Spirituality nuts and bolts
Preface:
Spirituality does not seek pain or struggle explicitly. But when the moment of pain comes, it is accepted along with the person desire to acknowledge the totality of existence. Pain is not to be run away from, nor is it to be endured but not learned from. There should be no goal in struggle, expect no gain from struggle. Explore it as a fact of your aliveness. Approach it only with the will to confront all of life and to investigate its nature. Extreme hardship is not necessary for the development of wisdom, but among the wise you will find none who have not penetrated into it.
Self Image and the Buddhist stance:
As we move about the world and conduct action in it, there is the fact of our first person, subjective perspective about the world, our private world of feeling and sensation. This is a more basic mode of consciousness, similar to perhaps that of animals, whose awareness is a movie like ours, yet with simpler storylines, plots, and motivations.
Humans are endowed, however, with third person image, a “bird’s eye view” of who we are and what we are doing in the world. We use this “self image” to simulate for ourselves the outside perspective on ourselves, to give ourselves an objective view in an attempt to better modulate our actions and responses. It provides us our judgment, our problem solving abilities, our ability to assess the effects our actions have on others. Zen Buddhism calls this the “rational mind”. If you misread Zen, you might think it is telling us to do away with the rational mind altogether. But to be happy requires knowing how to use the rational mind and in what situations.
If you think spiritual practice is just about doing away with rationality and getting to some “pure experience” or “no mind” and feeling emotions purely, you have it only half right. Our ability to step back from ourselves and to see ourselves objectively and our ability to think and rationalize our emotions are crucial for not letting negative emotions take control of our lives in that they allow us an understanding of the situation surrounding our emotion, of how that emotion might be a by product of a perspective about the world that doesn’t serve us. If you just let go of a negative emotion without applying any analysis to it, if you cannot identify the unfulfilled need that led to that emotion, then your perspective might not change and it is bound to come up again. For example, I lied to someone to make myself look good or protect myself and it made me feel badly. If I just let go of that bad feeling, but did not analyze the self cherishing, or the desire to look good in front of others, then what has my meditation accomplished? On the other hand, in meditation, we are taught to observe emotions and let them pass without analyzing or judging them, perhaps by watching the breath. Even still, this practice requires seeing into the nature of the emotion, and not just letting it pass intact. Of course this is ideal, but sometimes you won’t be prepared to see into it’s nature, and the negative emotion will grab of you and spin you around a little bit, or a lot. In that case, all you can do is come back to the breath when you can and hopefully you can do some analysis, and be more prepared next time.
So we recognize that Buddhism is not just about destroying any sense of self or self-image, and it recognizes that there is a reason for the self, that the self can be useful. If you never have any sense of “self” as a Buddhist, you’ve mistaken samadhi for stupidity. Of course much of Buddhism deals with our clinging toward our self-image. We may see ourselves in the mirror and become happy or sad, depending on our judgments towards the image of self we see. We may have just been praised or had an accomplishment and this has given us a glowing, positive image of ourselves. Ideally this feeling will encourage to greater excellence, or it could make us become self satisfied and complacent. We may have been through a failure and this has tainted our image of ourselves. This could either make us want to change and do better, or give up on ourselves.
Its in our habits to play with our self image. We like to dress it up with different looks, clothes, or careers. We like to project it into exotic places and give it exceptional talents. All of this gives us pleasure, and a person new to Buddhism might want to label this as “bad” and “selfish”. The real issue is when thinking like this serves us. When it serves us, it gives us a feeling of possibility, of connection and inspiration. When it doesn’t it is because we cling to these visions and become disappointed and lost without them.
Being truly free is understanding how the notion of “self” is tied to our emotions and using this understanding to best serve our lives. If we tend waver between happy, sad, or neutral in approaching ourselves, it might might adopt an attitude of doubt or questioning towards it. Is my self image really me? I might think I look like this, but am I so convinced that this is what the world sees? What meaning or weight does the image you project carry for the world anyways, and who is out there that really sees it? What control do you really have over your self image? You are a person, you are alive, but is that “you” contained in this self image or are you something larger, and more inexpressible than that?
If we stop identifying ourselves so much, living can flow freely without the hang up of judgments all the time. Certainly, at times things will be unclear and you will need to exercise your judgment. But without the burden of this self-identifaction all the time, our living process can flow naturally and freely, as if there is no possessor.
