Welcome home! Please contact lincoln@icrontic.com if you have any difficulty logging in or using the site. New registrations must be manually approved which may take several days. Can't log in? Try clearing your browser's cookies.
Non-Self and Personality
This is something I cannot figure out.
If there is no me or I - no enduring soul - the self is just an illusion
what accounts for our varying connections to different people?
i dont get how personality fits into this equation...
If there is no me or I - no enduring soul - the self is just an illusion
what accounts for our varying connections to different people?
i dont get how personality fits into this equation...
0
Comments
There is a major difference in what is asserted.
To understand the lack of inherent existence of self one must understand dependent arising.
For instance the personality is the result of past causes/conditions. It's not like there is some entity behind collecting, and waiting for life to be experienced. You are exactly the experience itself. Thus you are complete action of body, speech, and mind always moving always in flow due to causes/conditions.
Thus personalities can apparently exist, yet they are not findable because they don't exist like how we perceive them to (inherent existence thus giving status of is or isn't).
So we can say everything is like an illusion.
Because if we say it is an illusion, well that is a negation, which is basically an affirmation. You can only negate that which you deem as real or was once real.
If we say its real, well then where is it? Things are changing and moving about. Where is the exact essence of everything? And if we're honest and we don't assert and give into our thoughts then we'll come up empty handed.
So really illusion like is the best answer because well things functions and experiences are had. But there is no ground.
But that also means liberation as well for those who can intuit it.
Each moment you are fully yourself and when you are fully yourself then you are intimate with everything.
When you are intimate you recognize the sacredness of life and your life. Then you die fully into this moment, this life.
And each moment you are born and then you die. Nothing is left yet there you are.
So your life as it is in its continual unfolding is the sacred dharma manifesting as a coreless magic trick.
When the heart catches this then the only response is to weep.
I hope this reaches you.
i understand that in theory, but in practice our connections with others are so drastically varied that i find theory and practice out of sync here.
Well I do and a lot of others as well.
Its clearly written in the sutras that there are 2 kind of truth, the conventional everyday and the ultimate truths.
In the conventional, we all exist, otherwise, theres no world. In the ultimate, its only theres no fixed, unchanging independent entity. Each person is everchanging ( look at our cell division, our personalities, our minds) all changes over time. We are shaped by our surroundings, interaction with others, our food, aging, sickness, this is the basis of interdependent origination. The 'no-I, not-self' speak is confusing.
Look at a table, it exist conventionally, the truth ultimately is that its made up of molecules and atoms. Is it correct to say theres no table or it doesnt exist... well only if you're discussing the Dharma, otherwise people might think you need to be institutionalised.
All the major concepts of Buddhism are linked; (Inter)dependent origination, Mind only, impermanence, rebirth, the realms of existence, Karma and whatever else.
It would be an incomplete picture if we discard notions that we have yet to understand, and say this is the 'new' path.
Nope, we must to strive to understand, not discard, the unknown.
Clap the hands nothing there.
Now let us cloak the orange with causes for a tree, blossom and fruit and place the fruit in one hand. Now the conditions are more real because more real orangeness is manifest and clings to the zest. Now which hand is holding the real?
In a similar way the components of being arise. Very real. Experienced as real. What is empty of reality is the ideas of self, experience of imaginary or real, static and certain oranges. All this fuss over nothing . . .
In A.A. we're taught that we can't stay sober purely on self knowledge. Some knowledge is needed, but we need do to do more than just understand our condition at an intellectual level.
I think this 'seeing through the illusion of self' is a bit like that, conceptual understanding only gets us so far.
Gosh I almost sound as if I know what I am talking about. Must cut down on imagining I am Manjushri.
http://www.wildmind.org/mantras/figures/manjushri
Which one of these is this man's true personality?
It's true, what the posters above say, that no-self doesn't mean you don't exist. It means that permanent, unchanging thing we think of as ourself is an illusion. A false appearance. Your personality - the face you present to the world - is dependent on the skandhas that make up your mind all working together in response to your perceptions. You react in some ways like a chamelion to the situation around you and attempt to play the role you've learned.
It's easy to look and act enlightened on a meditation mat. Wait until someone cuts in line in front of you at a checkout counter and see what happens to that enlightened mind.
