The Theravadins talk about anattā (not-self) and the Mahayanists talk about shunyatā (emptiness); but they are referring to the same realization. That is, one investigates and sees that the ego, the neuroses that we have – thoughts, greed, hatred and delusion – are all anattā. There is no self to be found, just empty conditions that arise out of the void and pass back into it with no remainder.
So we let things go, allow things to be as they are, and they change quite naturally on their own. You don’t have to force them to do so. If you’re experiencing something unpleasant, you don’t have to annihilate it; it will go away on its own. Self-conceit says: ‘I don’t like this condition. I’ve got to get rid of it, wipe it out.’ This creates a more complex situation than before – you’re trying to push something away or bury your head in the ground so you can say, ‘Oh, it’s gone!’ But that desire to get rid – vibhava-taṇhā – just creates the conditions for the condition to arise again, because we haven’t seen that it dies quite naturally.
So we let things go, allow things to be as they are, and they change quite naturally on their own. You don’t have to force them to do so. If you’re experiencing something unpleasant, you don’t have to annihilate it; it will go away on its own. Self-conceit says: ‘I don’t like this condition. I’ve got to get rid of it, wipe it out.’ This creates a more complex situation than before – you’re trying to push something away or bury your head in the ground so you can say, ‘Oh, it’s gone!’ But that desire to get rid – vibhava-taṇhā – just creates the conditions for the condition to arise again, because we haven’t seen that it dies quite naturally.
We’re sitting now in a room full of kammic formations which we conceive to be permanent personalities. We carry them around like a ‘conceptions bag’, because on the conceptual level of thoughts we regard each other as permanent personalities. How many things do you carry around with you, such as grudges against people, infatuations, fears and events in the past? We can become upset just by thinking of the name of someone who caused us suffering over something that happened twenty years ago – ‘How dare they do that, treat me like that!’ Some people ruin the rest of their lives by carrying grudges around.
But as meditators we break through the pattern of memory. Instead of remembering people and making them real, we see that in the moment, memory and bitterness are changing conditions; we see that they are anicca, dukkha, anattā. They are formed in time, just like the sand grains of the Ganges River – whether they are beautiful, ugly, black or white, sand grains is all that they are.
Ajahn Sumedho, Peace is a Simple Step
Photo courtesy Hillside Hermitage
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