Dissolving ​​the Separate Self: The Practice of Emptiness [Episode 50]

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

To begin, I want to observe that there are many different ways to look at spiritual awakening. I don’t mean many different interpretations of what it is—there’s that too. Obviously, there are many interpretations of what awakening means. I’m not referring to that, but I’m saying that even within a shared understanding of what awakening is, there are a lot of different vantage points on it, or ways to look at what it is.

Awakening as a Transformation of our Worldview

From one point of view, we could refer to it as a transformation of our worldview or a paradigm shift. Spiritual awakening could be the ultimate paradigm shift—what you take to be real, what you take to be important, what you value, what’s meaningful to you. This is the ultimate worldview transformation that has many different components to it.

Awakening as a Transformation of our Way of Knowing

Spiritual awakening can also be seen as a transformation of our way of knowing—what in philosophy is called epistemology, your way of knowing or how you know. We go from a purely rational way of knowing and open to a much more holistic way of knowing that’s informed by subtle intuition, access to a deeper spiritual wisdom faculty, and collective field knowing. It includes our ability to read collective energy fields and somatic information in our body.

It’s this holistic or integral way of knowing that comes online. It includes rational knowing as well, but it’s not limited by it. It includes emotional knowing, but it’s this very broad holistic knowing that we begin to have.

Awakening as a New Mode of Being

Spiritual awakening can also be seen as a transformation of our way of being or our mode of being. This one is maybe a little more subtle. We begin living our life in an easeful, relaxed, very spontaneous way. We’re not trying to premeditate our actions and not always trying to anticipate and strategize everything. Instead, there’s a much deeper organic flow that we find ourselves a part of. We’re living and dancing in this flow without much fear about outcomes, without a lot of ego agenda driving our behavior.

We’re in a whole different way of being that’s attuned to what we might call the evolutionary imperative of each moment. It’s an attunement to what’s needed in each moment for the greater good of everyone involved, and for the higher potential of what we’re trying to do. There’s a deep attunement that guides our actions, which—as you can hear—is related to our way of knowing, but now it’s how we’re moving and acting and engaging.

Awakening as a Transformation of Motivation

We could also see spiritual awakening as a transformation of our motivation—of what motivates us. Prior to awakening, maybe we were motivated by a lot of our ego ambitions: the things we want for ourselves and are convinced we must have to be happy, and the things we want to avoid because they’re uncomfortable. There’s a whole world of motivations that make up the ordinary human condition.

Then we awaken to this great consciousness, this supreme intelligence, this extraordinary power—this whole different dimension of who we are—and our motivation changes radically. The things that are important to us now have a much higher order.

Many of the things that used to seem like the big, important things in our life are still there, but they’ve gone down the list of priorities quite dramatically because there’s this new priority that’s compelling us. It’s the priority of awakening and deepening, opening and evolving, and aligning with truth and goodness. It’s bringing the extraordinary reality that we’ve discovered into manifestation—bringing it into being and making it visible.

So that higher motivation now supersedes all of our previous motivations. It transcends and includes them, and puts them in their right place in our hierarchy of need.

Awakening as a Transformation of Values

We can also see spiritual awakening as a transformation of values. This is related to motivation because our motives are tied to our values. Prior to awakening, we may have valued certain things tremendously. I want to be careful about specifics here because it’s subtle, but let’s just say that upon awakening, we begin to truly value goodness, truth, beauty, and love in a way that our separate sense of self never could have valued them.

Even if these were values we held, the values of self-preservation, looking good, not rocking the boat, fitting in, and many others that drive our lives fall to the side in the face of this imperative to be an awakened being in the world—to help facilitate more awakening in the world wherever we can.

There are many other ways we could look at how spiritual awakening transforms us and what the transformation is. Each of these is valid and is part of the picture.

The Central Transformation: Awakening As a Shift in Identity

But perhaps the most fundamental or central transformation that occurs in spiritual awakening is what we could call a transformation of identity—a transformation of our very sense of self, of who or what we are.

Prior to awakening, perhaps we took ourselves to be this biological and psychological being. This body and this mind and this inner emotional life that we have, with a certain history of events, life experiences, and stories, with certain traits, capacities, and abilities. I am this person who was born on this date and has lived through these experiences. I have these relationships. This is what I’m good at, what I’m not good at. This is what I’m committed to. This is what I care about. This is what I do for work. This is what I do for fun.

