Gil Fronsdal: Lowering the Flag of Self

so good evening and can you hear me all right volume good so today I am said someone told me a little story or an incident that teaching that someone discovered for themselves or maybe they were told and it was that the person had trouble with self trust and distrust for themselves or distrust for the world noise the person had this you have distrust and to counter it thought that what was necessary was to cultivate trust so how do you do that in what area of life do you develop trust where do you develop trust one of the steps for developing trust all kinds of things and then one day the person discovered that they there was no need to develop trust all the person had to do was to stop distrusting so the point of the story is that the story is that sometimes we set up these dichotomies dualities we have something that we think is undesirable and we think the opposite has to be there and sometimes is an easier way and the easier way here was the suffering came from the distrust it didn't have to be replaced with trust in this circumstance was enough to let go of the distrust distrust here was an activity of the mind and there was an activity of the mind maybe which was not needed to cultivate trust seems like a good thing to do it seems like a logical thing to do but it comes along with complications of various types maybe it's just easier to stop this trusting so there are people for whom there's a lot of self-criticism a lot of even self-hate and so some people think well the solution is to have acceptance to accept myself and there's something logic to the logic to that and and so they work on acceptance and that can be sometimes may be easily done and sometimes it's challenging to do it and but maybe if there isn't an inter stop suffering if there isn't the need to accept oneself all we have to do is let go of the self ain't the self hate is an it is an activity we don't have to swing the pendulum to the other side and one of one of the difficulties of swinging to the opposite is what comes with us is the idea of self self hating there's a self and it's sometimes it feels like that and and then there's self acceptance and the self is right there and what might happen then is a reinforcement of some idea of self that might not be might itself be a source of suffering or challenge and they found that in 40 and raising kids now there used to be a whole movement in the schools and other places of developing cultivating encouraging self esteem in children and the people who cursed came up with this idea are now a little bit horrified at what's the result has been and and so you know logically it seems like there's a logic to develop it if there's a lot of low self-esteem but what's happened with the self-esteem movement in certain circles is now these kids feel feel deserving they feel like they well they I have self-esteem I'm great then wonderful and I don't have to work at anything I think should come easily to me and apparently there's a you know little generation or sub generation of kids that they've seen when they come into college they have some trouble because of they've gone through too much to the self-esteem thing so certainly a poor self-esteem should be overcome but maybe it doesn't have to be overcome by high esteem maybe it just has to be overcome by not having poor esteem so but but is it enough is it ok just to you know not have you know not you know just student stopped mistrusting is it enough just to stop hating oneself is enough just to stop having poor esteem yeah you know there's to be it's something so in people when people do mindfulness practice this sometimes the same challenge arises when because mindfulness practice the way it's generally taught it's a it's a personal practice you know it's like what you do with your own mind you pay attention to your body the physical sensations here you pay attention to the reactions of your mind and and you're told if you can cultivate mindfulness and non-reactive attention then you can manage much better at work into challenging situations with stress and so we're learning you learn just to manage by tracking your what's going on here this can be very wise and certainly I teach this sometimes but if what the message someone hears or what's passed on is that the self you the self it's going to learn these skills at self management learn skills of self cultivation learn skills of you know self monitoring and self development and kind of be able to be in charge of your life be the agent who's going to negotiate and manage and it's up to you to figure out how to go through difficult situations maybe difficult situations at work that no one should go through but you've learned mindfulness and so you were able to stay relaxed and remember to breathe and and even though work is basically an oppressive environment and and people are expecting you to work 14 hours a day and you know you can you learn to relax you learn to breathe that you've learned to recognize how tension arises and and so you become a wonderful support maybe for the capitalist system by having cultivated this wonderful mindfulness isn't that nice we have stress-free capitalists and that's wonderful but we're still left with capitalists which has its has its benefits and has its downside but from a Buddhist analysis that because of concern is not necessarily with capitalism but one of the concerns is with itself that's developing and sometimes this practice can actually support - certainly narcissism in people and and so you know so you have people feel like I have to Martha deal with this so so in Buddhism there's a very interesting teaching around this whole idea of self gar conceit Buddhism teaches