No Self

Emily Dickinson

I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us--don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.


How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!




The Buddhist idea of no self is not quite what Emily had in mind, I imagine, when she wrote one of my favorite of her poems, but it's a nice tangential reference, and maybe not so far off the mark. My yoga/meditation practice lagged behind this past week, but in the back of my thoughts I danced around with the awareness of having no solidly defined identity so to speak. I like to think I'm a little more concrete, and I act as if I am, but at the edges there is only a vague outline and something a little more flexible and fluid--open to change. I don't know if you've had the experience of waking up one morning knowing you're not the person you were even yesterday, let alone two years ago. It's an uncanny sensation the first time you experience it, but more interesting than surprising once you accept it. 


Here are Stephen Batchelor's words on the subject:

"...the person is nothing but a fleeting configuration of the fugitive elements of body and mind; that there is nothing substantial to it, nothing enduring, nothing constant."

This is a departure from the religious education of my childhood where I was taught to "hold to the rod," Wicked, heathen double entendres aside, I was instilled with a sense of urgency at pinning myself down, perfecting it, grasping at "Truth" with the unrelenting tenacity of a pit bull. But I never could be that constant. I doubt anyone can. I imagine anyone who comes close would be a rather formidable figure to confront--all that rigidity and rightness supplanting a natural compassion for the living, breathing others out there.


Another contradiction was the story of the wise man building his house upon the stone rather than the sand. I understand the good sense behind a solid foundation. This is a yoga basic: rooting down into the earth, feeling a solid connection to your core, allows for an almost effortless lift and extension in Virabhadrasana, for example.

Maybe Buddhists would not disagree with building on solid ground either--the solid ground of awareness! It makes a certain common sense. But in terms of pinning down the self, it sounds more like turning to stone than building on it. Batchelor goes on to say that a rigid individual would not be able to act. It takes having no self, paradoxically, to be able to move. 
The chapter I'm currently reading, however, has me a bit more baffled by Buddhism. I'm attracted to the practice of meditation and its potential for awakening. Emptiness and no self, as I understand these tenets, ring true. But Batchelor describes other more metaphysical elements in Buddhism (a mind separate from the brain, for example) that sound as archaic and entangled as the convoluted doctrines of Mormonism specifically and Christianity in general that do not jive with the world as I perceive it. Seems this is what we human beings do with the seeds of a simple, liberating philosophy--pin it down, construct institutions around it, and blind ourselves with dogmatic certainty. I'm more and more convinced that embracing ambiguity and uncertainty is a more valuable and honest stance to take. I'll let my morality be based on actions that mitigate rather than contribute to suffering here and now and leave ideas about hereafter and disembodied souls for other speculators. As for giving myself a religious or philosophical label, I'd rather join Emily and the other nobodies. Shhhh! Don't tell!