Really, if we are all in constant flux as the result of an interconnection of causes and condition with all other things, then any idea of "what I am" or "what you are" is bound to have limited usefulness and the potential to cause suffering.
The aggregates themselves, for example, aren't simply descriptions of what constitutes a human being as some people mistakenly think—they're one of the many ways of looking at and dividing up experience that we find throughout the Pali Canon (e.g., aggregates, elements or properties, six sense-media, etc.). But more importantly, they represent the most discernible aspects of our experience on top of which we construct our sense of self in a process of 'I-making' and 'my-making' (e.g., MN 109). The aggregates aren't so much things as activities or processes, which is why in SN 22.79 they're described in verb form, illustrating the element of intention that goes into our experience of suffering via clinging.
The first noble truth states that, in short, the five clinging-aggregate are dukkha (SN 56.11), i.e., it's the clinging in reference to the aggregates that's dukkha, not the aggregates themselves. But what does this really mean? According to the commentaries, dukkha is defined as 'that which is hard to bear,' although 'stress,' 'suffering,' and 'unsatisfactoriness' are the most common English renderings. In MN 9, clinging is defined as: In addition, the Buddha says that the five clinging-aggregates are not-self. He calls them a burden, the taking up of which is "the craving that makes for further becoming" and the casting off of which is "the remainderless fading & cessation, renunciation, relinquishment, release, & letting go of that very craving" (SN 22.22). The way I understand it, becoming (bhava) is a mental process that arises due to the presence of clinging (upadana) in the mind with regard to the five aggregates, and acts as a condition for the birth (jati) of the conceit 'I am,' the self-identification that designates a being (satta).
Looking at it from another angle, there's rarely a moment when the mind isn't clinging to this or that in one or more of the four ways mentioned in MN 11 (i.e., clinging to sensual pleasures, clinging to views, clinging to rules and observances, and clinging to doctrines of self). Our identity jumps from one thing to another, wherever the clinging is strongest. Our sense of self is something that's always in flux, ever-changing from moment to moment in response to various internal and external stimuli; and yet at the same time, we tend to see it as a static thing. It's as if our sense of self desires permanence, but its very nature causes it to change every second. As the Buddha warns in SN 12.61: Change is, of course, a fact of nature. All things are in a perpetual state of change, but the problem is that our sense of self ignores this reality on a certain level. From birth to death, we have the tendency to think that this 'I' remains the same. Now, we might know that some things have changed (e.g., our likes and dislikes, our age, the amount of wrinkles we have, etc.), but we still feel as if we're 'me.' We have the illusion (for lack of a better word) that our identity is who we are, a static entity named [fill in the blank], and we tend to perceive this as being the same throughout our lives.
That said, the conventional use of personality is a function of survival, as well as convenience. However, clinging to our personalities as 'me' or 'mine' is seen as giving continued fuel for becoming, i.e., a mental process of taking on a particular kind of identity that arises out of clinging. Our sense of self — the ephemeral 'I' — is merely a mental imputation, and when we cling to our sense of self as being 'me' or 'mine' in some way, we're clinging to an impermanent representation of something that we've deluded ourselves into thinking is fixed and stable. It becomes a sort of false refuge that's none of these things.
And these attachments, particularly our attachment to views and doctrines of self, keep us rooted in 'perceptions and categories of objectification' that continually assail us and our mental well-being. Thus, with the presence of clinging, the aggregates have the potential to become suffering (i.e., 'difficult to bear') when our sense of self encounters inconstancy. That's why the Buddha taught that whatever is inconstant is stressful, and whatever is stressful is not-self: In order to break down the conceptual idea of self (i.e., that which is satisfactory, permanent, and completely subject to our control) in relation to the various aspects of our experience that we falsely cling to as 'me' or 'mine,' we must essentially take this analytical knowledge, along with a specific set of practices such as meditation, as a stepping stone to what I can only describe as a profound psychological event that radically changes the way the mind relates to experience, opening one up to a state of mind that's said to be unshakable, luminous, and free.
Emptiness is form and form is emptiness . . .
http://buddhism.about.com/od/buddhismglossarye/g/enlightendef.htm
It might just be that the personality has to change and align with the impermanent, become more flexible, open and virtuous . . .
Good gracious, in order to be enlightened, we have to bcome more enlightened. Who would have guessed.
Oh Buddha