that there's a problem with having what being English would call conceit which in Buddhism is comment' hai conceit the conceit that your special are better than others and most of people in this kind of scene here world will agree it so somehow that me too much conceit to much arrogance and feeling is special and you lord over people is a problem and people sometimes I want to spend time with people like that it's uncomfortable and but the Buddhist analysis is that says there's a different kind of conceit then they kind of being better than others there's a conceit of feeling you're worse than others inferior to others and Buddhism considers that a form of conceit too because it is a conceiving of self it's a way of thinking of oneself holding on to an idea I'm this kind of person who is unworthy lower than everybody else and and and that's a way of being trapped in the suffering of self that can be as bad maybe worse then sometimes the trapped in the high conceit trap that's also kind of suffering but this gets more interesting in the Buddhist analysis Buddhism also says there's a kind of suffering that comes if you think of yourself as equal to others oh what's left you know and then now nowadays Buddhists are getting you know now it's not making any sense right I mean you know you kind of along with this gonna be better than others something where so there's but you know we should all be considered as equal to each others and that's the ideal to be equal it's a certain degree it's true there's a kind of truth that I want to kind of knock the idea completely but it's very easy for that to be more of the self game I am here you are there and we are equal and now there's a different kind of conceit the conceit of holding on to a view an idea of who I am in relationship to other people and the view is that we equal and in a certain situation that's a problem for sure the I would be in big trouble if I decided that I was equal in certain ways to my 15 year old son and decide that since we're equal I should also be able to pole-vault 10 feet and I probably you know break my back or something if I tried that but he seems to go over just fine so you know ways in which we're not equal and so there's ways in which many ways there's certain ways which were not equal because you have different abilities different capacities we're all equal so I'm just equal to the local physician and if you need surgery you come to me either so maybe this examples I'm giving a little bit silly but the Buddhists think of Buddhism points that is the problems that come with excessive adherence attachment to the notion of self or self identities how we would represent ourselves how we believe what we are and and that sometimes the alternative is simply not to play the game of self not to be involved so where there's three kinds of conceit the alternative to being better worse or equal is not to compare and are there times where it's actually helpful not to be comparing oneself to others or comparing others to oneself but rather just meeting people fully and openly and clearly and kindly without establishing any kind of hierarchy including equal just here as people and and so in Buddhism there's this teaching on that's very perplexing for many people that sometimes call the teaching of not self sometimes no self and and people are kind of get kind of sometimes quite perplexed but there's two ways of looking at the Buddhist Buddhist teachings around self one is philosophically and one is psychologically philosophically that's where people get into a quagmire of concerns but is there a self is there's no self there's no self I can that be what's the existential true reality of the self and that's a kind of more philosophical to kind of sort through the Buddhist approach this whole thing of self even though it might seem like Buddhism takes a stance on this the Buddhist approach is more psychological in the sense that it's trying to understand the psychological forces and conditions in the mind and what's actually going on here and if you turn the mindfulness to look at what's happening in the mind it can reinforce a sense that I'm in charge I'm the one who's doing looking especially if teachers are the teachings are told be the observer watch your experience be the watcher you're in charge and all that but if the it's possible to have a tension awareness without the activity or the idea of there being an observer to the watching they're just watching and if the attention turns inward to feel and sense what's here then if you're paying attention in the right direction you can feel the suffering the contraction the tightness the wind drag the limitation that comes from being caught up holding on to identity self identity that I'm this way or I'm supposed to be this way or I'm gonna prove myself or I'm gonna apologize for myself I'm gonna defend myself or I need to be this so I shouldn't be this way I can't you know this is I'm an embarrassment to humankind you know all these all these kinds of ideas and thoughts that are kind of a sometimes a whole constellation of thoughts and ideas some culturally learned from our society and family some developed their life experience them through I know where it comes from but we latch onto these ideas and if you're paying attention to this you can feel how the the actual movement of clinging or attachment that's aught that's operating in there so rather than questioning it philosophically the Buddhist quest is questioning should I be clinging should I be holding on should I be contracted around this thing and it gets quite subtle as the meditation practice gets deeper and deeper so them coarser aspect of this is when we say I am and you fill in the blank so I am