The awkward period between the Self-Self and the No-Self

Finally, I’d like to talk about one of the most difficult and seemingly invincible obstacles that comes up in this path. And this is a very advanced obstacle. It typically doesn’t happen to people until they’re well along in the practice, but I want to mention it to you because it has already happened to some of you. And those of you who persevere with this practice, that remember the axiom of consistency, and keep consistently doing it (including right now, because some of you aren’t) it will become relevant.

What can happen after this practice has begun to be successful is you get real calm, you don’t have the problem with the wandering mind so much anymore, and you’re really peaceful. And there’s a sort of sense of oneness and connectedness, which is wonderful. But, you notice that your old motivation, the fire, the passion for life has waned. It’s very peaceful, it’s wonderful, and it beats the old bullshit by far. But its rather disconcerting, because as the result of success with this practice, something seems to now be lost.

What I mean by the old bullshit – I hope I don’t offend anybody by that vocabulary – is that before, you didn’t have what we would call motivation very much, what you had was compulsiveness, and that goes away. Compulsion and internal suffering was motivation a lot of your endeavors.

Well great, a lot of the internal suffering has cleared up. But now, what about the passion for life’s activities? That seems to have waned. It’s hard to motivate yourself, like it’s All One, okay? That’s the dark side, the shadow side to the oneness. If it’s All One, it’s hard to get passionately involved on one side or the other, there’s a certain flatness in the emotions. A friend dies, and it hardly makes a ripple. It’s like, “What am I becoming? Am I losing my humanness?”

This is a very big obstacle, it becomes very relevant, not for everyone, but for some people, because it seems to be a negative consequence, and actual behavioral negative consequence of the practice. The first obstacle I talked about as being logically very difficult, which is the deeper you go, the yuckier the sensation gets. That’s a subjective difficulty that would discourage a person from going deep. But what I am talking about now is objective, and your actual behavior and your actual expression of things. Things seem to have gone flat. What to do about this?

Keep observing, no matter what

Again, the axiom of consistency. But this is hard, okay? Somehow you have to consistently observe that state of consciousness, watch the thoughts and feelings that go with that. And that becomes difficult because you might tend to think, “Well, the more I do that, the more things are getting flatter and I’m going to get less human and less motivated.” But I can assure you, I can promise you, that’s not what happens. What happens is that you are going from being a thing to being a process. Your going from being a noun, to being a verb. And there’s an awkward intermediate zone that you have to pass through where the human thing within you does in fact pass away. And what it gets replaced with is a very full human activity.

How does that happen? It happens from several causes. One is that you don’t give up on the practice, but you consistently observe even those mind-body states. That’s one cause. A second cause is that you take feedback from the people around you. If the people around you are telling you you’re not doing your job, you’re not being motivated, you’re not expressing yourself, you’re not acting in a human way, you listen.

How does a baby learn? It learns from getting feedback from its environment, its physical environment and its parents, and it learns how to behave. The no-self, which is arising within you, has to learn to take over the all the activities the self-self did before. And that’s a whole process. Just as when a baby who is born into the world has to develop a self-self, it learns to cope with the world.

When you go from being an adult to being a super-adult, you have to go from being the self-self to the no-self. And the no-self has to learn all the stuff the self-self had to learn. It has to learn how to be motivated and do things, it has to learn how to be feeling and expressive. The old personality was a material thing, it had a entity or substantial quality to it.

It’s like a whole process of being born again, but you’re being written with a different ink. It’s a new substance, but it’s not a substance, you are being born as spirit. I know we talk about the spiritual path and it sounds great. “Oh yeah, I’d like to be spiritual”. Okay, take shard of ice and melt it, it turns into fluid water, and they you vaporize it. And that vapor is what in Latin is meant by Spiritus. It’s still H2O, but in some ways it’s a very different critter, not chemically different, but it behaves in a different way.

But what has to happen is that the pure activity of impermanence has to learn how to be a human being. The great Christian mystic, Meister Eckhardt, referred to that as the birth of Christ within each person, the birth of the Son within each person. You become nothing, and yet you become a feeling nothing, a motivated nothing. It seems like a total contradiction in terms that transcends all logic. How can something without will or desire or feeling manifest will and desire and feeling? And manifest it passionately?

The way it happens is that, as you enter the void:

1. You continue to observe all states of thought and feeling as they come up, no matter what.
2. You take feedback from the people around you. You just listen.

And pretty soon the no-self regains its motivation and it learns to be expressive and feeling. You can make a statue out of gold, or out of lead. The statue may look the same, but the substance is different. So when emptiness, when impermanence, when spirit learns to act human, it’s really human. It’s like any other human, it has the form of a human, but the substance is different.

Comments

[Don McCormick]

What is the no-self? Is there a good explanation or definition of it some where I can read?

[Ted Holtz]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatta