Ajahn Sumedho's Articles on Lion's Roar

We believe deeply in ourselves as personalities, says Ajahn Sumedho, each committed to the reality of our own personal history and distinctive traits. He offers a meditation to deliberately bring such thoughts to the fore, and notice the uncreated awareness within which they arise. Most of us are very committed to ourselves as personalities. The habit of viewing ourselves as a person is deeply ingrained in us. In Pali, that is called sakkaya-ditthi, which can be translated as “personality-view” or “the ego.” It means that we regard the five khandhas (groups)—body, feelings, perceptions, conceptions, and consciousness—as belonging to this person, as making up our identity. In investigating the personality-view, we do not grasp on to the perception of “no person” either. It is possible to take the concept of anatta (no self) and grasp that, and say, “There’s no self because the Buddha said there’s anatta!” But in that case we’re still grasping a perception. Grasping a perception of yourself as a nonself gets to be a bit ridiculous. If you grasp on to the conditions you create, you will end up in the same place every time—suffering. But don’t simply believe me; explore it for yourself. It is so easy for us to conceive the conditions we attach to. Yet with satipañña (discriminating alertness) and sati-sampajañña (awareness), we begin to awaken ourselves to the way it is, rather than being committed to the conventional realities. I want to emphasize that this awareness is there before you become something. This point cannot be repeated often enough, because even though cultivating awareness might appear very simple on the face of it, our mindset is definitely geared to believing in the personality-view as our fundamental reality. If you grasp on to the conditions you create, you will end up in the same place every time—suffering. But don’t simply believe me; explore it for yourself. Instead of starting with a perception or a conception of anything, the Buddha established a way based on awareness, or awakened attention. This is an immanent act in the present. It is sati-sampajañña, an intuitive awareness that allows the consciousness to be with the present moment. With this attention, you begin to explore sakkaya-ditthi (personality-view) in terms of the perceptions you attach to as yourself. So that one can truly explore the development of sakkaya-ditthi, I suggest deliberately conceiving of yourself as a certain person: “I’m this person who has got to practice in order to become enlightened.” Then consider what you might say to yourself: “I’m an unenlightened person who has come to a center to practice meditation so that I will become an enlightened person in the future.” You can have endless comments about this and form further perceptions about these perceptions, but that’s not the point. Simply deliberately think, “I am an unenlightened person.” Say that to yourself with attention, listening. This deliberate thinking allows you to listen to yourself as you think. When you are caught in the wandering mind, you lose yourself; you just go from one thought to another. One thought connects to another and you just get carried away. But deliberate thinking is not like that. It’s intentional, for you are choosing what you are going to think. The important thing is not the thought, or even the quality of the thought—whether it’s stupid or intelligent, right or wrong—it’s the attention, the ability to listen to your deliberate thinking. When I do this, being aware of thinking in this way allows something to happen to me (and I assume will happen also to you, but I don’t know, maybe I’m just an unusual case). Before I start thinking, “I am an unenlightened person,” there is a space. There is an empty pause before I deliberately think. When you do this kind of deliberate thinking, notice the pause before the full-blown thought. That is just the way it is; there is no perception in that space, but there is attention to it. There is awareness. You are certainly aware before “I am an unenlightened person” arises. Thinking in this way is not wandering thinking; it’s not judging or analyzing, but just noticing “It’s like this.” When you deliberately think, you can use thought to keep pointing to this, noticing the way it is. Explore. Investigate. By investigating you are actually getting to notice the way it is, the Dhamma. If you listen to the pronoun “I” in a sentence such as “I am an unenlightened person” and the words that follow, you will realize that you are creating this consciousness of yourself through the words you are deliberately thinking. That which is aware of your thinking—what is that? Is that a person? Is it a person that is aware? Or is it pure awareness? Is this awareness personal, or does the person arise within that? Explore. Investigate. By investigating you are actually getting to notice the way it is, the Dhamma. You come to recognize that there is actually no person who is being aware. Nevertheless, awareness will include what seems personal. When one says, “I am an unenlightened person who needs to practice meditation in order to become an enlightened person in the future,” one assumes that “I am this body. I have this history. I am so many years old, born in such and such a place. I’ve done all these things and so I have a history to prove that this person exists.” I have a passport and a birth certificate, and people even want me to have a website. But in fact, there doesn’t seem to be any person in the awareness. I find that the more I am aware, the more my personal story seems utterly unimportant and of no interest whatsoever. