I was back at Bear Creek the other day (not that you can go back & step in the same river twice), and it was occurring to me that it never ever stops flowing. It is relentless. I’m no geologist but presumably it has already flown long enough to carve out Bear Creek Canyon, which, trust me, is enormous. Millions of years?
Where have you been all these millions of years?! Je Tsongkhapa said that our body is like a water bubble, which “decays and dies so very quickly”. Each of our previous lifetimes has been like one bubble after another popping up from an ever flowing mental continuum that has no beginning and no end. Each bubble-life so fragile and fleeting, yet seeming to be the sum total of our existence while we are still in it.
Even the longest bubble-life is nothing compared with the beginningless and endless flow of the river. As Venerable Geshe-la says in Introduction to Buddhism:
The continuum of the very subtle mind has no beginning and no end. It is this mind that goes from one life to the next, and if it is completely purified by training in meditation, it is this mind that will eventually transform into the omniscient mind of a Buddha.
This deepest level of our mind is not even human, if you think about it. This bubble-like life we’re having at the moment is human. We have had countless bubble-like lives in all six realms of samsara. And, as Venerable Geshe-la explains, this very subtle mind can transform into the mind of an enlightened being. We just need to practice the stages of the path of Sutra and Tantra.
A precious human life
Given the uncountable number of bubble-like lives, what are the odds of finding Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha in any one of them? Pretty slim, it would seem to me. Our Spiritual Guide can help us to identify ourselves correctly for possibly the first time ever, or at least in a very long time (and perhaps we weren’t listening last time). He is revealing to us how we are not a bubble, but that it is closer to the truth to identify ourselves with our very subtle mind, the river itself, the river which can then flow into the vast ocean of omniscient bliss and emptiness. We are absurdly lucky right now, we won the karmic lotto; but this luck is as fleeting as this life, especially if we don’t recognize or use it.
Who are we, really?
I saw this quote by Maya Angelou the other day:
When you know who you are, nothing can stop you from being that person.
It strikes me that this can be understood two ways. From the point of view of ignorance, we buy into our own self-grasping thoughts about who we are and get very stuck. From the point of view of wisdom, we understand that there is nothing fixed about us in the slightest, and we can identify with being a person bound for liberation and enlightenment.
The reason we can’t make ourself very happy at the moment is that the self we are trying to make happy doesn’t exist. It is created by our self-grasping mind; it exists only for our self-grasping mind. How does this happen? Some version of a me/self/I appears in dependence upon parts of our body and mind and we believe that it’s really there, existing from its own side. For example, some feeling of anxiety appears in our mind, we identify that as “me”, and now we are thinking, “I am anxious.”
Conceptual thought is merely labelling or imputing “me” onto the anxiety, but (due to the imprints of self-grasping) this me appears to exist all on its own, from its own side, far more concrete than mere conceptual imputation or label; and self-grasping believes this appearance. However, if we go looking for that self in our feeling of anxiety or anywhere else (try to find it behind the mere label as it were), it will disappear, as explained here: meditating on the emptiness of our self. Like Buddha said, that real self doesn’t exist. It is all made up.
The little voice in our head
It is not that made-up self that is doing the thinking or talking or working or walking. In fact, that inherently existent self isn’t doing anything at all. How can it, if it doesn’t exist? It is only our self-cherishing and its deluded thoughts that swirl around this mental image, trying to serve and protect it in some way: “How can I make myself feel better? How can I distract myself? Who can I text about this? What can I drink?”
Thinking about our dreams can help us to understand this. We know that the places, enjoyments, and other people we see in our dreams are mere appearances of mind, created by our dreaming mind. None of them exists outside the mind. For example, if we wake up from the dream of an elephant he is not sitting at the end of our bed. He has been replaced by the objects of our now awake mind, such as coffee.
So, a question for you … when you are dreaming, who is doing the dreaming? Is it the self in your dream, the person who is wandering around?! No, it’s not, is it? That dream person is as much dreamt up by the dreaming mind as the elephant or anything else in your dream, and will disappear as completely and irrevocably upon awakening. The dream you has been replaced by the waking you, dreamed up or created by your waking mind. This in itself tells a huge amount about the true nature of the self.
For one thing, it shows that we are perfectly capable of dreaming up an entire self – we do it every night. We dream up a dream persona, a dream version of our self that wanders around and has adventures and runs away from things, and we believe “This is me” the whole way through the dream – “Me, me, me” – just like we are doing right now. “This is really me, and the world revolves around me. This me is real and solid and objective and true. This is the most important me. If it meets anyone else in the dream, they are definitely not as important as this me.” We have this whole drama going on around with this me in center stage, as always, and everyone else a bit player in our drama. And we believe it totally during the dream, “Me, me me, I, I, I, mine, mine mine.” Yet upon waking we can see that the whole thing was dreamt up – the whole me and its whole world was dreamt up – and it never existed outside of the mind.
And the same exact thing applies to this waking self that we’re relating to at the moment with our waking mind. We can prove this by looking for it outside the mind.
The mind is like a projector – that’s what it does, it projects things. Our self-grasping then believes that those things are actually happening outside of the mind, which is akin to believing that the images on a movie screen exist from their own side. And another question for you, when we are dreaming, our mind is clearly functioning like a projector. When we wake up, why would our mind suddenly change from a projector to a camera?
No one can see this I or me because it is just the creation of our own mind. For lifetime after lifetime we have all been inhabiting one painful private universe after another, with this strong feeling of I or me right in its center – everyone else an actor in our drama, at best. Take the Berons for example – it doubtless all felt so real, here, in the Canyon, but none of it ever was, despite the photographs to “prove” they were here. I was wondering, where are they now, which version of self are they thinking about now, which body and mind is it imputed upon?
We non-liberated beings are all doing this, thinking about ourself all day long – trying and failing to serve and protect a self that doesn’t even exist, trying and failing to make it happy and free from pain. We keep doing this life after life and it is a fool’s game, “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
If this is true (which I think you’ll find it is), it means that whenever we are serving/protecting/working for a real important me, we are not in alignment with reality and are in fact moving further away from our goal of freedom and happiness. And whenever we are serving/protecting/working for others, we are in alignment with reality, moving closer and closer to what we have wanted all along.
We all equally don’t exist outside of thought
To increase our ability to care for others, we can contemplate how we are equal to others in wishing to be happy and free from suffering, in all being “Me”, and in other ways taught by Buddha – coming to understand that we are no different to anyone else, let alone any better.
And one powerful way to meditate on our equality is to understand how we are all equally imputed by mind, equally empty of existing from our own side, equally dream-like. None of us can liberate our made-up or fake self, much less attain enlightenment with it. I have to drop it by learning how to drop my self-grasping and self-cherishing through Dharma, and then help everyone else to do the same.
I am going to leave you now with a real treat, a jewel of a teaching about equalizing self and others from my Spiritual Guide, the fully qualified Buddhist master Venerable Geshe Kelsang Gyatso.
5 Comments
Thank you for sharing your knowledge.
I have a better understanding of emptiness after reading this post. Thank you for sharing your knowledge.
The Video Of Geshe-la Teaching At The End Of Your Article, Is The Cheery On Top, Particular For People In A Relationship…
Thank You Very Much For This Post Luna 👌
Brilliant article. Thanks for sharing
Glad you like it 🙂