Reflections on the nature of the self by Bob Thurman

here we need uh kind of self-know itself know itself yes buddhist would say certainly and as i said have to know itself a self has to know oneself in order to be free of suffering and to achieve you know one's fulfillment one's awakening and one's blossoming another meaning of buddha they say buddha and prabhu that one of them is awakening the other one is blossoming buddha means to blossom like a flower like a lotus and here to understand that uh we need the teaching nagarjuna's great teaching drawn from the prajnaparamita sutras which are which is buddha's own teaching in the mahayana view we need what's known as the teaching of the two realities or sometimes people say the two truths but better to say two realities which is conventional and relative versus absolute or ultimate you know those two realities so when you say can the self know the self the relative self certainly knows just as it's the relative self that doesn't know their relative self is trapped in suffering by thinking it's an ultimate or an absolute self when the relative self explores itself and fails to find itself as an ultimate self when it that sense of an ultimate self dissolves under analysis like the atom did like the quark did like the higgs boson will in the future and then then that is called the realization of selflessness or emptiness and it is experienced at first as a kind of disappearance where one sort of falls into a or one penetrates into a kind of feeling of not being a body not being in a way really not being a mind because there's no content of the mind so just vast space one goes into what's called the space like equipoised samadhi and that is a very releasing type of experience and there's a little danger that that is then thought to be the great supreme self and it and then but then when that itself is taken when there's a momentum of inquiry a momentum of analysis of critical wisdom partners sort of knowing through you could say that then then the person at first feels ah released from being the self and released from anything opposing the self just a vastness but then that momentum then well what is this vastness then this becomes the target of the critical inquiry and then it dissolves under analysis so there's that's called the emptiness of emptiness and when it dissolves under analysis then you have what's called the dreamlike aftermath samadhi or the illusion like after math somali or i think the more polite and more joyful thing is to call it the magical aftermath samadhi where the universe is perceived as magic as illusory in the sense that still things seem to be intrinsically objective and intrinsically subjective and i still feel like i'm really me and all this but actually uh then i know i've seen it dissolve under analysis so at first there's like an oscillation process perhaps for some people where they have that experience of freedom apart from things which they kind of treasure and enjoy then annoyingly the things come back but if they don't get trapped into thinking that that that disappearing experience was the absolute if they don't get trapped in it then they realize that that experience is a kind of relative experience the ultimate relative experience but then it has to fuse slowly with the relative relative experience and then the non-duality becomes where wisdom and compassion become the same is where the relative relative and the absolute the relatively ultimate one become one thing and therefore one feels completely free as if it was vast space and yet one is there with others and totally then equal to the others because then this absoluteness of the self and the absoluteness of the other being different from the self have dissolved and and that's when that's when one is enlightened that it could non-dually speaking that's when one is enlightened the people who achieve their that people under dualistic buddhism who achieve that disappearing moment they unfortunately tend to think they're enlightened by having done that and then they what they has is they lose a momentum when they were not introduced through the non-duality but it's absolute kind of teaching but they're just sort of our hat teaching they think arhat i've conquered my enemy of the of the deluded self and i've disappeared and that's freedom but now there's a momentum of my body and so i hang around with people and usually they're nice they don't usually become oppressive gurus in that case because they're controlled by buddhist monasticism and ethics and things but they still feel superior to the other people you can see in the mahayana sutras where shaari putra who's the example of that enlightened arhat he acts kind of high and mighty and really a little bit but he's very nice and very kind but he doesn't he he hasn't been introduced until he's you know buddha or vimala kirti or someone gets after him or the goddess party parameter gets after him in the mahayana sutras he hasn't introduced the idea that that state of disappearance because it had a boundary it occurred at a time it was a it was it was a product of meditative prowess and and a certain critical wisdom certain level of it it's not an absolute in itself it itself has no intrinsic value so nirvana is empty there's an emptiness of nirvana as well but that emptiness of nirvana is where nirvana comes together with the empty samsara and then they both are there and it's empty while being differentiated like jeremy russell said today while being variation you know informational variation in it it's still empty at the same time so or in the terms of the wonderful rupert the screen and the image have fused actually completely there's no separate screen and there's no no no the unchanging separate screen any longer and the and that unchanging thing has become all the changing things and and and that's a blissful time for that such a being they can then bear being with all the bees so you know for example they say in buddhism life no more life no more rebirth you know as an end to the process of rebirth i'm free i'm free i've done what have to be done no more rebirth for me but what that means in the non-dual thing is no more involuntary rebirth driven by um blind passion by anger by wish for by by not under control by the delusion of being a separate being navigating through the universe there there's the on the contrary what there is is a much vaster pre-birth what's called the nermanakaya of the buddha the emanation body of the buddha where buddha manifests whatever kind of embodiment any different being needs to help them free themselves from their suffering so in a way in a way buddha is like mega multi-rebirth simultaneously in many embodiments in theory you know i'm always impatiently waiting for the demonica to show up in the form of u.n peacekeepers everywhere and like overwhelm the war mongers and the people are necessarily torturing and harming people and the terrorists and the either the individual or the state terrorists either one i'm always waiting for them to show up so i'm not saying that i you know i've i've met the nirmala i recognized it near malachia i have difficulty doing that i get very impatient with the suffering of the world you know but but in theory enlightenment means omnipresence in the world not disappearance from the world in non-dual theory and therefore in vedanta and this is where shankara as you probably know was criticized badly by ramanuja and madhva especially later vidantins because shankara by coming to near gunabramen to absolutely unqualified non-dual brahmana totally relativized the caste system the superiority of god the superiority of the brahmin caste and therefore they kicked him out actually from ramanuja and they came up with vishishta advaita qualified nondualism and even madhwa in the 15th century i think was 16 he came up with dualistic nondual which was kind of fun but there and they when they kicked out shankara they said he's a crypto buddhist the prachanda bowden he's leading us toward buddhism with its relativizing of all structures in the universe and therefore taking responsibility so then the brahman has to take responsibility for the untouchable the male for the female you know there's no purusa who gets apart from prakriti any longer you know perusal practice become shiva shakti actually and shakti is usually the boss in fact if she was smart when he's smart you

Channel: scienceandnonduality

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Keywords: Robert Thurman (Author), Self, nature of reality, buddhism, emptiness, science and nonduality

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Length: 9min 12sec (552 seconds)

Published: Fri May 15 2015