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Selfishness and Freedom from Selfishness

Announcements

A couple of announcements before I begin the talk. First, I'll have a community meeting on Zoom tomorrow morning after the 7:00 a.m. sitting and Dharma talk. It will be at 7:45 or so. This is partly to commemorate the one-year anniversary of starting the 7:00 a.m. sittings. For many of us, it also marks the one-year anniversary of sheltering in place, when our lives changed dramatically. Different places went into shelter at different times, but at least here in California, it was a year ago. It has been a big year. I was almost going to give a talk today about grief. Maybe I'll do that in a couple of weeks, but I wasn't quite ready for that yet.

Next week, I won't be here. A wonderful teacher, Amanda Johnson, is going to speak. She graduated a year and a half ago from the teacher training at Spirit Rock^[1], so she is a local Dharma teacher. We are very happy to have her come and spend Sunday morning with you.

The Door in the Wilderness

Imagine you are in a beautiful place in nature. Maybe it is some place you've been and found inspiring, far away from buildings, roads, and lots of people. It is just an expanse of a natural setting—a beautiful, comfortable, safe, and inspiring place to be. Maybe it is so inspiring that you visit regularly to appreciate and feel the freedom of just roaming around the trees, skies, hills, lakes, or whatever it might be. It is a vast space that is wonderful to be in.

After visiting many times, you think this place is special, and you want to mark its specialness in some creative way. So, you bring a glass door with a frame with you into the wilderness. It takes a bit of effort to bring it in there. You install that glass door right in the middle of the wilderness. It swings open very nicely in its frame. Some people might think it is an art installation, but it is your door. It marks that this place is special to you, symbolically acting as a door into a different landscape.

But now, when you go to visit this big, vast, open space, there is a door in the middle of it. You happened to put it right in the middle of a trail, so when you walk on the trail, you have to open the door and step through. You like this door. Sometimes it gets locked by mistake, and you have to go home and get the key to unlock it. Sometimes it gets rusty from being in the weather, and you have to oil it so that it can open and close. Being a glass door, sometimes it gets dirty, and you have to clean it. You care for this door.

After a while, you think of this door as your door, and you want to protect it. Because the door represents this openness into the wilderness and this freedom, you decide the thing to do is put a fence around the door to protect it, so a moose doesn't come along, knock it down, and break the glass.

You put the fence around it, come out there, and feel, "My door is protected." But after a while, you look around and think, "This enclosed place isn't really big enough for me. I would like more space to be able to come in and just be spacious and open." So you expand the fence, making it bigger and bigger. After a while, you don't really want to see the fence, so you make it really big, going around the hills and outside your view. You go inside, and it is just you and the door. Sometimes branches fall on the door and break it, and you have to fix it. All kinds of things happen to the door.

Eventually, you start to wonder about this door. So you remove it. Once again, there is vast open space. Then you remove the fence, and it is just like it was before. It is still a beautiful, inspiring, peaceful location, wonderful to roam around in. And then you think, "What was I doing with the door? What was I doing with a fence?"

The Buddha's Teachings on Selfishness

This silly story is an introduction to the topic today, which is the Buddha's teachings on selfishness. In the earliest teachings of the Buddha, as best we know, he did not teach anything about not-self. The famous teaching of the Buddha on not-self wasn't his initial focus. Rather, he focused on talking about the problems and the suffering around being selfish, and how a wise person lets go of selfishness.

As he developed his teaching, he described three different ways of being selfish, self-focused, or self-preoccupied. One is through craving, one is through conceit, and the other is through metaphysical opinions and views—beliefs that we hold onto.

The idea of craving is associated with possessiveness: possessing things and saying, "These are mine, this is mine." Conceit is associated with the idea of "I am"—that I am something, that I am this or that. These are role identities that we take on and hold onto. The third is the view of "This is myself," or that this is the true self. We might think, "Now I know what the self is, what my true self is, what my essence is."

In Pali, these little expressions appear a lot in the suttas. It is close to what we say in English as "me, myself, and mine." The Buddha kind of says it in reverse: "This is mine, this I am, and this is myself."

The reason to pay attention to this is that the domain of selfishness involves being caught up in excessive preoccupation with oneself, a strong attachment, clinging, or self-centeredness. This movement toward "selfing" and holding onto a self limits our freedom. It does something that is not really necessary. Clinging to the self is comparable to the idea of putting this door right in the middle of the wilderness. The wilderness was beautiful and wonderful by itself. It was a peaceful and relaxing place to visit, and it was so much less complicated to be there when you didn't have to take care of the door, protect the door, repair the door, and build fences around the door.

