to moment, without realizing that these thoughts do not require a center, or continuity, we are whipsawed between identities that change value and valence as rapidly as our thoughts themselves.

My “I” more resembles the empty center of a bamboo tube through which impulses, thoughts, and feelings arise as the by-product of mental and physical processes. I have never encountered a homunculus behind my forehead doing my thinking, seeing, and hearing.

Those impulses, thoughts, and feelings are no more, nor no less, mine than my breathing and heartbeat. The underlying emotions are universal—love, anger, jealousy, insecurity, etc. I receive the same quotient of positive and negative thoughts, impulses, sensations, and consciousness as any other human. The content of those thoughts and impulses may be related to my personal history, but all humans experience love, anger, envy, and so forth. Those emotions are universal and related to universal circumstances. Pretending that we are immune to half of them places the world at risk, especially now that many more nations spend sizable fortunes on maintaining their nuclear stockpiles with weapons fifty times more powerful than the bombs that annihilated Hiroshima and burned the shadows of the incinerated into the walls of buildings.

We all know what anger is. We all know what hatred is. We’ve all known people who have hated haters and failed to perceive any irony in that posture. I’ve attended “peace meetings” where people screamed at one another for over an hour. The mind tricks us all the time. One of the positive consequences of accepting that each of us is fully human is that we can accept personal responsibility to monitor our own shadow states and decide what we allow or refuse to let pass our lips or animate our behavior.

Many people want to meditate as an antidote to wherever “ill-being” (Thich Nhat Hanh’s substitution of suffering) afflicts them. We push away uncomfortable feelings about being different, lonely, estranged from others, in search of wellness and happiness, but the universe doesn’t work that way. Our true option as adults is to learn to accept both as expressions of the same miraculous force sustaining us. Meditation helps us to perceive the insubstantial nature of things, including mental images, which makes it easier to observe them without flinching. That is only a half-step away from containing them. It becomes easier to remember that any feeling indicates that we are alive. If we can stop owning them as “ours” (which means attaching them to an idea of self) and suspend our judgment as to whether they are good or bad, our intuitions will guide us toward appropriate responses.

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From Zen in the Vernacular by Peter Coyote © 2024 Inner Traditions. Printed with permission from Inner Traditions International.