In the last session, I provided an overview of the four noble truths, which primarily teach us how to achieve liberation from suffering. Hopefully, this week you'll learn more about your Trixie mind on the meditation cushion and spend time each day looking out for those destabilizing second arrows. I bet if you did, you're able to pinpoint a few. Isn't it liberating just to see him? Every time I do, I always think about how relieving it is to think things don't always have to stay like this. I can actually do something to quiet down the inner critic who sometimes seems to take up residence in my mind. In this session, I want to talk more about where these second arrows stem from. I don't mean that we're going to focus on the roots of negative self-talk. We explored that in a previous course. We're going to focus on deals with our blind spots, characteristics about life, and about ourselves that we either overlook or can't quite wrap our head around. In Buddhism, these are called the marks of existence and coming to terms with them can be incredibly useful as we attempt to navigate this life. There's a story that's been handed down over the millennia about the Buddha during the time of his spiritual quest. In the midst of his journey, the Buddhist sat down under a Bodhi tree to meditate, and as he sat in reflective stillness, he observed many things about the life all around him. He noticed how beautiful the countryside was. The Buddhist saw the circle of life all around him. Everything seemed beautiful. Flowers bloomed, and the leaves caught the sun, but in the midst of all of this life and beauty, he also saw grave unhappiness, the flowers he watched bloom eventually withered and died. He saw a farmer beating an ox in the field. He saw a bird eat a worm, and then an eagle eat that bird. Deeply troubled, he wondered why life turns into death and why living creatures destroy and kill each other for sustenance. He meditated on this for a long while, and in that time, he was able to clearly see three specific characteristics that seemed to him to mark everything in the physical world. Everything from solid forums like animals, plants, and minerals to more ephemeral energetic forces like mental activity and psychological experience. The first characteristic Buddha noticed is that everything's transient, It's always in process. According to traditional Buddhist dharma, life is comparable to a river. Just like water molecules joined together to give the appearance of one continuous flow, life is actually a successive series of different moments joining together to give the impression of one singular experience. But in reality, our lives and everything all around us is actually changing every moment. This is true on a cellular level, we know that cells and all living bodies are constantly dying off for dividing themselves, are regenerating, and this is true energetically as well. Our lives are continually shaped by causes and effects, and we move from one state of existence to another. To continue with the metaphor of the river, the river of yesterday is not the same as the river of today. The river in this moment is not going to be the same as the river in the next moment. Now, what in the world does that even mean? It means that everything is impermanence, everything. Bodies decline and decay, excitement and anger arise and then fade away, relationships change and sometimes disappear, even mountains eventually crumble and stars burn themselves out. The entire universe is in process of constant flux, rising, and falling away. Maybe you hear this, and you think, yes, yes I get it, and I'm sure you do. On some level, we can all acknowledge that everything has a life. The problem is that even though we know it, subconsciously, we still refuse to accept it. We cling and attach to things the hope that they're permanent because change and what's on the other side of it is hard to face. I'm wrestling with that in my own life right now. In the last several years, my body and what I can do with that has changed tremendously, and not all for the better if you know what I mean. But resisting the fact that I'm aging doesn't help me. It doesn't stop time or make me any less stiff when I get up in the morning. It just makes me mad, and I push myself harder than is necessary because I always feel like I have something to prove that I can still run as fast or climb as higher, serve just as long as I could when I was younger. It's exhausting, like I'm chasing a ghost. But when I can accept the reality that my body's changing, that maybe I'm slowing down a little bit, I don't just focus on the negative aspects of growing older, and I don't blow it out of proportion. I remember things like with time comes wisdom and freedom, and authenticity, and my body with all of its abilities and limitations is still a miracle one to be grateful for. Accepting impermanence doesn't mean that we don't attach to things or that loss suddenly becomes easy. It means that our attachments don't own us. If we can learn to clean a little less, we're not as undone by the arrival of yet another gray hair or when a relationship ends or when people are animals that we love die. Our acceptance of the inevitable allows us to go with the flow of life, to be more flexible in our thinking, and it gives us more grace and resilience during times of great loss. There's an even sunnier side to our acknowledgment of the fact that everything isn't permanent. If we believe that everything's always in process, always evolving and changing, and if we include in this category moods, emotions, and experience, then we don't have to panic when negative emotions or circumstances come our way, they too shall pass. Now, this isn't a theoretical truth that I'm asking you to accept. It's a concept that I'm asking you to consider and explore in your own life. One way to investigate it and something that we've dabbled within previous courses is to focus meditation on the ever-changing nature of the breath and other bodily sensations or our shifting thoughts, or the passing of the seasons and other transformations in the natural world. Once you start to get comfortable with the shifting nature of things in your meditation practice, you can find areas in your life where you feel stuck in grief or loss or where you cling because you expect and desires a situation or a relationship to last. When you land on something, you might consider what might change if you accept the reality of impermanence. How might it reduce your suffering? We've included practice with this module that'll help guide you through this, and I encourage you to try to do it daily for at least the next week. If you do, I think you'll come to understand the veracity and the wisdom of Buddha's observation. A second characteristic about life that Buddha noticed is that it's both impersonal and imperfect. It's fundamentally dissatisfying. It doesn't always provide us with what we want, and even when we have what we want, things change. Even pleasure and happiness have limitations. Now, most of us have a normal and healthy drive to move towards the things that helped keep us safe and happy and to avoid danger and pain, and unpleasantness. This inclination is programmed in our DNA, and it's integral to our survival. There's nothing wrong with generally trying to meet your happiness needs or avoid pain and things that are unpleasant. The difficulty arises when we attach ourselves to these experiences. Our desires can then own us, resulting in a cascade of unintended consequences. Maybe we deal with our