In the same way, the natural state of being can be quite open, peaceful, and inspiring to experience. It does not require placing something in the middle and saying, "This is mine, this is who I am, this is myself." That movement is an extra movement that places something in the natural setting, which more often than not does not need it. This is especially true if what we are doing is clinging and holding onto these things.

Craving and "Mine"

Conventionally, we might say things are ours. We say things are legally mine; there is ownership and there are things we allow each other to have. But the selfishness around that arises when we cling to "mine" and hold onto it for dear life, feeling like it has to be this way. This movement toward possessiveness and claiming, "This belongs to me," is a recipe for suffering.

In one famous origin story in Buddhism, one of the beginnings of the downturn of society was the creation of private property. People started hoarding private property and stealing, and things got out of hand. The idea of "it's mine" and holding it tight fails to realize that possessions of all kinds are fragile and temporary. There is no guarantee that they are going to stay around.

I read recently about a meteorite or asteroid that landed in the driveway of someone in Scotland, bringing a rare mineral with it. But there is no guarantee that lightning isn't going to strike us or strike our things, like our car or bicycle. An asteroid might fall on something we own, and then we don't own it anymore—it's gone. It just becomes a squashed piece of burnt stuff. The idea that "it is me, myself, and that it's mine" disappears.

Recently, I broke a ceramic bowl in the kitchen that my son had made. It was a beautiful bowl, and it belonged to our family. But as soon as it was broken, I didn't really think of it anymore as mine or as belonging to my family. I rather unceremoniously just put it in the trash, and off it went.

I love the story of Suzuki Roshi^[2] that I have told many times. There is a photograph of him taken just as he was speaking, which makes it more poignant. He holds up his glasses and says, "These are not my glasses, but you know about my old tired eyes, so you let me use them." That is a very different relationship to "my glasses."

Certainly, it is convenient to have things that we use and know will reliably be there the next day when we look for them. But we might reflect a little bit about how much extra attachment and possessiveness there might be in the fear of not being safe, or attachment to status. It gets more interesting when we look at what we take as "mine" regarding traits of our personality, qualities of our physique and body, our ways of being in the world, and our opinions. If we hold onto those, cling to them, and think they are unchanging, we will suffer. For the Buddha, it is very explicit: even taking this body as "mine" is a recipe for more suffering.

Isn't it natural and normal to take this body as mine? Conventionally, yes. But we should do so with an open hand, not clinging to it, holding it lightly and provisionally. As soon as you say, "my body," you might feel you have to be in charge of it, that it can't change, and that it has to always stay the same.

Conceit and Comparative Thinking

The second form of selfishness is conceit. This has to do with over-evaluating oneself in relationship to other people. The common English word "conceit" refers to thinking we have a higher value than others, that we are better than others in some ways. It is a form of comparative thinking. As soon as we get involved in comparative thinking with other people, it becomes an amazing source of suffering.

Things are constantly shifting in the social world between our abilities and other people's abilities. If we expect to always have a higher evaluation than other people, we will eventually meet someone who is better. I might be pretty good at basketball compared to the six-year-old next door, but not compared to most adult men. Do I hold onto a conceit that I am a better basketball player than everyone else? I will probably just suffer around that idea.

This comparative thinking is an unnecessary glass door in the wilderness. It mars the natural setting, limits it, and turns into something we need to protect. We put fences around it and want more control over it. It actually becomes a form of limiting ourselves rather than freeing ourselves.

There is a wonderful Calvin and Hobbes cartoon where Calvin is in the snow building a fort to make himself feel safe. He builds up the walls so they go above his head. He surrounds himself with snow to make a good, safe fort, but he essentially makes a round little cone around himself. Once it's finished, he is trapped inside, and he yells, "Help, help!" because he can't get out anymore. Conceit can become a trap like that; we protect ourselves too much and we can't even breathe.

In the ancient Buddhist teachings, a word closely related to māna^[3], the word for conceit, is the word mada^[4]. Mada means to be intoxicated, totally confused, and wrapped up in things. Sometimes it is translated as pride, but since "pride" has a variety of positive meanings these days, "intoxication" is often more accurate. One translation of ancient Abhidhamma^[5] texts lists all kinds of things people are intoxicated by. They are intoxicated by their birth, by their caste, by their clan, by their health, by youth, and with life itself. They are intoxicated with gain and acquisitions, with honor, with being respected, with fame, with having followers, and with wealth. They are intoxicated with skin color, with learning, with intelligence, with not being despised, with accomplishments, and with popularity. They are intoxicated with being ethical and with meditation attainments. The list goes on and on.

