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audiodharma:
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      section_slug: mindfulness-of-oneself-5-of-5-freedom-from-self
      speakers:
        - speaker_name: Gil Fronsdal
          speaker_url: https://www.audiodharma.org/speakers/1
      talk_start_time_seconds: 0
      title: Mindfulness of Oneself (5 of 5) Freedom from Self
      url: https://www.audiodharma.org/talks/12186
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  title: 'Dharmette: Mindfulness of Oneself (5 of 5)  Freedom from Self; Q & A s'
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  uploader_str: Insight Meditation Center
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---

# Mindfulness of Oneself (5 of 5) Freedom from Self - [Gil Fronsdal](https://www.audiodharma.org/speakers/1)

_This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video above. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers._

## [Mindfulness of Oneself (5 of 5) Freedom from Self](https://www.audiodharma.org/talks/12186)

This question of what the self is, who we are, is a very profound and rich question that is multifaceted. It doesn't lend itself, especially in the English-speaking world, to a singular idea or concept of what self is. Psychologists, neuropsychologists, and philosophers have been looking for this self, trying to define it. To a great extent, people keep coming back to the conclusion that it is very hard to define. Perhaps lots of modern researchers are coming up with the Buddhist idea that there is no self—rather, what we are is a conglomeration of many different physical and mental forces that operate and get put together into some feeling of a unified or central self. But if you really investigate deeply and explore what that is, it begins to unravel. It begins to show itself as being made up of many different subparts that are arising and passing, impermanent, and changing.

So, there are some modern researchers who will say such things as there is inherently no self. The Buddha didn't say that explicitly; he didn't say there is no self. In fact, as I quoted earlier, he thought that the notion that there is no self was actually a quagmire, kind of like quicksand to go into. But he did say that there are ideas of self, doctrines of self, and philosophies of self that exist. He said that any doctrine of self, any philosophy of self, will involve some degree of suffering. There is something about the coming together and holding some view or idea of "this is what the self is" that makes it very difficult to be completely free, open, and with infinite possibilities, allowing for the full range of what our psychophysical functioning might be like.

In this regard, I think of a slightly humorous metaphor. One definition I have for self is that self is wind drag. When you have a lot of wind drag as you're biking along, it will slow you down. The self is what slows us down. Or, self is a coagulation. Something that's fluid becomes solid as it coagulates. The fluidity of who we are and how we function gets somehow solidified and tightened into something called "self." That tightening can feel like there really is something here after all—it feels solid, central, or well-localized. But it turns out, in mindfulness practice, if we go in and look more deeply, we find that anything we identify as or hold on to as self is actually made up of subcomponents that are fluid and dynamic. It breaks down the idea of any solid, central, or essential idea of "this is who I am."

The Buddha never wanted to say there is no self, because that itself is a kind of coagulation. It becomes an idea that we hold ourselves by. What the Buddha was looking for was freedom from suffering, and that is what is being championed. The goal in doing Vipassanā[^1] practice, insight meditation, involves having three insights. These insights are understood to be characteristics of our experience. They characterize our experience, and those three insights are not biographical. They are not considered personal insights that are only true for yourself. Personal insights are very valuable for understanding what happened to us early in life, what our personal beliefs are, and how that influences our way of living; highlighting that is part of the value of mindfulness. But the insight of insight meditation is not personal in nature. Rather, it is understanding the building blocks for all experience, what we call personal experience. It is to see something universal, something that is universally true for all human beings. That is, that all experiences we have are somehow characterized by being inconstant, being dukkha[^2] (stressful, suffering, unsatisfactory), and that all experiences are not-self.

Whatever we actually experience, if you look deeply at it, we say, "Well, that's not really the self." The more we go into our direct experience with strong mindfulness practice, we start having this insight: "Oh, this is not self." Not-self is not a belief that we have to believe, nor is it a philosophy. You don't have to hear the teaching of not-self and then try to make yourself believe it or argue with it because it doesn't make sense. That's not the point. It is something to see, something that is revealed over time as mindfulness becomes strong. When mindfulness and concentration are really strong, it becomes clear that in the experiences we have, "this is not self."

