..续本文上一页rs and have role models of what we should be when we grow up. I noticed from my own experience that the ego really started consolidating when I was sent off to school: I was thrown into those classrooms with all those strange children and then I started noticing who was the strongest, who was the toughest, who was the one the teacher liked the best. We saw ourselves in terms of our relationships to others. This develops through a lifetime unless we deliberately choose to change and start looking more deeply than just living our lives through the conditioning of the mind that we acquired when we were very young. Even when we get older, sometimes we still have very adolescent attitudes or childish emotional reactions to life that we have been unable to resolve except by suppressing or ignoring them. And these can be very embarrassing or shocking to us.

　　There is one way of talking about the self that makes it sound very doctrinal. Buddhists can sometimes say that there is no self, as if it was a proclamation that you have to believe in; as if there were some God on high saying "THERE”S NO SELF!"; and in that presentation something in us resists. It doesn”t seem true to just go announcing that there isn”t any self - because what is this experience that we are feeling right now

　　 Here there seems to be very much a sense of oneself! You”re feeling, you”re breathing, you see and hear; you react to things - people can praise you or criticise you and you feel happy or depressed accordingly. So if this isn”t me then what is it

　　 And am I supposed to go round as a Buddhist believing that I don”t have a self

　　 Or if I am going to believe in something, maybe it is better to believe that I do have a self, because then you can say things like: "my true self is perfect and pure." That at least gives you some kind of inspirational encouragement to try to live your life, rather than saying that there is no self, no soul, leaving a total annihilation of any possibilities. These are just examples of the use of language; we can say "there is no self" as a proclamation, or "there is no self" as a reflection. The reflective mode is to encourage us to contemplate the self. The Buddha was pointing to the fact that when we really look at these changing conditions that we tend to identify with, we can begin to see that these are not self. What we believe in, what we hold to and cling to and assume, is not what we really are: it”s a position, it is a condition, it is something that changes according to time and place. Each one of us is experiencing consciousness through the human body that we have, and it is like this.

　　Consciousness is a natural function, there is no sense of self in regards to consciousness. The only reason that we might assume a self is because consciousness operates in terms of subject and object; to be conscious we have to be a separate entity, so therefore we are operating from this position of being this subjective being here. Then we can get obsessed with a very personal interpretation of everything: every reaction or experience, whether it is instinctive or whatever, can be interpreted in the sense of it being me and mine. We can interpret the natural energies of the body in a very personal way as if this is me, my problem, rather than seeing them as part of the package that we get from being born as a human being. Even a baby when it is first born has instinctive drives to survive, so when it is hungry it cries. Babies are usually born beautiful creatures so that we naturally want to love and take care of them. Do you think that the baby is doing this deliberately - "I”m trying to be cute so that Ajahn Sumedho will hold me, my mother will love me" - or is this just the way it is, just nature in operation

　　 These are just natural things…

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