Who We Really Are
by Ajahn Sumedho
From Forest Sangha Newsletter, October 1996, Number 38
When we are contemplating the Dhamma, the teaching of the Buddha, it is very skilful to question what a personality really is: the sense of our own separateness, inpiduality, the perception of ourselves as a person that”s separate from the rest. Nowadays people are beginning to understand more and more about the nature of consciousness, but although it is an experience that we all have, it is probably the least understood. Scientists are studying consciousness, trying to find a physical base for it. Is it in the brain
What is it
... but it”s like trying to find our real self. The more we try to find out who we really are, the more we seem to be going in circles or chasing after shadows; we can”t really get hold of anything for very long and it vanishes.
However, it is not the self - who or what we are - that is the problem. Rather, it”s our delusions around the perceptions of what we are, the conditioning of the mind that we acquire after birth. When we are born, the new baby child is conscious but it has no sense of being a person, a personality; this is something that is instilled into us as we grow up. All kinds of impressions and assumptions are given to us through our parents, our peers, and the society that we live in. We are continually fed with information about what we are and what we should be. So the thrust of meditation is to begin to realise the true nature of the mind that isn”t conditioned by perception, cultural conditioning, thought or memory.
If we try to think about meditation practice as this or that, we”re creating an image that we”re trying to realise, rather than just trusting in the attentiveness of the mind, in mindfulness; letting go of the desire to find or grasp anything. As soon as we think about ourselves, we become a person - somebody - but when we are not thinking, the mind is quite empty and there is no sense of person. There is still
consciousness, sensitivity, but it”s not seen in terms of being a person, of being a man or a woman; there is just awareness of what is happening - what the feeling is, the mood, the atmosphere that one is experiencing in this moment. We can call this intuitive awareness. It is not programmed and conditioned by thought or memory or perception.
The thrust of meditation is to begin to realise the true nature of the mind that isn”t conditioned by perception, cultural conditioning, thought or memory.
Now one of the big problems in meditation is that we can take ourselves too seriously. We can see ourselves as religious people dedicated towards serious things, such as realising truth. We feel important; we are not just frivolous or ordinary people, going about our lives, just going shopping in the supermarket and watching television. Of course this seriousness has advantages; it might encourage us to give up foolish activities for more serious ones. But the process can lead to arrogance and conceit: a sense of being someone who has special moral precepts or some altruistic goal, or of being exceptional in some way, having come onto the planet as some kind of messiah... we get people like that sometimes visiting us at Amaravati; strange characters who come in and announce themselves as the Maitreya Buddha! This conceit, this arrogance of our human state is a problem that has been going on since Adam and Eve, or since Lucifer was thrown out of heaven. It”s a kind of pride that can make human beings lose all perspective; so we need humour to point to the absurdity of our self-obsession. In the monastic life we can become incredibly serious about our moral purity, our discipline, our dedication and so on. To a worldly person, it can seem that monks and nuns are making life un…
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