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Question about who/what am I?
chanratt
Veteran
Bear with me, this is complicated for me and I have a hard time phrasing my question......
I have listened to Alan Watts and some other Zen teachers raise the question, who are we/I. I guess the koan version would be 'What was your face before your parents were born'. (I think that's right). So their point is, the more we look for the Self, the less we find. We deeper we go the shallower we become. The personality is just a system of memories and a product of our environment, and we can't locate ourselves in the physical body; so who are we?
Well, doesn't science answer this? Aren't we the genetic makeup inherited from our ancestors? A product of who has gone before us? Weren't many of our personality traits (anxious/musical/bad tempered/ hard working/ lazy/ addictive/ funny/ artistic/ etc etc) handed down to us? Am I making sense?
I have listened to Alan Watts and some other Zen teachers raise the question, who are we/I. I guess the koan version would be 'What was your face before your parents were born'. (I think that's right). So their point is, the more we look for the Self, the less we find. We deeper we go the shallower we become. The personality is just a system of memories and a product of our environment, and we can't locate ourselves in the physical body; so who are we?
Well, doesn't science answer this? Aren't we the genetic makeup inherited from our ancestors? A product of who has gone before us? Weren't many of our personality traits (anxious/musical/bad tempered/ hard working/ lazy/ addictive/ funny/ artistic/ etc etc) handed down to us? Am I making sense?
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Comments
Not to raise alarm bells to everyone, in context such as the dhammapada self can be mentioned in Buddhism and I'm just throwing this out there anyhow.
Note: I'm not saying chanratt finds the world as meaningless it's a hypothetical
What are you depends on where the fiction is employed - way way far out a blip in energy exchange, local a human, zoom in a collection of molecular sub-systems, closer I'm led to believe a range of probable collectives...
Of course I have no idea who or what you are... I assume a lot
Buddhism cannot answer the question, "Who am I?"
The only person capable of answering that question is you.
Gone. Poof. Neither here or there.
Maybe this is not your thing.. at least the Zen approach? ... try something else. Why not just focus on examining Dukkha?.. read up on Dukkha.. Investigate Dukkha. stick with that... really. it is very concrete... very scientific even.
This is something to be investigated rather than believed.
So look at your personality traits and habitual patterns - are these fixed, or do they change over time? Are they really you or just activity of the mind? And so on.
Koans are non-intellectual inquiries. They are not to be answered by concepts. It is a pointing device, that when investigated, leads all the way to the direct realization of the Source, resulting in Self-Realization.
I wrote an e-book/e-journal, 'Who am I' detailing my journey and some instructions on the self-inquiry method: http://awakeningtoreality.blogspot.com/2010/12/my-e-booke-journal.html
To me, we are nothing more and nothing less than the entire universe manifesting through form in a process of self realisation. I looked everywhere for me but never found it until I broadened my notion of what I really am... What we truely are.
This form will pass away when the conditions wear out but we are all forms. And if we trace that lineage far back enough we end up at a big bang. Possibly an infinite amount of big bangs.
@ourself, when you looked within at what was there, was it during meditation? I can understand by passing the physical self as that is just a conbination of componenets made up and put together to form a human body that changes from moment to monent, but who are you, what did you find?
I continue to find myself within each passing moment.
A rose is alive... It feels and reacts to its environment but because there is no brain, there is no distinguishing of any kind. The rose is the entire universe. The rose is you and the rose is me. The fine line between the tool and the art.
IMHO.
That's not exactly what is taught in the Two Truths doctrine, but it's an easy point to make how there can be more than one truth.
And rather than read me waffle on about how we exist; when I don't really understand it deeply myself, here's a cracking Ted Talk about the mode in which we exist and it speaks from both a scientific point of view and Buddhism gets a mention too:
http://www.ted.com/talks/julian_baggini_is_there_a_real_you.html
Only you can determine 'who' you are.
She often told me what I was!
I see them both as aspects of the human spiritual condition which is to reach beyond current understanding.
I love Watts also, but he sometimes skips some important Buddhist background that he learned and went right to Zen.
To penetrate "What am I?" in its myriad forms, you need to start with the basic teaching of the skandhas. This teaching then becomes the ground from which the meditation plants the seed of Zen insight.
The Sanskrit word skandha means "heap" or "aggregate." The Buddha taught that an individual is a combination of five aggregates of existence, called the Five Skandhas. These are:
1.Form
2.Sensation and emotions
3.Perception and assigned meaning
4.Mental formations and memory
5.Consciousness
The genetic makeup you mention is the "form" part of the skandhas. Yes, genetics is PART of what you are. Also, activity in your brain and physical body processes influence what you are. But your body is not you. If so, knowing your genetic code would tell me what you are thinking right now.