We’ve got our constructed self there.

But upon awakening, we discover—not that that’s false—but that our true nature, who and what we really are, is something far beyond who we thought we were. We discover that we are so much bigger that we can’t really find boundaries for this self we discover ourselves to be. We’re this vast, infinite super-consciousness, this sacred depth that has no end, and that everything, in a sense, is enfolded into who and what we are.

The Dramatic Shift from a Limited to Limitless Self

Again, it doesn’t wipe out that more functional, unique, individual, personal existence. You’re still a person. You still have the same body, the same mind, the same memories, the same history. Your memory doesn’t go away. It doesn’t instantly upend anything. But now that personal existence is suddenly just a unique feature in the vast expanse that you are and that you now start to identify with.

Previously we identified with our body and mind and our history and maybe our abilities. Now we begin to identify with this infinite energy, intelligence, love, consciousness, and power. And we realize, “I’m not that limited self. This great self is who and what I am.”

When I say “this great self,” I want to be cautious about even using the term self to describe our true nature, our deeper being. Historically, it has sometimes been described that way—as the essential self, the authentic self, the absolute self, or the unmanifest self. There are many different attempts to describe our true being or true nature. But it’s also a little tricky to call it a self because, honestly, experientially it doesn’t feel like a self. We don’t experience it as a self in the way we’re used to experiencing ourselves.

Waking Up to Universal Consciousness 

When we awaken, it’s not really like an experience of “me” awakening. It’s not like I’m becoming a better version of myself or discovering new things about myself, as if I am these things and now I’ve uncovered additional aspects of who I am.

It’s more accurately described as a completely different consciousness and beingness and presence waking up in what you thought was your body. And it’s like, “Oh, this is different. This isn’t the me I thought I was.”

It’s not like you feel possessed by some other entity. It definitely has the quality of, This is what’s real. This is who and what I’ve always been. This is my truest nature, my truest being, my truest self. It feels real in that way, but it doesn’t feel like the former you simply took on new attributes or expanded its sense of self.

This is why I say it’s tricky to call it a self. The universal consciousness that wakes up in your body–mind doesn’t really relate to itself as a self, because self is usually the word we use to delineate—to say this is self and that is other. But in the universal self there is no other. There’s only you, and that includes everything.

I’m not going to stop referring to it as a kind of self, but I’m trying to broaden our understanding of what we’re talking about when we speak about consciousness without limits. We’re talking about a person who discovers themselves to be consciousness without limits, and yet still has a body and a mind and an emotional world, but no longer identifies with that. They no longer say, “This is me and that’s not.”

Making Room for the Vastness of Our True Nature

It’s like we’re making room for the truth of who and what we are—for the vast universal dimension to have a home as us, to have a life, to live in this world. And it is who we always were.

But there is a need for radical accommodation on our side. Meaning, we as individuals need to accommodate ourselves to this vastness. There’s a part of us that needs to step aside in order to allow this deeper, truer dimension to truly live as us. To allow our deeper nature to become our true home—or to allow us to become its true home. You can see the language gets tricky here.

The accommodation I’m speaking about is that we have to relinquish the habit of identifying with this mind-constructed self. This concept of self, this image of self, this insistence that I am this separate person. And there is a lot of momentum to that insistence. There is a lot of history to that habit of identifying and of constructing a story of self that we then try to defend and maintain all the time.

We’re always trying to prove to the world, This is who I am.
I’m a good person.
I’m a smart person.
I’m a strong person.
I’m a capable person.
I’m a worthy person.
I’m a likable person.

Whatever it is, there’s the attempt to prove the story of self that we’ve invested in. And we’re not just trying to prove it to everyone else—we’re deeply trying to prove it to ourselves.

Part of how we prove it to ourselves is by getting other people to acknowledge and validate it.
“Yes, you are a smart person. You are a capable person. You are a likable person.”
Right. I knew I was.

And our ego—our identity as a separate self—gets reinforced.

Seeing the Ego’s Mechanism and Releasing Its Grip

Then something happens in life that challenges it. Maybe we do something that’s not so smart, or not so capable, or not so likable. And suddenly it’s like, Oh, maybe I’m not quite who I thought I was.