I emphasize this wording to make a point: when I say "this is not self," it is always about _this_. It is always about something particular. It turns out in deep meditation practice that all the direct, particular experiences that are used as building blocks for conceptual understandings of who we are and what life is—all the individual building blocks of direct experience—we see very clearly: "Oh, that's not self." We don't plan it, we don't intend it, it just arises without any will, planning, or association with any central control tower or place of being.

Even one of the most powerful places of personal freedom is around personal choice. Some people want to say the ability to choose affirms that there is a self. That is a philosophy or an idea that seemingly comes out of experience. But in deep meditation, it's quite fascinating when the mind is really quiet and sees what is arising. Even this idea of choice doesn't quite seem to be personal. It doesn't quite seem to be "this is who I am." Is there really choice if the choice is happening without what you think is a self choosing? This whole world gets fascinating, but we don't get lost in it when we're doing deep meditation practice, which is really where the not-self teaching comes alive. Thinking about it is just wind drag, getting caught up in ideas.

What becomes clearer and clearer is that this experience—"this is not self"—reveals tremendous freedom. Freedom from "selfing," freedom from the attachments that are so often associated with self. To experience "this is not self" in this deep, revelatory way means we can look around, and in that moment, no self is found. Some people will say they are having a "no-self" experience, and that's completely appropriate to call it that in a sense, but it is a little bit abstract.

What is dangerous is to come out of that deep meditation and come to the conclusion, like a philosophy, that "there is no self." The Buddha didn't say that. It lends itself to all kinds of philosophical and personal difficulties if we start saying there is no self. We don't say there _is_ a self, but there is personal responsibility, personal self-awareness. There is personal choice at a different level of how the mind operates and sees.

To really have this not-self insight means that we come back from that experience much less inclined to get attached, much less inclined to be involved in greed, hate, and delusion, and much more inclined to have a clear feel for liberation, for freedom, for the emptiness of self. We can step into that emptiness as an experience, relax, and open to the possibility that we don't always have to be measuring, thinking, feeling, and deciding about things related to self. We can step through into that emptiness. The tradition calls it the "door of emptiness," and stepping through that door allows for some of the deepest letting go that is possible. That is called liberation and freedom.

We come out of that experience appreciating that generally, this idea of self that is so important for many people is a bit overrated. We're much better off not giving it such a high priority and obsession, which our culture often supports us in doing. Having freedom from self doesn't mean that we have to discard everything we might call self, because there are many different viewpoints of what this self is. But now we can hold it all lightly, wisely, and ethically, without operating with a self that is devoted or committed to greed, hatred, and delusion, or to attachments.

That is my attempt to talk about this topic of self and not-self. I hope it was clarifying over these days. I'll be back here in a couple of weeks. I've been doing a series on mindfulness: mindfulness of breathing, mindfulness of thinking, mindfulness of emotions, mindfulness of the body, and now mindfulness of self. I thought that when I come back it might be interesting to do a week on mindfulness of Nibbāna[^3], Nirvana, of liberation itself. That might be an interesting five days, so that's what I'm hoping. Thank you very much.

## Q&A

As I said, now I can stay here a little bit. If you want to ask some questions in the chat, I'm going to treat the chat as a basket that you drop your questions into, and I'll just pull them out randomly. In the past, I've tried to read them in order out of respect for each one, but it proves too hard with the chat moving so quickly. So I'll try to go around and get them.

**"How do you sit selflessly with pain and bodily malfunction?"**

Yes, it's actually easier to sit with pain and bodily malfunction if there's not a lot of selfing going on. I learned that as one of my first lessons when I started sitting retreats. I was doing Zen retreats where you weren't allowed to move during the 45-minute sitting. Sitting repeatedly through the day that way, I had a tremendous amount of knee pain because I wasn't really limber enough. I could see very clearly at some point that if I had self-pity, the little micro-muscles around the knees got tighter and the pain got worse. If I had no self-pity, it was easier to be with the pain.