desire not to experience grief and loss by numbing our sadness with too much alcohol, or we distract ourselves by scrolling through social media for hours on end. Instead of understanding that all emotions are fleeting, our tendency is to resist, fight, push away the challenging ones and hold on tight to the stuff that makes us feel good. But nothing is going to change the fact that good stuff doesn't last, and bad stuff happens to every last one of us. Life is inherently painful. Our mindfulness practice supports our acceptance of this reality and teaches us to move with all the ups and downs of life instead of against it. It teaches us not to mind what happens as much. It's not personal, and it's not permanent. It's just how things are at the moment. Remember, our meditation practice teaches us to pause in the midst of emotional experience, to sit with it, and observe the feelings. It facilitates inner calm that can keep us upright like a ballast keeps a ship upright in strong winds. We can be steady and strong to go with the flow of life without needing anything to be different than it is. Being aware of our feelings and making wise choices for expressing them or offering ourselves compassion in their midst enables them to discharge. Remember, emotions are as susceptible to the laws of physics as anything else. They're also impermanent. If we let them be, they'll go away on their own. But again, don't take my word for it. The next time you find yourself embroiled and swirling emotion, hit the pause button, get a sense of what you're feeling, scan for any second arrows that you might be throwing, and then notice what happens when you create space for your experience to be what it is, that ruinous can be transformative. The last characteristic that the Buddha noticed, and this one might feel very challenging to understand, is that there's no permanent underlying or essential substance in humans that can be identified concretely as the self. In fact, it suggests that the individual self, our likes, and our dislikes, what we think and believe about the world and our place in it, is more kin to a fictional character than the real thing. In other words, the self that you think you know, isn't real. Now, most of us tend to believe that there is something essential and absolute about who we are as individuals. Something we call I, that we identify as the primary experiencer of experience. This I is what we think of as our true self, but in the Buddhist tradition, no such thing exists. There's no self, just a very convincing illusion. Now, this doesn't mean that you don't exist or that the traditional ways you might think of yourself are erroneous. We can still think of our social roles or our professional roles, identifying as why for professor or friend. But what it does suggest is that there's no permanent autonomous pilot at the helm, that we feel like there's an essential illness to us. A true self that's continuous and stable, is itself simply the product of thought. This feeling is an example of what it's like to be over-identified with thought. Remember, everything about us is in constant flux, from the trillions of cells that make our body to the multitude of processes that creates thoughts, emotions, reactions, opinions, and beliefs. This means that all that we think we know or think we feel is born out of previous conditions influenced by context, time, our environment, and people around us. There's nothing fundamental about who we are. Now, this might seem like a radical idea and contradictory to your own personal experience, but this is enlarged part because we've confused the process of thinking as a genuine thing for such a long time. It takes time and practice to recognize that our sense of self exists only as an idea rather than a fact. This recognition is made even more difficult by just how convincing the illusionary self actually is. According to Chris Niebauer, a cognitive neuroscientist who wrote a fascinating book on this topic, the illusionary self is what narrates the world, determines your belief, replays your memories, identifies with your physical body, manufactures your projections about what might happen in the future, and create your judgments about the past. This sense of self seems all-important. It can be disconcerting to hear that it only exists as a construct of the mind rather than as a physical thing located somewhere inside the brain or the body. But there's a growing body of evidence to suggest that the ancient traditions of the East got this one right. The great success story of neuroscience has been in the mapping of the brain. We can point to the language center, the face processing center, and the center for understanding emotions and others. Practically every function of the mind has been mapped to an area of the brain except for the self, that thing that feels like I. Of course, this has been widely debated in scientific circles, but to date, there's no agreement on where or even if the seat of consciousness resides in the body. But other than fodder for mind-boggling philosophical debate, why does any of this matter? It matters because most of our suffering arises out of feeling like a separate fixed self and I. It creates a distorted view of reality with each of us at the center of our own universe and everything else arrayed around us as our objects. It's a mindset that leads to a more contracted selfish way of being and amplifies feelings of vulnerability and fear, grasping and aversion. The good news is the sense we all have as existing of an essential self can become the target of deconstruction through the practice of meditation. Not only does meditation give us an opportunity to carefully explore the nature of our own mind and our own experience in a way that's unmediated. On a very basic level, meditation teaches us that we're not our thoughts. They're simply mental activities of the brain that we can choose to focus on, identify with or believe or not. You know from your own practice that mind wanders off into thoughts all the time, and if we're not paying attention, we can easily get lost in them. But if we are paying attention and we take time to closely look at thoughts themselves, what we notice is that they continually arise and pass away. Arise and pass away. Whatever their urgency or content, thoughts vanish, almost the instant they appear, and if you look for the origin of these thoughts, where they come from, where they go, who created them, you won't find much. When we turn our attention to this thing called I, when we mindfully investigate it, it disappears, and with it disappears much of our suffering. This is a really tough concept to get your head around. Don't worry if you feel lost, shocked or even if you vehemently disagree. As I mentioned, we'll be coming back to this idea in later sessions. You'll have a chance to hear more about it. We've included some extra material in the resource section to help you. Take some time to look at these extra items, and then look for the self in your meditation practice. Illusions only exist until they're investigated. For me, awareness of these three marks of existence and my own tendency to misconstrue reality continues to grow. I feel like every week I learn some new way that I'm clinging to a rigid story or allowing assumptions and preconceived ideas to guide my behavior. Like you, I'm a work in progress. But with every delusion I dispel, my feelings of freedom and happiness grow, and I trust this work even more deeply. Hopefully, as your practice continues to grow, you will as well.