you know a plumber so then I got to be a plumber and I'm the good plumber and you should know that I'm the best plumber in Redwood City and and I got to prove it to you and and that's why I have the good plumbing truck whatever you know all this stuff you know that the plumber plumber plumber is kind of like my identity so so the more preoccupied I am with this identity the more I can feel the toll it takes on the inner life it takes a work to happen and hold on to an identity too strongly or and insist on it and assert it and defend it and all the different things and so and so what as we start seeing the toll and the impact inside then sometimes we can drop I am X just I am so that's nice and some people then champion how wonderful it is to just in just you know be ending as the mind gets quieter even that they have I that's part of him it's just too much the sense that even that there's no identity there's no one's up building up a structure of identity around it just I am and I had a wonderful story of many years ago of visiting a friend whose young daughter was I don't know she was just maybe just shy of 2 or something and she was just beginning to speak she had a few words talked a little bit and and I point to the different people in the room and say who is that daddy who's that mommy who is that like one of different people she knew and she named them and then I pointed to her and said who's that and she said I am and I thought that was nice so but I you know wasn't the answer I wanted so I asked again but who are you and she said a little bit more forcefully I am so I was slow to catch on so I asked a third time and she raised herself up kind of strong and upright a little bit indignant said I am okay and for the moment she was my teacher so I thought that was wonderful but there was a kind of assertion there he turns out that even a little bit sense of I and the Emnes is extra it's an extra activity of the mind and then I came to that - little pieces of pressure or stress or tension it gets even more subtle even the sense of M Ness is too much and if the mind is really quiet and still even the Glitter electeds because I sell any kind of sense like that is little activity little movements little doing of the mind and even that can you put down and generally they say that when that goes put down as well that then mind has an experience of freedom of mind which is not defined by anything or trying to do something or be something and this is one of the things that the Buddha was pointing to was the ability to be alive clear present engaged in the world without having a definition for oneself without limited limiting it oneself by a definition missus what I am and the Buddha himself was very reluctant to maybe reluctance out the right word but he wasn't inclined to be put into a category of ordinary definitions of who he is and the most common way the Buddha referred to himself was not by his given name and not by the title Buddha just a title but he referred to himself in this which would be probably just as strange in ancient India as it would be if I said that to you who are you and I said the one who is thus it was like you come up to someone say you know who are you and they say like so yeah you know that's not the definition it's like this just like so like like such the word is that ha ha thus just us and so that's about pretty minimal in terms of getting any information about someone but maybe there's something profound to not be defined to not be limited by a name by a word by a role by a concept by anything and so if Buddhist practice mindfulness practice takes us in this direction then it becomes the antidote to conceit and then the Buddhist practice doesn't lead to a certain narcissism doesn't add to the conceit that I'm in charge I have to do things and it's a kind of a little bit of a tyranny tyranny to learn these kinds of Buddhist mindfulness teachings and now think that your whole happiness your whole well-being is all dependent on you monitoring yourself and noticing where you're attached and letting go I mean that's a big responsibility so here's you know the alternative I don't know if I can do this effectively but maybe you'll let me try if I'm trying if I try to walk maybe along Highway 1 the coast here to San Francisco with a very very very big flag and generally let's say on the coast here there's usually generally gale force winds but there's pretty strong but I have this flag and so I'm holding on to this flag and the wind blows and and then there's people who don't like the flag and they're yelling at me and there's people who like the flag and they stand in my way with my autograph and I can't get going so the wind is blowing in it and the people who hate me that people who love me and and sometimes they're fighting and they get in the way of me walking up to San Francisco and just and so I'm just I'm trying to get a San Francisco but so and then my flag starts ripping in the gale winds so I go back to town and get another one and I had to start over again all the time it's just complicated this world with this flag so Buddhism sometimes likens conceit identity this attachment to self to waving a flag and possibility is put the flag down if you put the flag down the winds not going if it's a big issue you can walk put the bit down to the flag down the people who like and dislike that flag are not going to be caught up in it so much so I'm not sure these examples are the best ones to use given what goes on in our society but but I think that the principle is that if you hold up sometimes when things happen to us and we're holding up a strong sense of self if things happen in the world they'd come to us and they hit that flag hit that