Self and Self-Naughting

　　by Ajahn Sumedho

　　From Forest Sangha Newsletter, April 1998, Number 44

　　December 24, 2004

　　You need not seek for it outside, you need not think that it is something far away or inaccessible to you. It comes through the willingness to calm down and stop resisting and to listen and awaken to your own conscious experience.

　　I think something that interests us all is ourselves - because we are the subject of our lives. No matter what you think of yourself, there is a natural interest there because you have to live with yourself for a lifetime. The self view is therefore something that can give us a lot of misery, if we see ourselves in the wrong way. Even under the most fortunate circumstances, if we don”t see ourselves in the right way we still end up creating suffering in our minds. So the Buddha was trying to point out that the way to solve the problem isn”t through trying to make everything right and pleasant on the external dimension, but to develop the right understanding, the right attitude towards ourselves. This is the whole thrust of his teaching.

　　Where we get defeated is where we give up to the limitations that we have through resignation and apathy.

　　Living in Britain at this time, we expect comfort and all kinds of privileges, rights and material comforts. This makes life more pleasant in many ways, but also when our every need is provided for and life is too comfortable, something in us doesn”t develop. Sometimes it is the struggle through hardship that develops and matures us as human beings. I remember when we lived in London, we used to take walks up on Hampstead Heath in the morning and watch these well-off people taking their pet poodles for walks on the Heath. We”d start thinking that it wouldn”t be so bad to be born as a lap dog here in England: have some nice lady constantly pampering you, making you little jumpers for the winter, and finding tasty little dog biscuits to feed you. It looked like a life of affection and comfort could be rather pleasing! But the truth is that most of us would find that suffocating: we need to measure ourselves against something, we need to struggle and to learn how to get beyond the limitations that we think we have at this time. Where we get defeated is where we give up to the limitations that we have through resignation and apathy. Then of course we just get depressed and miserable.

　　But when we give up or surrender to restriction and to restraint through wisdom, then we find liberation! Life is the experience of restriction and restraint, being born in the human body and having to live under the laws of nature on planet earth. Mentally we can soar up into the sky, we can go up into the heavens, but physically we are bound to limitations that get increasingly restrictive as we grow older. This need not be seen as suffering because that is the way things are. You can develop a different attitude and learn to accept the limitations - not out of a negative resignation but just because you realise that what you really are looking for is within you. You need not seek for it outside, you need not think that it is something far away or inaccessible to you. It comes through the willingness to calm down and stop resisting and to listen and awaken to your own conscious experience. But of course the big obstruction to that is that we have the sense of ourselves as being this or that or the other.

　　The sense of oneself is something that we become conscious of when we are children; when we are born there is no sense of a self as being anything. As we grow up then we learn what we are supposed to be, if we are good or bad, if we are loveable or not, if we are approved of or disapproved of. So we develop a sense of ourselves. We also often compare ourselves to othe…

《Self and Self-Naughting》全文未完，請進入下頁繼續閱讀…