Happy With My Self, But Blissed Without
There is a Jewish joke, which I hope I get right and don’t offend anybody. “I’m not Jewish, I’m Jew-ish.” It plays wonderfully with identity and religion, and how we find our place. Neither associating fully as Jewish, nor declaring one to have no cultural or religious association with the collective past. None of us are the implied perfection of an identified person. We don’t fit a mould, we are an approximation.
Maybe this joke can extend to any identification, opening and expanding around the sticky and small. Maybe even with that tricky inclination to be selfish can morph into self-ish. We don’t have to be so obsessed about ‘our’ self, where it is going, and what we can do for its unstable desire for existence. But nor do we have to abandon our sense of self.
We’re going to navigate the confusable waters of self, identity, persona, and sense of self. These are not the same thing. To muddle our clarity at the start: a self view that has low self-esteem, actually has a strong sense of self. The not-good-enough ’weakness’ aspect of our persona is strongly identified with.
- A self would be something that aggregates a collection of disparate things within a whole entity. (The existence of such an entity is deeply questionable, I’ve never seen one.)
- An identity would be the characteristics of a person or thing.
- A persona is the act or presentation of being a person.
- And our sense of self is who we feel ourselves to be.
What is interesting about all of these is that they are made-up and they change. That is to say they depend on changing things from which they are fabricated. In Buddhist language they are empty of inherent existence; they don’t stand up from their own side; they lean. This implies we can play with them, and that’s what we’re going to do.
We have a strong inclination to identify with the body-mind experience. ‘Our’ thoughts and feelings feel particularly ‘ours’. And ‘our’ body seems to be where our sense of self lives. This is worth examining.
If left to the default setting of selfhood we can be led into acting in ways that do not serve us. We often do things with more effort and vigour when our sense of self demands it: “I must get this, or get rid of that, to be happy!” Yet in actuality we can notice that the sense of self being most quiet correlates perfectly with the moments of most happiness: friendship, ease, love, laughter all arise with a lessened sense of self (importance). Thereby we might wonder if getting a quieter and less-active sense of self, is what a healthy self should seek for an otherwise elusive happiness.
In Buddhism there is a core ‘Not-Self’ teaching that sounds like a declaration of the non-existence of a self. If that were so it would imply one could not have a self. This further implies that the one who does not have a self, would also have no reference by which to know that no-self reality. But when one looks a little further it actually unfolds that the ‘emptiness’ of self is allowing a certain self-ishness (if we extend the joke from above).
The Buddha actually was profoundly clear that the self can neither be said to exist nor to not exist. This is the ‘real’ meaning of emptiness; and the essence of what was taught as a middle way between extremes. Yet one has to be exquisitely clear that this really is not taking any side.
I love to share emptiness teachings as they can be some of the most beautiful ways to encounter something beyond our intellect. But always there will be someone verbally countering, “But…” And what follows will be some taking of a side. It is hard to become comfortable where there is no ‘where’ to land. Yet it is possible, and it feels great.
This great, open, loving feeling of emptiness is not something one finds in the alternate conditions of nihilism or selfishness. To land on the first comes from overshooting and on the latter from overlooking.
Nihilism or hopelessness is not a helpful view for cultivating a sense of wellbeing. It also doesn’t make logical sense. Why would anyone decide that there is nothing through a reasoning that can only display there is not a something like we imagine? There is no ground for overshooting, but overshoot we can easily do.
Likewise with selfishness, we are preprogrammed to overlook the absence of any substantiality to this route towards happiness. Where does the desire of feeding oneself before others come from? And where does any sense of wellbeing land? We can’t find it. Also once we get a little more wise we also see this does not lead to my happiness nor to the happiness of others.
The Not-Self teachings are offered not as a proof or a truth to believe, but as a strategy to extricate ourselves from the burden of landing somewhere. For finally it isn’t even that we should find something which is not fabricated nor changing to plant a sense of self upon, but to have a non-clinging relationship to all things.
Recently for the benefit of a friend we were rummaging through our memories of the past. Back in these memories we were hanging around a teacher (Ajay Singh) who later proved to be untrustworthy and seems to be able to act painfully selfishly. You can read about it at SanghaSeva’s site. But what jumped out of this memory lane was how common it was to find our peers in our spiritual community acting selfishly. The lack of compassion and care between us feels stark enough to have been a wake up call to our community that we were missing something in the teachings of how to be refined and awakened human beings. But rather than waking up to our unskillfulness we seemed to have accepted selfishness as part of what people were like.
“In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
I rather disagree with our tolerance. I think a sign of real friendship is to gently challenge each other when we fall off the middle way. Perhaps an act of apparent selfishness is as much a cry for help as an act of apparent self-harm. With compassion for them we should name it, and inquire into what’s going on.
Since we heard about (the teacher I mentioned above) Ajay Singh’s unethical behaviour we have shared anonymised details of his harmful actions. We have tried to explain to Ajay the error of his ways, and help him act better. Failing this we have, with the best of intentions, tried to make the information known to people of what sexually inappropriate behaviour and financial deception Ajay has done.
I wish we were able to garner more support in our old community to open around an identification with a teacher. For then we’d be more able to protect more innocent people from coming to harm. We need to be sternly clear with people like Ajay that he won’t receive our support (far less any of our adoration) until they have apologised and changed their ways (in his case returned the money he has taken). Disappointingly this hasn’t happened in Ajay’s case.
Just as with emptiness teachings it is hard to extricate oneself and not impulsively implicate oneself with something else. This difficulty can lead to inaction, as we tend to believe that inaction is not a type of action. But it too is a landing point, it is a taking of a side.
How then do these apparently wonderful teachings of emptiness help us in a world of inequality and hurt?
I don’t believe we’re looking for a firm place to stand, for if we were I don’t think we’d find it. What seems more relevant is to gravitate gently towards the truth that ends dukkha; distress and stress. For this we need to come away from any inclination towards nihilism (it doesn’t matter) nor selfishness (but how does this affect me?).
Obviously it makes sense to challenge each other for any acts of selfishness or harm the perpetrator cannot see. But it doesn’t make us special; seeing another’s blindspots is much easier than seeing our own. We need to remain humble. We all have blindspots, that is human nature, therefore, no matter who we are, we need each other, so we can collectively draw each other out of our delusions.
A deeper lighter sense of self, is what meaningful existence points towards. We can all find examples of the opposite. Neither nihilism nor selfishness make sense. The self (idea) is empty of self (existing reality). In this emptiness we have the possibility to hold the sense of self playfully, and live for the benefit of all.
When you next feel the urge to be selfish, open a little wider and just be self-ish.