Self is often a magnet for fears, judgments, comparisons, and ideas about what should and shouldn't be. The self is not an innocent little thing that's just sitting quietly watching what's going on; the self has a lot to do with reactivity. It is often the seat, the house of reactivity. If we're really caught up in this notion of self, then pain and bodily malfunction can be a lot more difficult. If there is less self, less need to be a particular kind of self and to always measure ourselves against what kind of self we need to be, then it can be easier to be with pain. It's not a breeze to be with pain—I want to respect the difficulty of it—but it actually can be a lot easier if we're not doing a lot of selfing around it.

**"If reincarnation and karma, something continues ongoing in this conglomerate?"**

Buddhists don't tend to use the word reincarnation; they use the word rebirth. I think because reincarnation suggests that there is something very specific that travels between one birth and the other. Rebirth, for Buddhists at least, is the idea that there is no "thing" that travels, but rather it's a momentum, kind of like a wave that goes across an ocean. There is no water that travels across the ocean with the wave. The wave is the momentum that's pushing these particles of water up and down. It's the up-and-down momentum that goes across the ocean. The Buddha talked a little bit that way about rebirth, and karma is what creates that momentum.

It is a little bit hard to understand. I never felt that Buddhists explained very well what the mechanism of rebirth is and how it really fits with this teaching of not-self. But maybe the teaching of not-self wasn't meant to explain too many things. Human beings and philosophers are always trying to explain things and make them line up in an explanatory way. Perhaps the freedom that Buddhism is looking for doesn't need everything explained. We discover this door of not-self for the purpose of freedom; we don't have to use that experience of not-self to build explanations about how things work.

**"Does the ego fight one to achieve freedom, or does it diminish as time goes on, or rear its head again and again?"**

I think the attachment to self, the self-definitions we have, the desires and aversions we have, lend themselves to a lot of impatience, restlessness, and attachment to having things be a certain way. Anything that threatens those attachments or ideas of self that we hold on to causes a rebellion. There is a protest, running away, frustration, anger—all kinds of things. Sometimes there can be fantasy that we go into, and it can be very convincing. There are ways in which we get tricked out of the path of liberation because of what we might call the ego. We have to be very attentive and alert to really see how all this works in our minds. That's one of the benefits of developing mindfulness. As we get clearer, we see more clearly what's really going on in there, and so we are wiser and freer about it.

[Laughter] Oops, okay.

**"Would you speak more about respect? It seems very conditional to me. I understand self-pride, vanity, compassion, love, and care, but have a hard time understanding self-respect."**

This again is a labyrinth of challenges when we start using the word "self." People have so many different references, understandings, and philosophies of it. Different cultures use the word differently. Some people say there's a tendency in Buddhism to be very shy of using the word self. That's why the talk I gave on Monday emphasized that the personhood, who we are, is something that becomes a person of respect. We become someone with a certain dignity and value. We are valuable beings.

But because the word self is a magnet for all this cultural, personal, and familial luggage about what a self should be, what the right self is, and what the wrong self is, it's a very complicated word. We can use some of these words very lightly. Self-respect is the ability to be present, to see clearly without disrespect, animosity, demeaning criticism, or feeling that we're inadequate somehow. It's the ability to be present in a clear and dignified way without any fear diminishing the value of who we are. That's kind of my definition of it, so I hope that was useful.

