One sometimes challenging concept of Buddhism for me is the idea of no self. Buddhism argues that our perception of having an individual self is illusionary. As an illusion, we act in ways sometimes that bring us pain because we cling to this idea of an individual self. Lord knows I cling to my individual self!
I've come to think of this no self illusion in terms of a single street's relationship with an entire grid pattern.
Streets and roads are part of a larger, interconnected network. These networks only end at the edge of a continent where oceans separate one network from another. My house sits on a street that I perceive to be an individual. It has its own name. It runs in a particular direction which has a linear cohesiveness to it similar to how my own life has a linear history running through time. My street is even mine: it has relationships where certain people live on it. Certain people commute on it. Certain repair people maintain the electric lines and sewers above and below it.
But my street is part of a network of all the streets in my city. My city's network in turn is connected by highways, back roads, and interstates to most of the roads in North America -maybe even South America too. Change a sign and redirect traffic and my road will become the new twist in the larger, main spoke road to which it connects two blocks up. There are real things that make my street individual, but in the larger scope of things this individual link in the great network is no more an individual than a single stretch of a line in a painting made with a continuous brush stroke.
I think of myself as like my street: seemingly individual but part of a larger single spiritual body. Especially if I do not meditate, my moods are constantly in flux; the reactions to outside stimuli rather than some internal state usually. Something 'bad' happens and I am in a 'bad' mood. Something 'good' happens, and I'm in a 'good' mood. It makes me ask: just what do I really feel? Is my emotional state just a series of reactions?
Meditation tells me there is a calm, peaceful state of observation inside. This place...this me...watches with an interested but detached serenity. Or, if not always serene, this part of me is able to discern factors behind my emotions such as illness, fear, excitement, etc.
I've read that as one grows deeper in experience with meditation over the years, this place of observation gains depth until the observer notices there is no one to observe: the people we think we are becomes a series of reactions and relationships we observe. It is almost as if meditation flies us over our street so that we begin to observe the bigger street grid. The individual dissolves as a component of the whole.
I think compassion by necessity flows out of this observation. When the speeding driver irritated by your left turn is as much you as the driver turning left, one feels empathy towards both.
I'll end with two other factoids:
1. There is a Buddhist story or fable about a demon who comes to a Buddhist nun to tempt her with all sorts of worldly delights. She calmly looks at the demon and tells him there is no one there to tempt. Neat story! For me the implications are that cultivating this sense of no self is not about nihilism but offers a way to overcome fear, overeating, substance abuse, etc. by moving the locus of control to a higher spiritual sense of unity when our illusionary sense of individual self may feel weak. Maybe. I'll have to give this some more thought but it is at least a fable to ponder.
2. One current theory in physics argues that each decision gives birth multiple universes. In each new universe, we made a different choice. So, in Universe A I chose chocolate ice cream. In B I chose vanilla. In C I chose strawberry. In D I decided not to have any ice cream at all. Like the idea of the no self, such a model of the universe is both fascinating and frightening to me because again it unseats the idea of a single, unitary self. If one could, however, reach a state of being where one was aware of all your selves in the multiverses, each experience would become a rich source of knowledge. There would be no clinging to hopes for a particular outcome in one universe because both the chosen and feared outcomes would both come to pass in one universe or another. While physics offers no way currently to perceive between multiverses, it is a concept where Buddhism and physics may overlap in some sense.