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a few memories I can churn up. Yet if I adopt the personal view, if I get caught up in myself, thinking about myself as a real personality, then suddenly I find my past tremendously important. An identity gives me the sense that I am a person. “I have a past; I am somebody. I am somebody important, somebody that may not be terribly important, but at least I feel connected to something in the past. I have a home, I have a heritage.” People talk about losing a sense of their identity, perhaps because they’re refugees, their parents are dead, they’re of mixed race, or they lack any clear identity of themselves as belonging to something in the past. The sense of a personality depends very much on proving that you are somebody. You have your education, your race, your accomplishments or lack of accomplishments; whether you are an interesting or uninteresting person, important or unimportant, a Very Important Person or a Very Unimportant Person! This simple exercise of saying “I am an unenlightened person” is quite deliberate. You could also say, “I am an enlightened person!” You can choose which you would like to be, enlightened or unenlightened. In meditation we are not trying to deny personality. We are not trying to convince ourselves that we are non-people, grasping ideas such as “I have no nationality. I have no sex. I have no class. I have no race. The pure Dhamma is my true identity.” That kind of thinking is still another identity, isn’t it? That’s not it. Our practice is not about grasping the concepts of no-self. It is in realizing, in noting through awakened attention, the way things really are. This simple exercise of saying “I am an unenlightened person” is quite deliberate. You could also say, “I am an enlightened person!” You can choose which you would like to be, enlightened or unenlightened. Most of us don’t dare to go around saying we are enlightened. It’s safer to go around saying, “I am an unenlightened person,” because if you say, “I am an enlightened person,” someone is going to challenge you. They will say, “You don’t look very enlightened to me!” Whatever you say—“I am an unenlightened person” or “I am an enlightened person” or “I am an enlightened non-person” or “I am an unenlightened non-person”—the words are not really important. It’s the attention that matters. I have found this exercise very revealing. When I did it, it became very clear what awareness, apperception, sati-sampajañña, is. Then the thinking, the perceptions, arose. Deliberately thinking, “I am an unenlightened person,” arises within the awareness. The awareness is not a perception, is it? It’s an apperception; it includes perception. Perceptions arise and cease. It’s not personal; it doesn’t have any Ajahn-Sumedho-quality to it. It’s not male or female, bhikkhu or siladhara (nun), or anything like that. It has no quality on the conventional, conditioned level. It is nothing. There is awareness, then “I am an unenlightened person,” and then nothing. There’s no person. You are exploring, you are investigating these gaps before “I” and after “I.” You say “I” and there’s sati-sampajañña. There’s the sound of silence, isn’t there? “I am” arises in this awareness, this consciousness. As you investigate it, you can question what this is about. Awareness is not a creation, is it? I am creating the “I am...” What is more real than “I am an unenlightened person” is the awareness. That is what is continuous, what sustains, while the sense of yourself as a person can go any which way. As you think about yourself—who you are, who you should be, who you would like to be, who you do not want to be, how good or bad, wonderful or horrible you are—all this whirls around and goes all over the place. One moment you can feel, “I am a really wonderful person.” The next moment you can feel, “I am an absolutely hopeless, horrible person.” But if you take refuge in awareness, whatever you are thinking does not make much difference, because your refuge is in awareness rather than in the gyrations and fluctuations of the self-view, of your sakkaya-ditthi habits. Just notice how being a person is like a yo-yo: it goes up and down all the time. When praised, you feel you’re wonderful; you are wonderful. Then, you’re a hopeless case, depressed, a hopeless victim of...

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