I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Monday Musings, I write freely and wanderingly about some topic that’s on my mind.
[The] mind is constantly organizing our experience around me, mine, for me, against me. So it can be very helpful to think of self not as a noun, but as a verb. Not self as a thing, but selfing as an activity, a process, a strategy, something the mind does.
Ines Freedman, Being Somebody & Nobody (1 of 5): The Action of Selfing
The self as noun can so quickly become the comparing self, who compares itself to other selves, or the clinging self, who wants and wants without every reaching satisfaction. Instead of being passing weather, feelings become raised up to possessions: my anxiety, my fatigue, my ennui.
Freedman says, “There’s two parts. There’s the experience and the interpretation of that experience, the way we relate to it, the way we make a self around it.” Often it’s the latter part — the making a self around something — that brings the most suffering.
Consider the difference between thinking about my macular pucker (the pucker of my self) vs the macular pucker. What if I don’t organize my experience of the macular pucker around the self that has a thin membrane of scar tissue on her left eye. What if I instead consider unselfed experiences, one after another? The experiences: detecting deteriorated vision, seeing an optometrist, seeing a second optometrist, seeing an opthalmologist, scheduling a surgery, sensing the vision deteriorating further, finding accommodations such as covering the left lens of the reading glasses with saran wrap, to block out the distortion, awaiting the surgery.
Freedman suggests we take the self too seriously, and that causes suffering — the three defilements of wanting, aversion, delusion. Instead, don’t take it so seriously, she says:
At the retreat center, we have a little picture of the Buddha with a quote by Suzuki Roshi: “What we’re doing here is so important, we better not take it too seriously.”
The comparing self
In her second recent talk on Being Somebody & Nobody, Freedman discusses one instantiation of self-as-noun, the comparing self:
The mind compares almost automatically. We look at somebody: oh, you’re more organized than me. She’s more confident. He’s more spiritual. I’m behind. I’m ahead. I’m wiser. I’m failing. I’m not enough. At least I’m not as bad as so‑and‑so.
But we don’t only compare ourselves to other people. We compare ourselves to ideals, to who we think we should be, or sometimes to the past, especially maybe as we get older. I used to be stronger. My memory used to be better. I had such a beautiful retreat experience
last time. Why can’t I get back there? The mind compares this moment to another moment, and it suffers because this one doesn’t measure up.
The comparing self thinks about whether she has enough or not — comparing her possessions to some abstract measurement of what is enough and what is not. Is it enough to have one vacuum cleaner and no rug cleaning machine? Is it enough to have four vacuum cleaners and a new rug cleaning machine?
What is the alternative? Affirming what is. I have four vacuum cleaners and a rug cleaning machine. Or let’s take the self out of it: there are four vacuum cleaners and a rug cleaning machine in my house, and they’re available to use.
The idea of mine
That reminds me of one of Gil Fronsdal’s talks from last August, Self and Not Self. He discussed how we create the idea of mine and then get caught in it. (Here’s where I first blogged about it).
I have that sense about the space in front of my house: that’s mine. Don’t park in front of my house. Last summer, my across-the-street neighbors had extensive renovations done on their house. This summer, it’s their next-door neighbors doing the same. In both cases I routinely have had giant construction trucks parked in front of my house. “Don’t park there!” I say silently to myself. “Mine!” Even though I know legally it’s not. But more important than thinking legally it’s not, it’s more comfortable to drop the idea of mine for everything, even things I do legally own. Instead of “my house” — “this house I live in.” Instead of “my stock portfolio” — “this stock portfolio I manage and can take money out of.”
In his talk, Fronsdal says sometimes it’s useful to use the word mine:
[You] do people a favor sometimes by using the word mine. [For example], a neighbor needs to get to the doctor and their car is not working. And [so you say] hey, you can use my car, … as opposed to, oh, yeah. There’s a car which the state of California has given me the sole rights to use, and I have the paperwork to show it. And it’s up on the street. It’s a gray Toyota. And it’s 10 years old. And this here is a key that will work in it. And I think with rights I’ve been given by state of California, I can allow you to use it. I mean… [it’s] easier to just say, you can use my car.
It’s a useful mental trick to drop the idea of mine. I wrote about that before, about the idea of mine:
I think that’s funny, to treat things we own like that, as sort of phenomenological experiential elements of the universe that we don’t own but are just coming into and out of our lives.
I think of my pets: “this dog Bo is not mine” and in a lot of ways he is not. Bo is a dog who has his own life to live and it happens that I am housing him, feeding him, loving him, and caring for him. Is he really mine? In a legal sense he is but in a Buddhist not-self not-mine sense he’s not. He’s just an aspect of my experiences (and I’m an aspect of his).
Ways to unself
So some ways to unself: Tell stories as experiences not as things that happened to you. No comparing, only what is. Nothing is “mine.”
It’s all about turning the mind to direct experience instead of self-based stories atop or obscuring direct experience.
Fronsdal suggests you “yield to emergence”:
Yield to what’s emerging. And maybe it helps to understand that we have a lot of experience, 10,000 experiences in any given day. If you can take into account every little sight and smell and taste and touch and thought and feeling and sensation in your body, there’s such a wide kaleidoscope of things happening all the time.
But some of them clearly appear, emerge, and dissipate, disappear. They’re there and then they’re not there. Days come and go. They’re not there. The morning appeared, there’s the beginning of the day, it emerged into emerging. It’s pretty much full light now, and at some point it’s going to start dissipating and returning to darkness.
Meals come and go. Meals begin, and usually meals come to an end. Our experience of the meal comes to an end, and we go off and do something else. An inhale begins and it ends. It emerges, it does, it comes. You yield to the inhale, and it’ll come to a time when it dissipates. Stops, dissipates, it’s no longer there.
This morning, what I’m experiencing. Sitting in my a bathrobe and jammies at my a computer screen in my a bedroom. My Two dogs on my a bed nearby, awaiting a walk. Rain outside today. I am worrying about getting wet on the walk. I am worrying about what the stock market holds for my a portfolio today.
Unselfing brings a kind of freedom, a welcome freedom.