non-self

One of the primary teachings of the buddha is that there is no lasting core around which the self revolves; there is no soul which persists and remains as other things change. There is no single thing which you can point to and say ‘that is me’ because everything is in flux; a cross section of energy and matter.

This is the fundamental principle that leads to release of grasping, of craving, of hatred. ‘You can’t take it with you’, as they would say, but this applies to every single aspect of your being from moment to moment, not just to some potential afterlife.

When you touch nibbana you go through a phase of intimately knowing that nothing is constant; everything is change. You cease to cling to these aggregates because you see them for the transient things they are. After that you settle down into a new container but retain the fundamental understanding that this self is always changing and no one part of it can be called ‘you’.

In the buddha’s model there are five components to self: form, feeling, perception, volitional formations and consciousness. In a modern interpretation, memory might make up a sixth aggregate, but in the buddhist tradition it is an interplay of the five.

He states clearly that all five are conditioned things: they are nothing more than a domino in a chain with no identifiable start or end; a chain which flows from the external to the internal and back out again; a cross-section of a river. 

Form (rūpa):

This is your physical body and your five sense organs, as well as interoception. This is also everything you perceive with these five sense organs. These things are always changing, be it fast like a camera flash or slow like the death of a star.

Feeling (vedanā)

Feeling is the hedonic tone that comes from interacting with something through the six sense organs. Positive, neutral or negative.

Perception (saññā)

Perception is where you see a tall brown stick with green things at the top and label it a tree. This is where you divide the electromagnetic spectrum into colours and pressure waves on your eardrums into sounds. This is where your nose detects a molecule and says nice while your mouth detects another and says not.

This is where you look at your body and say ‘me’ despite the fact that it has changed since last time you perceived it, even if only in posture or poise. 

Volitional Formations (saṅkhārā)

Volitional formations are where kamma lives. Some of this is conscious (intention, planning, attention) and some is unconscious and conditioned (emotions, habits and conditioned impulses). 

This is where the rules of your life are stored and why you have some conversations on rails. This is why you float through life unaware if you are too full of learned-behaviours and conditioning; you simply become unable to process reality due to karmic-overload. This is why you fear dark alleys and love the smell of BBQs: one has been conditioned as dangerous and the other as delicious.

This is also where the karmic formation of self takes root, and why the idea of self is, sorry to say, nothing more than a ball of conditioning. This is one reason why you cease to experience a self when you encounter nibbana: your filters are temporarily blown apart by pure reality. The cultivation of which ones return is a major reason for needing an ethical framework before you go in for the show.

Consciousness (viññāṇa)

Consciousness is the spotlight: it is what you are focused on at that point in time. Without an object at a sense door there is no consciousness at that door. There is no sound-consciousness when there is no sound. There is no sight-consciousness if there is no sight. 

Consciousness can be focused or diffuse. You can either cast a net wide to all of your sense organs, as you do in vipassana meditation, or you can hone it to a laser as you do in samatha. This is why people could scream in my face when I was hyperfocused and I would not hear a word: all my consciousness was on a single thing, and nothing else could enter.

Memories straddle perception, consciousness and volitional formation. Your mind-consciousness highlights a volitional formation (an alleyway), which results in a perception (dark), a feeling (scary), and a reinforcement within volitional formation (dark alleys are dangerous).

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Through dividing things like this it is quite easy to point at body and say ‘not me; always changing’. 

You can see how your perception changes as the clouds drift by and how your volitional mind is cultivated or poisoned by the things you feed it. 

You can point your consciousness to each one of these things and see that consciousness is not constant. 

You can become aware that all of these things are not actually under your control in the first place: the body arose because of your mother and father who arose because of theirs. It is sustained by food which is pollenated by bees and fed by the sun. 

You can feel in yourself an initial revulsion toward the idea that you are not a constant being, but then a gradual relaxation into it and eventual liberation from the craving for self. 

It all loops around, ever changing and ever spinning. Through accepting that we are just currents in the water we are better able to live a life of liberation.

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