"We come to meditation with the usual assumption that the thoughts and images and feelings that arise are something that I am doing, only to realize that the thoughts, etc. have a life of their own. It's more correct to say that the thoughts are "doing" me: that my sense of self is composed of mostly habitual ways of thinking, feeling, acting, reacting, remembering, planning, intending and so forth.
One's thinking, feeling, intending, etc. constantly relate back to the self-image of a "me", yet that image too is a conditioned construct.
Conditioned by what? By earlier experiences, both passive (what happened to me) and active (what I did in response).
According to Buddhism, the problem isn't that we have a self; on contrary, there's never been a real self, so there's nothing to discard. Nor do we need to get rid of the sense of self; that's necessary to function in daily life. The problem is a sense of self that feels and believes itself to be separate from the rest of the world.
Realizing that the sense of self is a construct gives us insight into why it is the source of our most problematic dukkha. A constructed self is not something that has any discrete reality of its own. It's a cluster of impermanent and interacting psycho-physical processes that are not grounded in anything more substantial.
The solution to our festering sense of lack is deconstructing and reconstructing the sense of self, so that it doesn't feel so separate."
One's thinking, feeling, intending, etc. constantly relate back to the self-image of a "me", yet that image too is a conditioned construct.
Conditioned by what? By earlier experiences, both passive (what happened to me) and active (what I did in response).
According to Buddhism, the problem isn't that we have a self; on contrary, there's never been a real self, so there's nothing to discard. Nor do we need to get rid of the sense of self; that's necessary to function in daily life. The problem is a sense of self that feels and believes itself to be separate from the rest of the world.
Realizing that the sense of self is a construct gives us insight into why it is the source of our most problematic dukkha. A constructed self is not something that has any discrete reality of its own. It's a cluster of impermanent and interacting psycho-physical processes that are not grounded in anything more substantial.
The solution to our festering sense of lack is deconstructing and reconstructing the sense of self, so that it doesn't feel so separate."
A new buddhist path - p. 43-47
