On The Path

 Self-Consciousness - No More

It is important to realize that in the end, no self-consciousness remains.

Self-consciousness has nothing to do with consciousness, and nothing to do with self-awareness. Self-consciousness is an awareness or appreciation of yourself as something or other.

A person who is self-conscious is aware of what the world is doing within, what other people are doing within - what effect they are having on him or her. And in the end this self-conscious disappears. The measuring of things in relationship to what is regarded as the self stops - the measuring of things as positive or negative, good or bad, welcome or unwelcome, agreeable or disagreeable.

With everything that happens to us, something in us judges that as okay or not okay. It makes us feel good, or better, or it makes us feel bad, or worse. In the end, this completely disappears. Things happen, responses also happen, but there is no feeling that something called oneself is being affected in this way or that way. So as long as one gets the feeling that one has been done wrong to, or even that one has been done good to, then one is not at the end. In the end things are just happening, and you are involved, but there is no more measuring going on, there is no more weighing.

All the time in our lives we are weighing up other people - how they are with us, how they treat us, and how much, on the other hand, we are respected by other people, liked by other people, appreciated by other people, or whether other people are even aware of us or not aware of us. All this measuring and weighing up is going on. And it seems as if this is natural, is the way it is bound to be, is what being a human being is - to be checking out whatever is going on in relationship to this thing we call our precious self. Everybody does it. But in the end, you don’t do it. You simply stop measuring. Or rather, measuring stops.

You don’t stop measuring, measuring stops, because the whole point is that the ‘you’ that measures somehow falls apart, breaks up, scatters to the winds. And then if you are blamed for something, there is not a reaction, it is just that blame is passing by. And if you are praised for something, it is the same: praise is passing by. You recognise that this person is praising you or blaming you, is angry with you or is loving towards you, and you acknowledge that, you recognise that, but there is not this weighing up. This relationship with what is going on around you and the way people are with you, this relationship is broken, and a new kind of relationship is established, a new kind of relationship altogether. A communal thing is there. An energy flow is there.

So this universal, ubiquitous process of weighing up, which everybody does with everybody else and with everything else, how can that disappear, since it seems so integral to the whole view of being an individual member of the human race? Well, you can only really arrive in that state through the disappearance of all else that does not belong to that state. You can’t decide to be in that state, because if you do, then the decision has been made from the identity: “Well, let’s be that way. Let’s be cool towards that.”

‘Cool’ is a praiseworthy description of somebody. It means they don’t react, they hang back, they let things happen and they stay in some way cool, serene and unaffected - more unaffected than others. But often when people do this it takes a tremendous discipline, and something very different is often going on behind it. It’s just that they don’t lose energy in the moment, or they don’t show other people what their true response is, they keep it behind the scenes, and they cook up, maybe, something for another time - some revenge, some reaction.

So it’s not a coolness that comes, it’s not that you have become cool. You can’t apply an adjective like ‘cool’ to the situation at all. You can’t apply any adjective whatsoever to the situation. It’s just that you are not in that game anymore. Other people are shooting at each other, and thinking about ways to shoot back, and resenting hurts, and judging others according to the way they are with them. And this simply disappears. With everybody, it disappears.

So you can’t just be cool and be in that place. Then that’s just part of the game. Then you’re not out of the game, you’re still in the game. You have to find yourself in this place I’m describing, like you’ve arrived at the end of a journey. And until you’ve arrived at the end of the journey you’re not at the end of the journey. You may dream about it, you may imagine that you are there, you may try and be like you think you will be when you get there, but you can only be there when you’re there.

So one can only get there by dealing with the way things are at the moment. You can’t jump into it, you have to deal with the way things are at the moment. And all this is going on at the moment: we are reacting, we are judging, we are measuring, we are weighing, we are coming to conclusions and judgements based on that weighing. That’s going on all the time, and it seems inescapable. So how to get from that place to this state where you’re out of it, where it doesn’t happen anymore?

Well, I guess there are ways that are not so easy to describe or employ, but for sure, one of the main ways is the non-identification with all this weighing and judging that comes up. It comes up, but there is no more identification with it.

The moment you identify with it, then you’re strengthening the identity. The moment you are confirming it, you are strengthening it. The moment you are giving ten reasons, or fifty, or even just one good reason why you are justified in feeling the way you are feeling about what somebody’s done to you, or is doing to you, or what is going on around you, the moment you even lift a finger to give support to anything like that, you are identifying and making it harder to let go.

