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Mindfulness of Oneself (3 of 5) Self as a Projection

So, this is a third talk on mindfulness of oneself. And so, what are we mindful of in the self? One of the things I talked about yesterday is we can be mindful, become aware of all the selfing that goes on, all the activities of constructing a self, asserting a self, defending itself, attaching to ideas of self, acquiring ideas of self.

We acquire ideas of who we are, and in that sense, kind of put on a coat, or clothes of self, with those ideas. And there can be layers and layers of these coats that we wear of different selves. Some of it's done quite, I don't know if innocently or easily, or someone tells us something. Like I was told in seventh grade by an art teacher, casually as I was drawing on my desk, that I had no artistic ability. And there was no sting to that, there was no idea that I should have artistic ability. It just was a simple, ordinary fact of the universe since it came from a teacher. And that became a coat that I wore: I personally have no artistic ability. And it was held lightly, but I didn't know any better. It turned out I had some when I went to college. I discovered it and took art classes and things.

And so, we have some experience in our life that is, maybe we do something that hurts someone, we make a mistake, and that becomes a coat that we wear, that "now I am this kind of terrible person." And that one event then becomes this heavy coat that we apply everywhere we go, with the idea, "I'm a terrible person."

Or someone raises us with lots of self-esteem and telling us how great we are, and so we put on this coat, "I'm great." And then we end up as an adult in situations where work or school or something is really tough for us, really hard, and maybe we fail or do poorly. And that challenges this idea of self-esteem. Suddenly, we thought we were a certain way, but it turns out maybe we're not the way we thought we were, and that coat was really heavy and hard to take off. So we carry it around, hurting, being angry, or something.

And so, this idea of selfing, we have these ideas and attachments to "me, myself, and mine." In the teachings of the Buddha, the idea of a self—any kind of idea of a self—is seen as a concept. And the word for that is saññā^[1]. Saññā is usually translated into English as "perception," but "perception" in English suggests kind of an innocent, neutral, pure taking in of a sight or sound just as it is. But the saññā word implies not only the taking in, the sensory perception of it, but once there's a sensory perception, then there is a label, an idea, a concept of what that is. Sometimes it's accurate, sometimes it's not.

So, like the example I gave a few weeks ago maybe, of hiking in the trails up here and seeing a root poking out of the ground or a stick on the ground kind of curving like a snake, and I first see it as a snake. My mind now has made a concept of "snake" that wasn't there. And so, this idea of conceptualization, in modern terms, is projection. We also project; so I projected the idea of a snake on that little twig.

And so, it turns out, for the Buddha, the ideas of self, notions of self, what many of us perceive innocently or not—we perceive a self which is really through the filter of these ideas, these constructions—can be seen as projections. We project self on things, on ourselves, project certain kinds of selves on other people.

And one place to see it is if you go to someone's house for maybe a little dinner party (at other times than COVID-19 maybe). And there's not a bunch of people around, it's time to go sit down, and you take a seat and you sit there. But then you excuse yourself maybe to go do something, and then you come back three minutes later, and lo and behold, someone is sitting in your seat. There are other chairs around, and you hadn't touched the plate or anything there, you hadn't used anything, so other places are just as clean and ready for you as where you were, but they're in your seat. And then there might be anger, self-righteousness, despair, discouragement, possessiveness: "Wait a minute, that's my chair." And maybe going over there and telling the person, "Excuse me, but this is my chair."

But if you hadn't taken that chair, if you sat there for the time and then you left, and some weeks later you came back and someone said, "Which is your chair?" "Oh, I don't know, I don't care, I'll sit anywhere." Before you came to the house, that chair was not your chair, but somehow the mind makes it mine in some way or other. And that making it mine is a projection. If you took off your shoes before coming to the house, as you came into the entryway of the house, everyone took their shoes off. And then if everyone left with different shoes than they came with, the shoes wouldn't care. There's a projection of self, "mine," onto the shoes, and it's of practical value to be able to put on the shoes which fit you when you leave, so it's good to have some conventional sense of "mine." But these are projections.

And so, if someone has a profession, like maybe a person's a plumber, and other people might see at the party, "that's a plumber," and so they're projecting plumber-hood on that person. And so if something's clogged up in the sink in the kitchen, they go find the friend who's a plumber. And that's innocent enough to have that. But some people project that on themselves, some profession, some role, some idea they have to be this kind of person.