holding up so if I need to be the best plumber in Redwood City and my whole self esteem and place in town and status and everything's depending on that good items a plumber then someone comes along and does a yelp review of me that is not so good well that yelp review just comes and hits inside of me that place of self what happens if I'm not trying to be the best plumber and someone says something about my poor plumber I am it just goes right through or they tell me you are the best plumber in Redwood City it just goes right through it doesn't hit the place it doesn't get doesn't there's no place where it gets stuck so rather than self-improvement and certainly my Buddhism is about dropping the flag now does that make us nobody does that make us kind of uninteresting doesn't make it impossible for us to take care of ourselves are we now here's the pushover for what goes on in the world and are we not you know supposed to assert ourselves or being in the world in any kind of way is economic were just like you know we're just you know empty and I don't think that's the case at all we have within us there's all kinds of forces within us all kinds of there is empathy there's feelings of fairness feeling justice of kindness of compassion there's a lot of different things that up right here there's also forces of hate forces or prejudice forces of greed know kinds of things that operate as well if we're doing this careful work inside paying attention we'll see that more often than not the afflictive emotions of greed hate and delusion are usually entangled with this idea of self they can be there without it but often that's part of the little Nexus or little kind of complex they're working together for for each other and that if there's no attachment to self there is much less the mind is less alienated we're net we're more in touch with ourselves we're not caught up in these desires ourselves the abstractions and concise and stories that go along to building up the self if we're not caught up in those stories and ideas and everything then generally we have more capacity to touch into the beneficial forces within us the empathy the compassion the kindness of generosity the wisdom the love that can be here and with a mindful practice you can you can physically feel the difference between a mind that is greedy and a mind that's generous or a heart that is as hate or a heart that has love it feels there's a whole you know qualitative difference one if you're really attentive it feels like picking up hot coal and why would you do that the other feels like you know a nice spring day and refreshing and nice so if when when we don't have the self active self identity is it's gonna really attach to with you clinging to it and building it up and all the different things that can make it complicated we've one of the things that is less than diss fear and it said that a person who's liberated is a fearless person and if you're fearless and if you don't feel like you're trying to defend yourself or protect yourself it's a much easier to step forward and say stop you can't do that if we need to protest injustice it's easier to stand up for oneself you can't do that you have to stop the Buddhist kind of attitude towards people who are harming us you know it's not completely fair to say to kind of call on this idea but do you mean maybe it's just for the purpose of pedagogical purposes okay there is some some places where they have this idea that if someone hits you turn the other cheek kind of offer them the other cheek Buddhism would never say that but they would say if someone hits you turn and face them and look them right in the eye don't hit them back but you know don't just stand there and offer the other cheek just you know stand your ground and look at them and say what's going on here challenge them that way don't let them just kind of pull you over but you don't have to be assertive and attack either just that's the ability to say no and stop let's look at this and stand our ground doesn't have to come from assertion they can come because we're fearless but you're not holding on to any was trying to prove ourselves we're also no need to diminish ourselves there's no need to say oh I'm you know madly up to it or I'm not really worthy of this or I'm supposed to be kind of you know a good Buddhist and not cause trouble it's this idea of not self artistic fitting and dropping of this kind of caught up in selfness leaves a person in a certain kind from next door looking from the outside both strong and soft both receptive and able to stand up for themselves able to speak if speaking is what's needed able to be quiet of quiet what's needed and in fact down through the ages but some Buddhists have been known to be very courageous very strong people the Buddha was even though he said you know I'm just thus was a superbly confident but is there a confidence that's not a so much as you know self confidence or is there a confidence that comes from the absence of a lack of confidence who are you if you leave yourself alone and just show up without the burden of being better or worse or equal what happens if you show up without any fear around self identity what happens if you just there and this is one of the you know one of the things that I've started to learn through Buddhist practice I was very much when I was a very young the you know my early twenties darted to practice I was completely entangled in this whole world of self and self identity and how people liked me and and I was approved by people and playing social games to try to convince people who I am how they should see me creating a sense of self and I'm sure they saw me better than I they could see me who I was but I was trying