The Four Noble Truths: Suffering and our Emergent Self Identity
As mentioned in the previous post, Spiritual transformation and Spiritual Awakening both involve a major shift in identity. This is a transformation of our ‘self-center’ from a limited and needy small self-sense, based upon fear and anxiety, to one of freedom, wholeness, love and wisdom, our True Self. The first awakening to, or ‘realization’ of our always and already present True Self is usually sudden and, depending upon how much preparatory training we have had, can be shocking.
Who do you see in the image to the right, a younger woman, or an older one? Both are there, but we can only see one at a time, and there may be a much stronger pull towards one over the other. Some researchers see this as a factor of age.
The flash of spiritual awakening is analogous to this sudden recognition that there is something right before my eyes that I somehow I did not see before. I thought I was seeing something totally different. Nothing changes but the perspective.
What is fascinating about the Spiritual shift in perspective from seeing through the eyes of the limited self to seeing through the eyes of Unbounded Infinity is that it can come at any time. True Nature is always and already present, not the result of any developmental process. But we have become conditioned to only see from a limited view, and because all of our habits and behaviors reflect this, we become stuck.
To make our journey of awakening more complicated, all of these habits have an energetic momentum, which means that even if I am able to have a temporary breakthrough and “See” my innate wholeness, I still have to deal with my small-self habits. These will inevitably pull me back into my old anxious and fearful self and I will ‘forget’ that True Nature is who I am.
Richard Baker Roshi, former abbot of the San Francisco Zen center, has a wonderful observation about process of Awakekening. “Awakening is accidental. Practice makes us accident prone.” The key practice is just sitting, known as shikantaza in Zen. Our Spiritual identity is seen and known by resting in Stillness or Silence. ” All that is required to realize the Self is to be still.” (Ramana Maharshi.) “When the mind has become quiet, the Seer abides stably in its own Nature”. (Patanjali, YS I-2 and I-3).
However, even with and after the first realizations of awakening, we still have to address the challenges of our ‘relative’ or small self. The small self is actually an essential, evolving and complex organizational process that runs throughout the length of our life. Its crucial role is the monitoring and modulating of the flow of energy and information, coming in through our senses and relational/ interpersonal neurons, and out through our actions. In its most healthy expression, the small self functions from an emotional maturity that embraces its inherent human frailty without forgetting its source in the True Self
Unfortunately, this ‘small self’, often referred to as the ‘ego’, often gets stuck in emotionally immature and dysfunctional habits and beliefs. These habits, rooted in fear and insecurity, embed the thoughts ‘I am not good enough’, I don’t have enough’, ‘there is something wrong with me’ or ‘I am not worthy of love’ deep into the psyche. Then, our self identity becomes defined by these thoughts, as they continue relentlessly throughout our lives. Patanjali describes this in Sutra I-4, (when not abiding in True Self) there is identification with thought. This is the personal manifestation of the First Noble Truth, ‘there is suffering’.
Over time this mindset, deriving from a sense of personal inadequacy, gives birth to an endless series of life decisions that are desperate attempts to acquire ‘anything’ that will ‘fill the void’ and avoid anything that reminds us of the pain of our own neediness and inadequacy. These actions, and the mindset behind them describe Buddha’s Second Noble Truth, the ’cause of suffering. The Buddhists and Yogis refer to these life long pursuits as ‘grasping’ and ‘avoiding’.
In addition to these dysfunctional lifestyle choices, grasping and avoiding area tangible experiences we can easily feel in an embodied meditation practice and have two primary manifestations. First is the actual sensation of grasping or contracting in the energy flow through the connective tissues in somatic meditation. More subtle is the feeling of the mind, as the process of attention, habitually grasping onto thoughts and sensations as you are sitting in stillness. ‘Avoiding’ is also felt as a contraction in the tissues as a response something unpleasant or painful, and emotionally, as the constricted armoring we all carry around our hearts.
Because the small self and its patterns of thought and behavior are developmental, with some patience, and perhaps some outside help, it is possible to go back in time somatically to uncover the roots of dysfunctionality and allow the process of healing to begin. This is an expression of the Third Noble Truth, ‘letting go of striving is the goal’. Allowing space for developmental sequences to reveal themselves, feeling their current manifestations in the body/mind during both meditation practice and life, and then holding them in Presence is the path, the sadhana.
Other skills and practices are also added, to adjust not only our inner landscape, but also all of our relationships in the world and we have the Fourth Noble Truth, the eight fold path.
In the next post, we will take a deeper look at some of the different ways to chart the developmental sequence involved in the emerging self sense, including the Buddhist ‘skandhas’, contemporary neuro-psychology and somatic embryology as presented by Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen. Also, we will also look at how systems theory offers clues about integration across multiple components of a complex system such as the ego. These are living maps, offering guideposts to our inner explorations of the many dimensions of what it means to a human being, on Mother Earth, here in the early years of the 21st century.