**"After being free of self, what is left?"**

What is left is our ability to respond to the world without greed, hate, and delusion. The response to the world is just what the system is set up for. Greed, hate, and delusion are more the surface crust of the mind and the heart. When that surface crust is dissolved, then the depth of who we are has a chance to feel and experience what's happening in this world. The depth of who we are is a place where we have the opposite of fight or flight; it's where we approach and soothe, where we step forward with care, compassion, kindness, and friendliness. The absence of self-clinging allows for that deeper wellspring of attention, sensitivity, and goodwill to operate exactly how it's going to operate for different people. It is very personal. We should be very careful not to make it an essential idea of what a person should be like when they are liberated from self. I think what we're free to do then is for our own deep personality and uniqueness to come forward and be what it is. A million people might have radically different expressions of what freedom looks like, or how their deep sensitivity and care for the world gets expressed. I like the idea that we want to give people who are free the freedom to really be who they are and to trust it.

**"Is the arising of self considered within the aggregate of saṅkhāra[^4]?"**

Yeah, probably that. That's where the mental formations construct in the mind. It wouldn't be anywhere else. I guess it could be a little bit of saññā[^5], part of the recognition of things.

**"How to approach self-loathing with love without engorging the self?"**

That's a very good question. It's a little bit hard to answer such an important question without more information, but sometimes what helps is to feel the heartbreak of self-loathing. Feel the suffering of it and how painful it is to be that way. Sometimes when we're really feeling the pain of it, the heart breaks, and only then do we soften and relax. When the tears come and we feel how sad and difficult it is to live that way.

Another way is to begin actually doing the opposite and offer mettā[^6] to oneself—loving-kindness and compassion. Engage in that both as a meditation practice and with kind acts. Live and do things that express it. Even if you don't feel like you have self-generosity or self-love, sometimes you can just act your way to it by treating yourself in that way and feeling the benefits.

A third thing, because it is such an important one, is to talk to a friend or someone really wise that you trust, and simply talk about it. Maybe it's a little bit like a confession, opening up. Sometimes opening up around self-loathing can break the trance. We can hear ourselves speak about it and realize, "Wait a minute, maybe I don't really believe this," or, "Maybe it's not really true." It kind of breaks out of the shell, because sometimes self-talk is very hard to become free of.

**"The notion that thoughts are not self, I can see not giving them authority, not picking them up, but to disown them as not-self, I need help with this."**

This is again so hard with this notion of self. But anything that we cling to or hold on to as the self, we understand that clinging to it is painful and not worth doing. It turns out that if you really focus on the non-clinging aspect, most ideas of self that people operate under do in fact have some clinging involved with it. Shedding that clinging is part of the freedom we begin discovering for ourselves.

We don't want to disown anything in the sense that we have a degree of choice about how to relate to our thoughts, impulses, and desires. We want to be able to do that wisely. In deep meditation, the choice is to leave them alone, not to be involved, to let them just be there, and then we can see them as not-self. But in ordinary life, we have to actually choose to do things. We don't just leave things alone. We are responsible for what we think, tracking them, questioning them, and deciding how to listen to them in the right way. All this is an important part of who we are. There's no need to disown anything.

That's why it's very important not to take this not-self teaching out of its native Buddhist context. It's so easy for us human beings to hear these teachings and then want to apply them outside their context, saying, "Well, if this teaching is true, how does it work here and here?" It's not meant to be applied that way. Use your common sense in how you live your life. But as we have a deeper experience of this revelation—"this is not self"—as that becomes strong in Vipassanā practice, some of that changes our view about how we live our ordinary life. We start seeing that even our thoughts have a way in which they are not-self; they arise. There's no shame or grandeur for the thoughts that we have, but we still have to be careful about how we pick them up and how we're involved with them. If we don't automatically attribute them to the self, they are less sticky. We have more choice and can handle them more wisely.

**"These mornings are wonderful. So far they are not penetrating the density of selfing that manifests during the day. Can you speak honestly about what's necessary to actually end our suffering, the density of selfing that manifests during the day?"**

If you're motivated to really penetrate the density and coagulation that we have around self and the attachments to it, the whole path of Buddhism is to really become free of clinging. What's left after that, a lot of Buddhists don't want to call "self" anymore, but they are still very self-responsible in the English language.

