Mastering the Core Teachings of Buddha. An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book - [18]

My favorite exercise for examining suffering is to sit in a quite place with my eyes closed and examine the physical sensations that make up any sort of desire, be it desire to get something, get away from something or just tune out and go to sleep. At a rate of one to ten times per second, I try to experience exactly how I know that I wish to do something other than simply face my current experience as it is.

Moment to moment, I try to find those little uncomfortable urges and tensions that try to prod my mind into fantasizing about past or future or stopping my meditation entirely.

For that meditation period, they are my prey and nourishment, opportunities to understand something extraordinary about reality, and so I do my very best to let none of them arise and pass without the basic 27

The Three Characteristics

sense of dissatisfaction in them being clearly perceived as it is. I turn on sensations of the desire to get results, turn on the pains and unsettling sensations that make my mind contract, turn on the boredom that is usually aversion to suffering in disguise, turn on the sensations of restlessness that try to get me to stop meditating. Anything with fear or judgment in it is my bread and butter for that meditation period. Any sensation that smacks of grandiosity or self-loathing is welcomed as a source of wisdom.

A half hour to an hour of this sort of consistent investigation of suffering is also quite a workout, particularly as we spend most of our lives doing anything but looking to these sorts of sensations to gain insight from them. However, I have found that this sort of investigation pays off in ways I could never have imagined.

Looking into unsatisfactoriness may not sound as concrete as the thing about vibrations, but I assure you it is. Even the most pleasant sensations have a tinge of unsatisfactoriness to them, so look for it at the level of bare experience. Pain is a gold mine for this. I am absolutely not advocating cultivating pain, as there is already enough there. Just knowing in each precise instant how you actually know that pain is unsatisfactory can be profound practice. Don't settle for just the knee jerk answer that “of course pain is unsatisfactory.” Know exactly how you know this in each moment, but don't get lost in stories about it. This is bare reality, ultimate reality we're talking about. Just be with it, engage with it, and know it as it is at a very simple level.

NO-SELF

The last and perhaps most misunderstood of the Three

Characteristics is no- self , also rendered as egol ess nes s or emptine ss . Emptiness, for all its mysterious sounding connotations, just means that reality is empty of a permanent, separate self. The emphasis here absolutely must be on the words “permanent” and

“separate.” It doesn't mean that reality is not there, or that all of this is illusion! Solidity is an illusion, permanence is an illusion, that the watcher is a separate thing is an illusion, but all of this isn't an illusion.

Sure, all experience is utterly transient and ephemeral, but that is not quite the same as everything being an illusion. There is a habit of reading just a bit too much into things and coming out with the false 28

The Three Characteristics

conclusion that all of this means that there is some separate, permanent us. Reality is actually fine just as it is and always has been, but there is a deeper understanding of it that is called for.

Let's talk a little bit about this concept and how the illusion of a self is created in the first place before we talk about how to use this powerful and profound concept of no-self in simple ways in practice. Some theory really can be useful to the practice, as all of it can be understood directly once one has some stability of mind and a bit of insight into what is mind and what is body, and when each is and isn't there.

We have this notion that there is really a permanent “I.” We might say, “Hello, I am...” and be quite convinced that we are talking about a permanent, separate thing that can be found. However, if we are just a bit more sophisticated we might ask, “What is this 'I' which we are sure is us?” We have grown so accustomed to the fact of the definition changing all the time that we hardly notice it, but the point of insight practice is to notice it, and to see just what it is that we are calling “I” in each moment.

We may begin with the obvious assumption: we are our body. This sounds nice until we say something like “my body.” Well, if it is “my body,” that seems to imply that, at that moment, whatever it is that owns the body wasn't the body. Suppose someone points to our toenails.

They surely seem to be “me,” until we clip them, and then they are “not me.” Is this really the same body as when we were born? It isn't even made of the same cells, and yet it seems to be a permanent thing. Look more closely, at the sensate level, and you will see that moment to moment it isn't. At the level of actual experience, all that is found is flickering stuff. So impermanence is closely related to no-self, but there is more to no-self than that.