This week we’re going to finish up looking at the three characteristics which fuel insight practice. Recall in previous emails that I mentioned how we change our relationship with ourselves and the world by provoking insights about the nature of experience, and that we do that by collecting evidence about three aspects of experience: impermanence, suffering/unsatisfactoriness and no-self.
The third aspect of experience is no-self or not-self which can be understood as the self not having inherent existence. While this is the most difficult of the three characteristics to get a handle on without having already achieved an experiential understanding, we’ll sketch it out.
Rob Burbea gives a good description of the typical predicament our mind is in:
We usually feel either that we are the body or the mind (or both), or we feel that they are somehow ours, belonging to the self. Sometimes this normal appropriation by the self is conscious, but most often it is not – it is simply and intuitively felt as part of our experience of things and of ourselves. (Seeing That Frees, pg. 174)
However, this is ultimately revealed to be an illusion. As we develop our understanding through engaging in insight practice on the nature of the self, we come to see that, upon inspection, none of the things we think of us or belonging to us actually are us.
What we feel ourselves to be is just more content happening in space of consciousness. Eventually not even feeling we have a centre to our being can be sustained any longer as that too simply arises as content in experience.
To work toward cultivating insights on the nature of the self there are a number of techniques we can employ. This week we’ll practice one way of disidentifying with experience, using it to moving from the body, to emotion, to thought, to the core of our being.