And so in the teachings of the Buddha, the idea of self is considered in modern terms a projection. Sometimes he calls it an upside-down projection, topsy-turvy some translators call it, the idea of a self, because it tends to limit people. It tends to be a magnet for all kinds of suffering, all kinds of stress, all kinds of other ideas, associations of what a self, a good self, a bad self is, how we should be.

And so, you know, I was told that I had no artistic ability, and so I was now a person with no artistic ability in my mind, in my projection. But then I might have gone a little bit further in life, and maybe I went to a class where they said, "Of course, everyone has artistic ability, and we want to celebrate everyone's artistic ability." But I've gotten this idea that I have none, and so suddenly my idea goes counter to how I'm supposed to be. A successful, good person is supposed to have artistic ability, and I know I don't because I was told. And now this gets more complicated, and now other selves get formed, other projections. Now I'm an inadequate self because I'm not fitting into the artistic ability thing that I'm supposed to have. And so now I'm projecting something. And these projections sometimes are acquired, internalized from what people say around us and treat us. And sometimes they're just born out of us. Like for example, the chair, "That's my chair." We can get quite attached to that for a few minutes for the dinner.

And so becoming more sensitive to the activity of selfing is one of the functions of mindfulness. In some ways, in a more basic way, the Buddha never really asked the question, "Who am I?" What he asked—not literally, but more the spirit of his instructions—is not discovering who you are, but to discover what you're doing. And sometimes for some of us, the question maybe more appropriately is, "What in the world are you doing?" What are we doing? What are the activities of the mind, what are the projections of the mind that we're involved in? And this is where meditation becomes very important.

Because as we meditate, we get calmer, quieter, and as we quiet down, we start seeing the activity of selfing more and more. We see the thought, we see the idea, we see the judgment. We see how a thought comes up and how we latch onto it, or hold it, or are troubled by it, or pushed around by it.

So as we get quieter and quieter, we can see more and more subtle, more basic and foundational projections of self that we've been living with. This is not a rejection of any kind of idea that there is a self, whatever that might be, especially if we don't have thoughts to answer the question. It's not a rejection of it, it's not a claim that there is no self, but it's an idea that a lot of what "self" is for people is an activity of the mind that projects and creates ideas and concepts, and even feelings, around this thing that we identify as self.

So it's subtle, it makes it more and more subtle. And subtle doesn't mean inconsequential. It's actually sometimes more consequential when you go down the layers to the places where we usually don't see. So if the activity level of the mind can be rated from one to ten, and mostly we're going around at a level of ten, there are layers in the mind. And so subtler things that are more active at a level of three are not seen because they're kind of covered over. It's like the agitated waves on top of a lake prevent us from seeing what's deeper down, which maybe there's a swirl of fish that are swirling around, or maybe there's an underwater current that's swirling around that you could see if you could look through the top of the lake, and you could see the grass underneath, the seaweed kind of moving. But then when even that gets quieter, then you see, oh, in fact, in between the grass there's little quiet slugs moving around very softly. So you start seeing more and more as things get quieter, you see the quieter things.

So if selfing is an activity level number three, you don't see it if you're busy in life at level nine or ten. But if your mind gets quiet enough that it gets to a level two, then you see more clearly—overall the mind's a two, but you see kind of the movements of three. You see how it's born, how it appears, how it goes. And to be able to watch the projections, the ideas, the concepts of self appear out of nothing, in a sense that we were minding our own business and suddenly there's a thought that "I'm X." Where did that come from, and is that true? And that's a thought, "Who am I if I don't use that thought to say who I am?"

So part of what Buddhist practice is about is quieting down so we can see through these projections of self, see what they are, see them clearly. Some of them are useful, some of them are useful coats to put on for the circumstance. And so to start seeing them as being provisional, seeing them as being contextual, seeing them as something that we have choice about what we pick up and put down, is part of the freedom of Buddhism. And also part of the freedom is to put them down completely, and to have an experience of ourselves of being free, being alive, being vital, being upright, maybe even a certain kind of strength, but without any projections of self, any associations on it that makes things so much more complicated so quickly if we're attached to it, if we're caught in it.

So, projections of self. I think that all of you are pretty wonderful. That's what I've seen. I've seen a lot of people over my lifetime, and as a teacher, I get to meet people all kinds of ways, and it's a wonderfulness that you can discover for yourself if you can put down, take off some of the projection coats that you've overlaid on top of your wonderfulness. Thank you.