So I’m not saying don’t respond. I’m not saying a Buddha does not respond, so be a Buddha and don’t respond. I never say things like that. I never ask people to pretend. I always say to be a genuine Buddha you have to be a genuine seeker, a genuine person who reaches the goal in a genuine way. That’s my style: be authentic, be genuine. But at the same time as that is happening, one has to be outside it, too.

That is self-awareness, not self-consciousness. Through self-awareness, one comes to the losing of self-consciousness. So you see the response, you see things coming up, and you say, “Aha!” You might even bring some energy into it, but at the same time something in you is recognising that all of this belongs to an entity called the self, which has left behind the Oneness of all things, withdrawn from it, taken a distance, and is looking at the world from a place of isolation. And everybody is doing the same thing. Everybody is looking at everything around them from a place of isolation, because nobody agrees with everybody on hardly anything. The Zen people say: ‘Inwardly no identity, outwardly no attachment.’ Well, that’s in the direction I’m talking about: non-identification.

Non-identification does not say don’t respond, don’t react, don’t let it happen. It’s saying, if it’s there, if it’s rolling, if some energy’s moving, let it roll, and at the same time remember that it is coming simply from a separated place, a separated perspective on reality - and that can’t be the truth, can it, if it’s separate from reality, if it’s an isolated position? It cannot be the truth, the truth has to be for all. And yet we do this all the time. We try and force other people to believe our view from our point of isolation, whereas the true Path for a true seeker is really: Never mind others and what they are up to, look to yourself and find your way to the place where you are free.

It’s not just that you have a feeling on arrival that you are free of the old reactions, which is like a relief. No, it’s not that. It’s just the feeling that you are free. You’re not ‘free of’, because what you would say you are free of is gone. You have a feeling that you’ve got out of prison, because the prison is no longer there. The prison, as you are free, has vanished, so you can’t be ‘free of’ it - it’s gone, as if it never was.

So that place I am describing is a place of great calmness, great serenity.

It is not that you are serene. That’s different. One can really enjoy being serene. But here you are not serene, but there is serenity there. When you are reacting to every look that other people give you, every remark that people make to you, every what you take to be a stab at you, at your amour-propre, your pride, your self-respect, how can you be serene? Anybody could take your energy away from you. Just one remark, one look, and your energy has leaked away. You are a slave to that reaction. You cannot be serene.

So when you reach this place, you see people’s responses to you - some are looking lovingly, some are pissed with you, some are suspicious of you and so on - you just note that these things are so, you observe them - or in some cases you are so deep in it that you don’t even observe in that way, because you don’t give a name to it - you see somebody smiling or looking angry, but you don’t say, “Oh, this person’s angry, and it’s nothing to do with me.” You’re even beyond that place. When you say, “This person’s angry, but it has nothing to do with me; it must be something in their life, some trip of theirs,” that’s good, because that’s when you are getting free of that place. But when you are there you are not ‘free of’, it is simply that all this is not in your territory.

So I’m saying to get there, to arrive there - and it is an arrival that you find yourself to have reached - not identifying is really important. But sitting quietly together, as we do here usually, is also important, because that’s like a mirroring of that serenity. Then when we are sitting quietly it is not so much others that are pulling you off your serenity, it is yourself. It is your own thoughts, your own feelings, your own quarrels with yourself, your own debates, the old sores and wounds and so on. You see them coming up, and you don’t identify, because you have decided for now to be as calm as you can, to be quiet, and to watch what passes by without letting it disturb you - unless you have no experience of that, and then you’ll be moving around all the time, like we have here this evening somebody who can’t be still, because everything that comes up has to be reacted to.

But most of you now know how to just let that stuff go by. And that is part of the journey - to begin to feel something in you which is not affected by anything that is going on in you, something in you that is outside the thoughts, outside the feelings, outside the pains in the body, the stiffness.

Everything that you can note going on in you, with you, something in you is outside it. And that place is connected to the place I am talking about tonight, where you are outside all that is taken for interaction with others - which is not the natural interaction at all, but a clash of isolated perspectives, your isolated perspective clashing with other people’s.

Talk given during a “Tuning In”, 26.09. 2002.