to pretend and be different than who I was and and it wasn't real there was a lot of work to do this and I think I kind of what kind of really got to see it clearly when for the year that I was working in the monastery kitchen kitchens are pressure cooker places and I became kind of the kitchen manager managed all the other cooks which is really bad managing cooks in the kitchen is that that's tough and and you know he had his deadline getting the food out a certain time and you had this production you know you couldn't just kind of say oh well you know take your time we'll do it tomorrow you know we have to feed people and and so I would I don't get so to a worn out until I realized that what I was doing was doing complicated social Jeannette gymnastics in this very difficult social environment to try to ensure that everyone liked me and so this is a lot of work I discovered it's a lot less it's a lot more easy to live life if you're not trying to get everyone to like you it's kind of impossible anyway and so now I don't try so much to get people to like me so you know it's not be nice if you did now people do but there's not like a big project and and it was not really much of a concern for me so their whole idea of the city of selfing in many ways is be able to drop away so then Who am I who are we who can we be and one answer to this question that then that they give in the kind of Zen tradition is you are whatever you're doing in the moment so someone is sweeping the temple courtyard and they up to them and say who are you and then then the answer would just be continue to sweep you're not even the sweeper you're just the answer is in this doing the sweeping so will you discover who you are moment by moment in the activities that you're doing it but when the activity is over if the sweeping is over you're no longer the sweeper you do the new on to something else but you are what kind of defined by the moment you're in but it's as as ephemeral or what you're doing in a moment so if you're a plumber you're only a plumber when you're plumbing when you leave work you know you don't carry that with you kind of thing so I think it's fair to say that there are parts of American culture especially white American culture that's very individualistic very since strong sense of privacy strong sense of self-efficacy the self has to manage and and it's a little bit you know and and it's very hard to see how deeply ingrained the individualism is that exists in the circles of American and Western culture I think some people who come from collective cultures some of the cultures of Asia are that way some other there are other and native people in this country and other cultures in this country that have this they come into some of these as strong individualistic white scenes in America and it stands out and highlights you know wow this is quite strong but for the people are in it it's hard to see it's just like you know it's like the air you breathe you know you don't you don't see it or something and I was lucky enough one of the dramatic times I saw it yeah was when I was in a monastery in Japan and Japanese culture is a very collectivist culture so I grew up in descent a very strong individualistic kind of currents of culture and I'm from Norway and Norway mmm it's possible Norway has even stronger than America in certain ways certain ways it doesn't and and so I was in Japan and it is monastery with twenty thirty oh I've got 35 other Japanese mostly young monks and every morning we had to do a period of collective cleaning together and it was a little bit of a ritual because even if something was already clean you cleaned it anyway and so we had these columns that held up the roof of the temple and those columns got cleaned the individual um got sometimes cleaned four or five times you have this rags and you'd clean it and you go look for another one that was no no one was cleaning and you clean that one even though just been cleaned by someone else the idea was just to be working you know there was like full Helen you have to work full on and you know and but it was very kind of fast and engaged and and so I was doing that for about three or four months with them every morning and then one day somehow and I spent the whole you know 24 hours a day we were living together we slept in the same room we ate in the same room we bathed in a collective bathing situation we were you know so it was really living that life with them and kind of experiencing itself maybe this contributed to really so I finally kind of grokking understanding something and I've kind of one day I was doing this cleaning and I suddenly kind of saw something I hadn't seen before and what I saw was that I was operating as one individual among a collection of different individuals doing work and they were operating first and foremost as a group at which they were a part of so I was all these individual entities and they had one entity in the group and they were all elements there working together and how I saw that and how to explain it I don't know how to I don't know how to tell you now but that but I saw that's very strong way in which they saw themselves as a unit and and I and I had no idea this is we're living in little different social universes here I didn't think that one of them was better than the other just automatically I didn't put him on earth I kind of thought well every human society has to figure out some way so people can not bump into each other too much earth somehow you know manage to work together incorporate enough and so there are different kind of stories and ideations and concepts we form and so different cultures do different things different ways and but it was fast it was it was