But it's really dense, so deep meditation practice is the personal way that requires concentrated mindfulness—the kind of attention that is usually only available for most people on retreat, practicing for a long time. This is where the insight of Vipassanā into the context for experiencing not-self is most relevant. If a person has done a lot of retreats and feels like they haven't penetrated that, they should talk to some teachers to get advice about what's going on. Or it might be that there are other modalities that can penetrate through the shell of self that might work better for some people than this meditation path.

**"Detachment from self, dispassion, disillusion have negative implications in English. Wish there were a word that imparts the positive nature of these efforts, states, and intentions."**

Yes, I think most Western Dharma teachers who speak English don't use the word "detachment" very much because of its negative associations, but rather use the word "non-attachment." It doesn't quite have the same negative distancing or indifference that detachment can suggest. Some people are fine with the word dispassion and disillusion, but I agree they can have very negative associations. The word "passion" apparently originally comes from the word suffering (e.g., the passion of Christ), so "dispassion" meant to end suffering. In Buddhist English, passion means the absence of very strong craving, like lust. Passion here is not seen as a zest or enthusiasm for life, but rather as greed.

I think we should adopt the word "disillusion" more. Buddhists often use the word "disenchantment," but they both carry the idea of not living in illusion or enchantment. I appreciate the idea of finding words for the positive nature of these states. The primary one in Buddhism is "freedom" or "liberation." Sometimes they use "happiness" or "great happiness," or "peace" and "ease"—to live with an ease that doesn't have the agitation that comes with attachment, craving, or living in delusion. So yes, it's a very good point.

**"Where do thoughts come from?"**

Thoughts arise from the combined, interrelated functioning of the whole planet. Everything contributes to the arising of a thought. I say that in a little bit of a phantasmagoric way. It's fascinating to watch the birth of a thought. When the mind is really quiet and still, to see a thought arise without seeing it coming is amazing. Sometimes we see that thoughts arise clearly because something prompts them. We can see, "Oh, I thought X because someone told me about Y, and I was reminded of something." If I say the phrase, "The hills are alive with the sound of..." many people of a certain age would fill in those lyrics, and the word "music" would appear in their mind. Where did that come from? It was prompted by my silly example.

Sometimes you can see the causes and conditions that precede the birth of a thought, but sometimes it just arises completely without any seeming conditions. It's fascinating to consider what combined forces allow a thought to arise. But what's more fascinating is how hard it is then to take that thought as "myself." That word "music" appearing in your mind—was that you? Did you plan it? Did you have a choice in that word appearing? Is it any different than feeling a breeze across your skin? Some parts of the mind just operate automatically.

These are fascinating questions, but in Buddhist practice, when you really get into the flow of it, the idea is not to get distracted by questions like that. The task is to have very clear mindfulness about what's actually happening in the moment as we're experiencing it, so that we come to this place of freedom.

I hope these answers are good and this has been interesting. I appreciate all the questions. It shows me how important it is to have an exchange, which is a big limitation of this YouTube format that we have to live with a little bit. I look forward to the time that we can be more in person and have more dialogue. Thank you, and I'll see you in a few weeks, or maybe Sunday if some of you come there.

---

[^1]: **Vipassanā:** A Pali word often translated as "insight," referring to insight meditation practices aimed at seeing the true nature of reality.

[^2]: **Dukkha:** A Pali word often translated as "suffering," "stress," or "unsatisfactoriness."

[^3]: **Nibbāna:** The Pali term for Nirvana, the ultimate goal of Buddhist practice, representing liberation and the cessation of suffering.

[^4]: **Saṅkhāra:** A Pali word meaning "formations" or "mental dispositions," considered one of the five aggregates (khandhas) that constitute a sentient being.

[^5]: **Saññā:** A Pali word translated as "perception" or "recognition," another of the five aggregates.

[^6]: **Mettā:** A Pali word meaning "loving-kindness" or "benevolence."