Hello friends,

The moments we love most are often the ones where we disappear. Absorbed in music, or in work that’s engaging, in a books, or in the beauty of nature, the part of us who spends so much time holding up a sense of me, goes quiet and there's a sense of ease that comes with it. We usually call these good days, or flow, or getting out of our own way. We rarely notice what actually happened, which is that for a little while we stopped being a separate someone standing apart from our own life.

The rest of the time, being that someone takes a lot of effort. There's an image to keep consistent, a story to defend, a running comparison with everyone around us and much of our suffering carries this quality. It's personal. The insult lands because there's a me for it to land on. The fear grips because there's a me to protect. In July we watched this self assemble out of conditions, and saw that noticing this process was in itself the release. In August we learned to feel where the heart's warmth gets tangled and caught. This month we look right at the assumption underneath all of it, the sense that there's a fixed, separate someone here at all.

This month our theme is Anattā: The Freedom of Not Being Separate.

Where the Buddha looked

The Anattalakkhaṇa Sutta (SN 22.59) was the Buddha's second discourse, given to the five companions who had practiced alongside him in the forest. He takes the whole of a human life and sorts it into five heaps (khandhas, pali; skandhas, sanskrit): the body and its form, feeling, perception, volitional formation, and consciousness itself. Then he asks a simple, very practical question of each one. Can you make it be exactly as you wish? Tell the body never to age. Tell a mood to stay bright. Order a thought to arrive on command and another never to come. Each follows its own pattern. Whatever changes on its own, whatever arrives and leaves through conditions we never authored, turns out to be a strange thing to hold as "me" or “mine."

As the Buddha spoke, the five felt their grip loosen. They weren't being asked to take on a new belief to defend, but rather they were being asked to set something down. By the end of the talk, all five were awake.

The relief in it

People often hear not-self (anatta) and flinch, as though it means they're about to be erased. The felt reality runs the other way. What a relief to learn that the body has never been a possession we have to guard, that a passing mood has never been an achievement to maintain, that thoughts arrive and dissolve like weather and don’t have to be believed. The breath is already happening. Sounds arrive already complete. The whole of experience is showing itself, moment after moment, and no one has to be in charge of it.

Ajahn Sumedho points at this again and again, that everything which arises, passes away and doesn’t belong to a self, and that seeing this opens the door to peace. Ajahn Chah put the whole path in the language of letting go: 

“Try to do everything with a mind that lets go. Do not expect any praise or reward. If you let go a little, you will have a little peace. If you let go a lot, you will have a lot of peace, If you let go completely, you will know complete peace and freedom. Your struggle with the world will have come to an end.”

Anattā is this letting go seen all the way through.

Why the heart can be boundless

All year we've been cultivating the four qualities of the awakened heart, the brahmavihāras. They are described as, appamāṇa, meaning boundless, immeasurable. This month shows why they can be boundless at all.

The boundary is the self. The boundary that makes me a separate thing, set off from you, is the same wall that keeps our care limited and well defended. Soften that boundary and the heart's warmth no longer stops at the edge of my people, my concerns, my comforts. Compassion stops being a bridge I build across a gap toward someone over there, because the gap itself was part of the construction. Kittisaro and Thanissara teach the Kuan Yin dharmas in just this spirit, a compassion that pours out most freely right where the sense of a separate self wears thin. Mingyur Rinpoche and the Dzogchen teachings point to the same union, an open awareness with no center and the natural warmth that rises from it, one taste, inseparable. When we're not busy defending a self, the heart has nothing it needs to hold back.

In the formal practice

Sit, and instead of treating the breath as an object you own and operate, notice that the breathing is happening on its own. Sensations appear and vanish without our permission. Sounds land already complete. See if you can rest as the awareness in which all of this is showing up, the knowing that has no edge and wants nothing. When the self-sense tightens, a plan, a worry, a small flare of I and me and mine, that's welcome too. It's one more thing arising in the same open awareness. Even the tightening is anattā, moving by its own nature.

In daily life

Watch for the moments the separate self grows quiet, lost in good work, in laughter, in an ordinary afternoon that turns beautiful without warning. Let yourself enjoy them and trust them. Watch too for the moments it clenches, when a comment stings, when you catch yourself managing how you're coming across, when you get defensive. Both are the practice, and neither one needs fixing. We see it clearly and gently, and the seeing does the work, naturally.

May we set down, even for a single breath, the labor of being someone. May we find that what we are was never something to defend and that this very heart has room enough for everyone and everything. May the freedom of not being separate meet us right in the middle of our daily lives.

With love,

Adam

Resident Guiding Teacher

Mountain Stream Meditation