So the maintenance crew comes in and tries to reconstruct and patch up the self-identity to convince us that we really are that way. Or it may make some modifications.

“Oh, actually you’re likable, but you’re also tough. Yes, that’s it—I’m likable, but tough. That explains what happened. I did something that seemed mean, but really it’s because I’m strong and nice.”

So now you have a slightly modified identity and ego, and now you go about defending and proving that.

Anyone who’s confused about the ego we’re trying to evolve beyond or transcend—that’s it, what I just described in a nutshell. And of course it’s different for each of us. It has different flavors because what we’ve identified with in our lives is different in each case. But you can see that the mechanism is the same. You can see it in other people, and you can see it in yourself.

So if we’re going to make room for this profound, infinite “self” to manifest as us, we have to get out of the way. We have to learn how to let go of that false identity. We have to learn how to deconstruct it, to take it apart so it no longer seems like a solid thing. And we have to gradually shift our allegiance to this greater being and consciousness.

Dissolving the Self: A Contemplation Practice

I want to invite you into a practice. It’s a bit more of a contemplation than a meditation, really more of a reflection.

This is what would traditionally be considered an emptiness practice in Buddhism, but I’ve found it to be a useful preparatory practice for direct awakening meditation.

When Buddhists talk about emptiness, it’s often misunderstood. People sometimes think they’re referring to blackness, or the absence of content, or a kind of void. That’s a complete misunderstanding of what the Mahayana Buddhist idea of emptiness, or shunyata, is pointing to.

The Buddhist idea of emptiness is the insight that things which appear on the surface to be solid, static, tangible, and fixed, and which seem to exist independently of one another, are not actually that way. When we look more deeply, when awakening begins and we start to see what’s really going on, we discover that what seemed like substantial, independent, solid, separate entities or events are not as solid, substantial, separate, or tangible as they appear.

This understanding rests on another Buddhist idea called dependent origination, or dependent co-arising. This is the recognition—an enlightened recognition, something discovered through spiritual awakening, not a philosophical concept—that everything arises together. Nothing is independent. Everything under the sun is an interdependent pattern of occurrences.

It’s sometimes described as the Jewel Net of Indra, a vast web of interrelationships. When we look closely, we cannot actually find a separate thing anywhere. There are many ways to talk about this, think about it, and explore it conceptually, but for our purposes here, we want to bring these reflections into our inquiry into the self.

Like everything else under the sun and beyond the sun, the self we take ourselves to be appears to be a separate entity, and a static one. We have the sense that I am a thing with substance, even if I’m changing or going through processes. There is an “I” that feels solid and separate—separate from other people, separate from the objects I perceive around me. They may impact me, and I may impact them, but I’m still me.

Yet when this sense of self is placed under the scrutiny of awakened inquiry, we begin to see that it isn’t really that way at all. In fact, when I actually look for the self, I can’t find it anywhere. Where is it?

Engaging in this kind of emptiness practice, this kind of inquiry, can help us begin to meditate without holding a fixed sense of self. The meditation we were just doing a few minutes ago can be deepened and supported by a practice like this one.

So I’m going to guide you through it.

The first thing I want you to do is to strongly bring your sense of self into awareness. Invoke your most substantial sense of self. When someone calls your name, or when you think of yourself, there may be an image, a feeling, a picture, or a concept. Bring that fully into awareness.

This is who I am.

Again, I’m not asking you to think about everything you know about yourself. Just tune into that basic sense of self, that sense of me, the separate person living this life.

Now we’re going to scan through the body and see if we can find that separate person, that separate self, somewhere in the body. We’ll start with the feet.

Scan your feet, your ankles, your calves and shins, your thighs. Move through your whole body, bit by bit, looking for the sense of self. Is it in your legs? Is it in your arms? Is it in your head, your stomach, your chest, your back? Where is this self?

Anytime you come upon something that feels like, “Maybe this is it. Maybe it’s here in my heart, in my chest. I feel myself here,” I want to invite you to stop for a moment and look more deeply into that area of the body.

Look closely at what that sense of self in that area is actually made of. If it’s in your chest, notice your heart, your lungs, your ribs, your flesh. Is one of those the self? Or is it the feelings associated with this sense of self you’re noticing physically?

