If There Is No Self, Who Is Born, Who Dies, Who Meditates?
ONE OF THE MOST PUZZLING aspects of the Buddha's teachings is the idea of no self. If there's no self, who gets angry, who falls in love, who makes effort, who has memories or gets reborn? What does it mean to say there is no self? Sometimes people are afraid of this idea, imagining themselves suddenly disappearing in a cloud of smoke, like a magician's trick.
We can understand no-self in several ways. The Buddha described what we call "self" as a collection of aggregates—elements of mind and body—that function interdependently, creating the appearance of woman or man. We then identify with that image or appearance, taking it to be “I” or "mine," imagining it to have some inherent self-existence. For example, we get up in the morning, look in the mirror, recognize the reflection, and think, "Yes, that's me again." We then add all kinds of concepts to this sense of self: I'm a woman or man, I’m a certain age, I'm a happy or unhappy person—the list goes on and on.
When we examine our experience, though, we see that there is not some core being to whom experience refers; rather it is simply "empty phenomena rolling on." Experience is "empty" in the sense that there is no one behind the arising and changing phenomena to whom they happen. A rainbow is a good example of this. We go outside after a rainstorm and feel that moment of delight if a rainbow appears in the sky. Mostly, we simply enjoy the sight without investigating the real nature of what is happening. But when we look more deeply, it becomes clear that there is no "thing" called "rainbow" apart from the particular conditions of air and moisture and light.
Each one of us is like that rainbow—an appearance, a magical display, arising out of the various elements of mind and body. So when anger arises, or sorrow or love or joy, it is just anger angering, sorrow sorrowing, love loving, joy joying. Different feelings arise and pass, each simply expressing its own nature. The problem arises when we identify with these feelings, or thoughts, or sensations as being self or as belonging to "me": I’m angry, I'm sad. By collapsing into the identification with these experiences, we contract energetically into a prison of self and separation.
As an experiment in awareness, the next time you feel identified with a strong emotion, or reaction, or judgment, leave the storyline and trace the physical sensation back to the energetic contraction, often felt at the heart center. It might be a sensation of tightness or pressure in the center of the chest. Then relax the heart, simply allowing the feelings and sensations to be there. Open to the space in which everything is happening. In that moment, the sense of separation disappears, and the union of lovingkindness and emptiness becomes clear. We see that there is no one there to be apart. As the Chinese poet Li Po wrote: "We sit together the mountain and me/ Until only the mountain remains."
Isn't self conciousness? If someone else's hand is cut off,I don't feel pain,but if mine is,I feel pain. Because my conciousness pervades in this body not that?
The arising of a self consciousness or awareness is a continual happening during our waking hours. It accompanies the arising at all time when there is bodily actions, or of speech or of mental activities in us. All these senses and mental activities are actually disjointed moment to moment consciousness arising dependant on what our mind and senses detect in the course of our day’s activities. But because they arise in such close proximity and quickness to each other, the self awareness in us, which is a function of the 7th consciousness, the Mind, in the Mahayanist literature, perceived them as one permanent entity existing in itself.
It is this wrong perception that there is a permanent self, the ‘I’ in us that the Buddha is telling us to discard. It is this ignorance of our existence that is the cause of our clinging, for greed and hatred to develop leading to the cause of suffering.
Hi
Is there a time betweent hese arisings in mind and other external phenomena?If we super slowed all this could it be visible somehow?
According to the Buddhist logicians, when our sense organs first make contact with an external object, consciousness arises. That is considered the first moment in our perception. At this stage, we ‘saw’, but we still do not know what the object is.
The 2nd moment is just one moment that links the consciousness of the external object perceived, to the internal 3rd moment. The 3rd and subsequence moments occurs when the mind starts to draw from the 8th consciousness, construct and identify what is perceived. This store house consciousness is where the seeds from our previous actions in this and previous lives are stored.
This is why to the Mahayanists the external world is an illusion. This is because what we sensed with our organs recognized, an eventually named is a construction of the Mind based on what each individual have stored in the 8th consciousness.
In the Theravada tradition, according to the Abhidhamma, One cognitive process alone is made up of 17 mind moments.
How much is a mind moment in our time in milli seconds or so?
According to the Abhidhamma, a mind moment is of such brief duration that in the time it takes for the eyes to blink, millions of mind moments could have elapse.