Each of these is seen as a kind of conceit that we get intoxicated by or caught up in. It is so much easier to be in the world without getting caught by comparative thinking. Thinking that we are less than other people, or that we have less value, is also considered a form of conceit, because it is still an attachment to an idea of self and a comparative way of thinking.

The solution is not to figure out a better way to compare ourselves. Even comparing ourselves as equals to others is still considered playing the comparison game. Rather, freedom is found by not comparing—by allowing ourselves and others to be just as they are. It means removing the door and the fences in the middle of the wilderness and letting that natural setting be itself.

The Conceit of Views

The third kind of conceit is the conceit of views—philosophical opinions and beliefs about what the "true self" or "essential self" is. The Buddha said he knew of no belief in an essential, true self that doesn't bring suffering. I haven't done the analysis myself to see if that's really the case, but it's certainly a provocative idea. We can say that anytime we cling or crave something, we will suffer.

If we are craving or clinging to a view or an idea—"my true self is my soul," "my true self is my inner goodness," or "my true self is my consciousness"—will that give birth to suffering? Does it bring suffering when we are not in touch with that true self, when it's not evident and present, and it just remains an idea we have? The idea then needs to be reinforced and reasserted in order to stay in touch with it, because maybe it can't really be felt and experienced.

What about deep meditation, when whatever we experience as the essence of who we are falls away? Some people get really frightened by this. In deep meditation, when we let go of all clinging, the peace is remarkable. It is liberating when the ordinary reference points for anything we experience as "myself" dissolve. But some people get frightened because they think, "I am this, and I have to be this."

Letting Go and Finding Peace

The antidote to selfishness in Buddhism is certainly to see the suffering of it. Sometimes it is only by seeing how painful and fragile it is, and how much energy goes into being selfish, that people begin to loosen up and let go.

But the other antidote is happiness. It is experiencing a deep, abiding sense of well-being and contentment that doesn't require being selfish. One of the functions of meditation practice is not only to become calm and mindful, but to acquire a sense of deeper contentment, satisfaction, and ease. It allows us to breathe easily and freely without clinging to any idea of "me, myself, and mine"—at least giving ourselves a radical break from it.

We don't come into meditation to hold onto these ideas. The fuel for a lot of our preoccupied thinking is "me, myself, and mine." When we let go of that, we can experience something really wonderful. We begin to value the beautiful, natural setting that we have—the natural capacity for ease, freedom, and peace. We learn how to wander freely and openly in our own hearts, our own minds, and our own lives, without the glass door in the middle of it all, and without the fences around it.

Our lives become unobstructed. We don't need to advertise ourselves, promote ourselves, defensively explain^[6] to people who we are, or assert ourselves on people as a form of clinging. One of the benefits of discovering such well-being, peace, and ease is that it might be easier to stand up for oneself when society around you tries to define you. When society says, "You have to be different," or "You have to be this way," if we have our own stability and peace inside, we are not wrapped up in identity issues. It can be quite powerful to stand up for ourselves and say no to how other people define us.

Other people's "me, myself, and mine" (or "you, yourself, and yours") can be really oppressive for many people. Looking deeply at selfishness is a gift, so that we don't project our own views onto others in ways that oppress them. Imagine if we could live in a world where we don't put fences around anyone, where we don't put glass doors that block anyone's path. We would allow people to be how they are, and allow the natural world to unfold beautifully without the limitations and problems of our clinging.

May this meditation practice show us the limitations and suffering of our selfishness, so that we become more open, free, generous, kind, and forgiving. When there is no clinging, a naturalness is present. I hope that gives you something to reflect on. Hopefully, you are forgiving of yourself if you happen to have some conceit or some "me, myself, and mine." You might want to take a deeper look at this topic and make it a study for the week.

When I saw this ancient list about being intoxicated—caught up in health, youth, gain, honor, fame, followers, learning, accomplishments, popularity—I was kind of delighted. This has been going on for thousands of years. It is what humans tend to do, especially when they come together. So if you are involved in some of it as well, you have a lot of company. You have the company of the Buddha in freedom, and perhaps the company of yourself in meditation, where you are beginning to loosen up and unstick yourself from all forms of selfishness.

May you let go of selfishness and find out how to be really happy in this life. Thank you.