So if "you" are a series of processes all working together, each importing and influencing the others, then what is the "self" in this. What, exactly, is a man or woman made of? What are you?
And before form, before the body, where was the self? Where were you before you were born? What was your face before you were born, in other words?
Now you have some grounding to chew on the koan.
I do not mean to be snarky or unfreindly.... I'm just wondering what is going on.
And I've only been meditating on and off for less than 2 years. I'm sure I've only been on this site a year and a half (not years!). My questions and confusion before were about meditation. I stopped asking questions about meditation....now I just sit. I don't see how this question is directly related to any of my other questions...then again maybe it is. I dunno. I have an attention problem and took medication for a year, but I don't take anything now . I am trying to focus my mind the natural way, but it's not easy. Sometimes things do register with me but then I forget.
Pointing directly to this moment.
Confidence in this interdependent suchness, which has no essence.
Well we still need to get up and reasonably act as if we are a separate person because I can't just take your car or food off your plate because we are not separate individuals. However finding that line between living as separate and living as the reality of non-separation is kinda tricky huh. We can't take anything too seriously, however we need to take it seriously enough to not act badly or against the 8 fold path.
Answer - Nobody knows, until anybody realizes Nirvana or Self-Realization(in Hinduism) or Ultimate Reality.
I have been studying Buddha's teachings for nearly 8 months now. So my understanding of Buddha's teachings say - everything is a projection of mind.
there is a 'I' but it is not the 'I' as we think in our mind - the real 'I' will be something like plain Buddahood or plain Buddha consciousness as referred in Tibetian Buddhism. Well, how much we think/analyze this question, we will not be able to answer it through our reasoning/analysis. The answer to this question can only be realized through direct experience - which means sitting in meditation, being mindfully aware of the natural breathing with sati and sampajanna, leading to arising of wisdom which will remove the ignorance and will eventually lead us to realize Nirvana or Self-Realization(in Hinduism) or Ultimate Reality, to see the things as they really are, without adding anything to it.
All the above are based on my theoretical understanding, as till now I have not experienced anything with direct experience.
A similar type of discussion is also going on in below thread -
http://newbuddhist.com/discussion/15036/what-kind-of-a-virtual-world-we-are-living-in
if interested, please feel free to go through the above thread too.
But I posted one of my early stories that involves a Buddhist monk and makes an important point here at NewBuddhist, at http://newbuddhist.com/discussion/14373/master-kwang-and-the-hungry-ghost#Item_4
Hope this helps.
http://www.treeleaf.org/
be honest and frank... just say you need support with practice.. it is very open and kosher.
The reason why is that self-view in any form contributes to suffering, In MN 22, for example, the Buddha said that he didn't see "any such supporting (argument) for views [of self] from the reliance on which there would not arise sorrow and lamentation, pain, grief and despair." Futhermore, the Buddha said "Who suffers?" isn't a valid question, and suggests the alternative, "From what as a requisite condition comes suffering" (SN 12.35) in an effort to re-frame these questions in a way that's conducive to liberation, i.e., in terms of dependent co-arising.
I suppose meditating on the question of "Who am I?" can lead to the same realizations and release from suffering; but I think the danger of mistaking certain experiences along the way and latching on to them as 'me' possesses more danger than the Buddha's not-self strategy.
Just my two cents, at any rate.
:bowdown:
I really liked the interpretation of formations as memory, that really opened something up for me.
My lama who is shentong interpretation of emptiness said the skandas were a confused perception of reality. They are used because we can see directly that they are impermanent.
But Buddha said we are NOT the skhandas I believe. He didn't say we were a stream of changing skhandas.
A gelug layperson from the rangtong interpretation said that we transform the skhandas into dharma via transforming them.
form to ethics
feeling to concentration
perception to wisdom
formations to liberation
consciousness to knowledge of liberation
And of course as a TB teaching there are 3 levels to look at the 5 transformations which all involve interbeing-emptiness: hinayana## mayana and tantra.
##not a sectarian intention it just means the shravaka-hearer level which is the view of emptiness that the skhandas are empty of self. Whereas the rangtong interpretation is the prasangika view that all VIEWS are creative prapancha and the realization is non-conceptual non-dual jnanna (not jhana)..
Which one is right? Or can all of them be right, according to our viewpoint? It's still the blind man groping at the elephant. Some of us Buddhists say the skandhas point to emptiness and thus began a two thousand year old debate on what if anything emptiness means when applied to the self.
I'll find the discourse as I read it not long ago in one of Thays books.