"The body is not self. If it were, it would not get sick. You could tell your body: be like this or don't be like that. But because the body is not self, it does get sick. You can't tell it: be like this or don't be like that. He points out that the same is true for feelings, perceptions, inclinations and consciousness. You cannot determine in advance how you will feel, what you will perceive, how you will be inclined to act, or what you will be conscious of. You do not choose to feel happy rather than sad, to perceive a world that delights rather than disturbs you, to always incline to a calm rather than an agitated response, to be unconscious rather than conscious of something distressing. In others words, you are not in charge of what is going on within your own experience.
The liberating insight he [Buddha] proposes is not the realization that there is no self but the realization that I am not the same as or reducible to any or all of the five bundles (aggregates) that constitute me.
Gotama understood awakening as the result of directly knowing how experience comes about.
The key to freeing oneself from the repetitive cycles of reactivity and beholding nirvana is attention. When attention becomes embodied through contemplation of the transient, tragic, impersonal and empty nature of the bundles, our relationship to experience begins to shift in disconcerting ways. The practice of embodied attention challenges our habitual perceptions of self and world as permanent, satisfatory and intrinsically ours. By stabilizing attention through mindfulness and concentration, we begin to see for ourselves how pleasurable and painful feelings trigger habitual patterns of reactivity and craving. These two insights not only undermine our inclinations to hold on to what we like and to push away what we fear but open up the possibility of thinking, speaking and acting otherwise.
'Seeing things this way', says Gotama at the conclusion of his discourse on not-self, 'the attentive noble disciple disengages from form, disengages from feelings, disengages from perceptions, disengages from inclinations, disengages from consciousness. By disengaging, reactivity fades; non-reactive, he is freed; the knowledge arises: 'I am freed.'' This is the experience of nirvana as immediate and clearly visible; it is at this crucial point that one sees for oneself how one is free not to react to life but to respond to it from a perspective that is no longer conditioned by such inclinations."
After Buddhism: Rethinking the Dharma for a secular age
