Well Being with Don Oakley Don Oakley

The concept of “no-self” in Buddhism can sound scary, nonsensical, or just plain weird, but it is one of the three pillars of Buddhist thought. The other two are much more readily understood: the impermanence of living things and the sense of unsatisfactoriness. But no-self? It sounds dangerous to even ponder. What makes it sound dangerous is the belief that we would be giving up everything that we take ourselves to be. But this raises the question about what we believe ourselves to be. We discover that what we give up is a fiction and what is gained is without limit. The only caveat: it’s not personal.

Don speaks about the metaphorical importance and similarities of silence, space and awareness.

Recognizing your true nature (aka awakening) is immensely liberating. But it is not the end of the journey. We may be awake to the timeless nature of our essential beingness but, paradoxically, it may take some time to learn to live from that realization. Embodiment is the process by which the thoroughly conditioned body/mind learns to live from the unconditioned vastness of our true nature. It is a process of increasing subtlety and wonder.

What we call the normal waking state, many spiritual sages have called the dream state. We assume that we all perceive the same external world which we take to be real and objective. The perceptions themselves are not illusory; it is the stories that we tell ourselves about what is happening where the distortion occurs. That distortion is dreamlike in that it is only happening in our own heads; Others are experiencing a different inner narrative. It is this dreamlike narrative that we wake up from.

Most people meditate to either quiet the mind or to experience some non-ordinary (“spiritual”) state and, of course, we all get to choose what we want. However, if your objective is to discover the truth of your being for yourself in your own direct experience, then these two common goals of meditation will lead you astray or, at best, delay your journey. Why? Because they deny the presence of our essential beingness in this moment. They deny in the here-and-now that which we seek, in favor of finding it in the there-and-then, which has the curious attribute of never existing.

Surrender is often talked about in spirituality as a possible future event - well down the road. It sounds admirable, but we're not quite sure what a surrendered life looks like. But surrender is not actually something that we do, or can do. It can happen, but any effort to surrender is inevitably tainted with self-interest. One day, however, we may discover, to our great surprise and relief, that which is already surrendered. That which receives everything, but which doesn’t grasp onto anything.