What are those feelings exactly that you’re calling “self”? Is it a feeling of warmth? A feeling of ease or relaxation? A feeling of tightness? Notice all the different sensations that combine to give you the sense that this is yourself here in your chest.

If you feel like you’ve found the self in your head, do the same thing. Observe all the components that make up your head physically: your ears, your eyes, your nose, your mouth, your brain, your skull, the different parts of the brain.

If your experience of self in the head feels less physical and more like a quality of awareness or sensing, notice that as well. Look at what it’s made of. Observe it carefully.

What you’re really doing is seeing whether you can find a self that’s truly separate, truly independent of everything else. Or whether what you find is simply a collection of parts and processes, all arising together.

I’ll give you a moment to explore this on your own now that I’ve described it.

And each time you, in a sense, penetrate through any sense of self and see it as an interdependent process of parts and processes, allow yourself to return to open awareness, without any self. Then look again, and do it again.

Let’s take a minute for you to explore this in your own body, just with the physical body.

Now bring your attention to your body as a whole, not just its individual parts. Look at your whole body all at once. Inwardly ask, Is the self the body?

If it seems like it is, look more deeply. Notice all the different parts of the body and explore what this sense of self in the body is actually made of. See it as an interdependent flow of parts and processes.

Then allow your awareness to return again to open, spacious awareness, without a sense of self.

Now reinvoke the sense of self, that substantial sense of you, whoever you take yourself to be.

This time, look at the mental picture or image you have of yourself. This is different from the felt sense of self. It’s the mental content that makes up who you see yourself as.

When you imagine yourself, that image is usually drawn from memories, from looking in the mirror. Look closely. Is there a self there, or is it simply an image, a picture of your body? An aggregation of many images brought together into one idea of who you are?

See whether that image truly represents a separate, independent self, or whether it’s just an idea, a picture in the mind.

And then allow yourself to rest, open again.

Awareness, with no imposition of self.

Again, I realize it can become harder to keep invoking the sense of self as you continue to deconstruct it, but bring it back once more. This is me. This is my sense of self.

Now turn your attention to the concepts you have about yourself. These include ideas like what you know you’re good at, your profession, the kind of person you are in relationships, the things you stand for in the world, and what you feel committed to. All of the concepts you have about who you are.

If someone asked you to describe yourself, you might say, “I’m this, I’m that. I do this, I do that. I’m passionate about these things. These are my political views.” All of that. This is me.

Now see if you can find a separate, independent self anywhere in those concepts. Or is it simply a collection of ideas coming together to form a self-story, a self-image, a self-concept?

Anywhere you think you’ve found the self in your concepts or thoughts, allow yourself to look more deeply. Break it down into its components, all the individual thoughts and ideas that make up that larger concept.

Having examined these ideas of self and discovered that there isn’t a self living in any one of them, allow yourself to notice again the absence of a separate self. Let your awareness rest in openness and spaciousness.

Now reinvoke your sense of self one last time.

This time, turn your attention to your feelings about yourself, all the emotions and sensations that may contribute to the sense of self. Feelings of tenderness toward the self. Feelings of protectiveness. The simple feeling of being a self.

What do you feel when you feel yourself? Include your felt sense of self as a whole.

Anywhere you find what seems to be a self, look more deeply into it. See what it’s made of. Is it truly a self, or is it a collection of feelings you’ve been grouping together and calling a self?

Is there a self in your feelings, or is there simply a flow of feelings?

Allow yourself to recognize that there is not a solid, separate, independent self, only a system of interdependencies.

Then allow your awareness to relax and open. Let it be free and flowing, without self-fixation, without the need to find or see a self.

Without any fixed sense of self, without any sense of a separate, independent self, allow yourself simply to be as you are. Allow meditation to happen on its own. Allow your experience to flow without referencing it back to a person or a self.

There is just this unfolding moment as it is, one experience flowing into the next. No need to know who is having the experience.

Anytime a sense of self, a concept of self, or an image of self reasserts itself in your meditation, simply look at it directly and gently deconstruct it in the way we’ve just practiced. Ask, What is this self made of?

See through the illusion and recognize that it is simply another experience arising in this moment. It’s not the experiencer of the experience. There is no separate, independent self behind it. It is just part of the flow of what is arising, not separate from anything else.

Let yourself see that.

And now, allow yourself to gently ease out of the meditation.

Thank you.