very important for me to see it because then I started to be able to question and see what I was doing and and then as more and more especially as I went to continued my monastic practice and got quieter with my mind I started seeing the subtle ways in which this idea of the self the individual individual responsibility agency you know all these things were operating and I could put a question mark behind it or see it as a condition see it is not absolute and so kind of you know not hold on to it so much and be able to put it down and when other things were suitable so so I think that you know in these currents of Western culture that some of us are in that where the strong individualism is here a couple of things it's hard to see and the logic behind it is how it embedded and deeply that sometimes it's you know not only we don't see it but even Buddhist teachers in teaching like mindfulness and Buddhist practice sometimes are subtly reinforcing it because it's so deeply embedded and I wonder what's going to happen now because now things like mindfulness you know secular mindfulness my clinical mindfulness and is getting more more popular in all kinds of settings and it's starting to be imported into other cultures and so some of the founders and leaders of this mindfulness secular mindfully men are being invited to places like China to teach mindfulness and to train people to do this is like mindfulness protocols mindfulness based interventions and stuff but the big question is are they bringing with them a Western individual idea of the self who does the practice and bringing it into a culture that doesn't have that sense of the individual and what's going to happen with a meeting of those two especially what's going to happen when it's when it's not explicit or even the people who are propagating it don't even know what's happening so so you know there are challenges in teaching this whole mindfulness thing in this kind of culture and my hope is that people practice well because if you practice well then at some point you'll start feeling the limitation of the self thing you'll start feeling limitations of holding on and clinging to self identity self identity has a role but there can be too much activity too much mental turmoil and agitation and clinging and grasping and resistance and all the stuff going on with it and we saw you and so to learn to see it and drop it to lower the flag and then if we're able to do that well then the hope I have is that people will have the sensitivity to be able to respond appropriately to different cultures and different kinds of people they meet I don't have to assert the end of being you sometimes it's useful to show up as an strong independent individual if yours in places where that's asked for but you're just as happy to show up and be part of a community in a collectivist and a social thing if that's what's called for without holding on to a strong sense of self people who come out of a collectivist culture you know Buddhism in Asia often was an antidote to some of the excesses of collectivist culture and people often will step out of the collectivist mindset in Japan for example in becoming a Buddhist monastic it's really - you can't Americans many Americans can't even imagine how radical it is for a Japanese young person to leave and become a go off and do full-time Buddhist practice here in America we do that for a while then we go back you know to our life and everything is waiting for us kind of Ricans pick up but there you can't do that you step out of their social Nexus and it's hard to come back and so so but how to be fluid and all this huh not to be caught in anything I'll be caught in a collectivist identity not to be caught in a individualistic identity but to be fluid and respectful for all of them knowing they have tip something like that has to be operating and then how do we get fluid and you know improvise or play or or move smoothly within it and just be wise about it and be careful with the ways subtle ways which there's maybe it's it's conveying values attitudes which are not helpful for people and maybe cause harm so mindfulness practice leaves you with nothing there's that good news in nothing is that kind of very but nothing which is full of potential full of be able to respond full of being able to be fluid full and be able to adapt and change without nothing in a way that we can there is more breathing room for whoever we actually are there's lots of room to be who you are when you don't package it and limit it with holding on draping yourself with the self lowering the flag of conceit so I hope this made some sense this evening and it's a complicated topic and what I was trying to do is point to the psychology of how these stuff works without making any kind of claim that there absolutely is no self or there is a self whether there is herself or is not a self doesn't it really matter to someone who is free of self he let it show up whatever it wait once then you learn how to be wise and play with it and if what I've talked about this evening is perplexing you're welcome to leave it here if it's irritated if it's Eric if it's irritating and then well no buts irritating you're welcome to leave it here but it was irritating it might actually be useful then it might be even then then it might be something here for you to look at more deeply you know which flag did my teaching hit which flag are you trying to protect anyway I hope I gave you something to think about and explore and consider a nice way thank you

Channel: Insight Meditation Center

Views: 8,390

Keywords: buddhism, dharma, vipassana, meditation, mindfulness

Id: 8I7Pipqunes

Length: 45min 47sec (2747 seconds)

Published: Tue May 08 2018