# Who am I? #42 \[rebroadcast\]

An episode of [How to Train a Happy Mind](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1496841325), 6 May 2025, 36 min.

Audio: https://www.buzzsprout.com/721908/episodes/17073083-who-am-i-42-rebroadcast.mp3

Are you your body? Are you your mind? Are you a collection of thoughts, memories, and neural connections that could be uploaded into a computer to live forever? Or are you an old-fashioned soul? This episode probes the nature of the self using the Buddhist notion of emptiness, searching for the partless, independent, unchanging "I" that ordinarily appears to us, and finding a self that's far richer and interconnected with reality and with others. Episode 42: Who am I? If you’d like to practice with others and bring these ideas into your life, join our weekly meditation community with Scott. 🙏 Help us stay ad-free 📲 Follow us on socials

## Chapters

- 0:10 Introduction
- 0:46 Who am I?
- 3:05 Dependent origination
- 6:30 Interdependence
- 15:24 What is the mind?
- 20:32 The root of our suffering
- 22:49 Examining the parts and causes of our mind
- 34:45 Closing

## Transcript

[0:10] Speaker: I'm Scott Snibbe, host of A Skeptic's Path to Enlightenment.
[0:14] Speaker: I wanted to take a brief moment before the episode starts to ask for your support of the podcast.
[0:19] Speaker: A Skeptic's Path to Enlightenment is a nonprofit organization that's supported entirely by donations that keep the podcast free and ad-free.
[0:27] Speaker: To support us now, visit our website at skepticspath.org.
[0:31] Speaker: We accept cash, credit, bitcoin, and other cryptocurrencies, and your donations are tax deductible in the US.
[0:38] Speaker: Who am I?
[0:47] Speaker: It's one of the most important and interesting questions you could ask yourself.
[0:52] Speaker: We don't usually have gaps for reflection in these discussion episodes, and especially not at the very start of an episode, where we're usually trying to hook you so you don't skip and move on to listen to the next episode of Serial or Joe Rogan or something else maybe more entertaining.
[1:08] Speaker: But before going into this episode, which explores this question of who I am from the perspective of Buddhism's ultimate view of reality, take a moment and think about it yourself without any preconceptions.
[1:20] Speaker: Who am I?
[1:21] Speaker: So what did you come up with for an answer?
[1:30] Speaker: Did you identify with your body?
[1:33] Speaker: Did you decide that you were your brain?
[1:36] Speaker: Maybe you decided that you're defined by whatever mark you've left in the world so far, the work you've done, the children you've raised, the warm feelings toward you from friends and lovers that keep your memory alive and positive in the world.
[1:49] Speaker: If you're a believer in a higher power, or if you were raised as one, then perhaps you believe in a soul, some immaterial aspect of yourself that moves from this life to the next, from earth to heaven or hell, like many Christians and Muslims believe.
[2:04] Speaker: Or if you were raised as a Hindu, you might believe in an Atman that travels from body to body across different lifetimes.
[2:11] Speaker: Did you conclude that you are your thoughts or your feelings or your accumulated knowledge?
[2:16] Speaker: That you are more your software than your hardware?
[2:19] Speaker: A lot of technology-minded people today not only believe this, but they also believe that this sum collection of your brain's connections and neural activity could be downloaded to a digital brain in a virtual world where you could continue living on forever, or at least as long as the computer running the simulation kept running.
[2:37] Speaker: You can get a glimpse of this view if you've watched Netflix's dark mirror episode, Sanhu Nippero.
[2:43] Speaker: I don't watch a lot of TV, but I've watched this episode a few times, and I have to say it's one of the most perfect pieces of television I've ever seen, not only because it's set in a perpetual California New Wave 1980s beach town like the one I grew up in.
[2:57] Speaker: This is the second to last episode in our series on emptiness or the interdependent nature of reality.
[3:05] Speaker: So far, we've only looked at how external objects appear to exist from our habitual mental shortcuts as solid, separate, and unchanging.
[3:14] Speaker: But we haven't analyzed ourselves.
[3:17] Speaker: We've mentally taken apart objects into their parts, we've meditated on their causes and conditions that brought those parts together, and then we notice how our mind wraps a label or concept around those parts to give them the illusion of a solid, separate object.
[3:33] Speaker: This mind, parts, causes analysis of reality is called dependent origination in Buddhism, and there's nothing inherently difficult to understand about it.
[3:43] Speaker: It fits in with the scientific view of reality as seen through the lens of physics, chemistry, biology, and language.
[3:50] Speaker: But the whole point of learning the dependent origination analysis of external objects, like a phone or a cup or a car or our home, is to ultimately apply this analysis to ourselves.
[4:03] Speaker: To see how, just like our smartphone, we also project onto ourselves and the people around us the illusory concept of independent, solid, unchanging self-existence.
[4:15] Speaker: Dependent origination is one of the logical ways that we come to intellectually understand the Buddhist concept of emptiness.
[4:23] Speaker: We start to see that things exist in a more complex, interdependent, and dynamically changing way than they ordinarily appear.
[4:32] Speaker: Dependent origination is a method for understanding the Buddhist concept of emptiness.
[4:38] Speaker: They are not the same thing, but the reasoning of dependent origination leads us to an understanding of emptiness.
[4:44] Speaker: The concept of emptiness means that we are empty of something.
[4:49] Speaker: What is that something that we're empty of?
[4:52] Speaker: We're not empty of existing at all.
[4:54] Speaker: Emptiness isn't a nihilistic view, which makes no sense at all.
[4:58] Speaker: Of course we exist.
[4:59] Speaker: Our senses bring us data on the sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and tactile phenomena around us, and our mind brings us memories, plans, thoughts, and feelings.
[5:08] Speaker: This way of existing that we perceive with our everyday senses is called conventional existence.
[5:15] Speaker: Conventional existence is the way things appear to us through our ordinary senses without deeper analysis.
[5:22] Speaker: We do exist conventionally.
[5:24] Speaker: Objects move, emit light, make sounds, and affect other objects.
[5:29] Speaker: Their parts come together, abide, and dissolve.
[5:32] Speaker: Our actions matter, and even our tiniest actions, positive or negative, have lasting impacts on the world.
[5:39] Speaker: What we're empty of is existing independently, unchangingly, and singularly, without depending on parts and causes and conditions, and without changing.
[5:50] Speaker: This is called inherent existence.
[5:53] Speaker: For most of us, we go beyond conventional truth and conventional reality, that things exist provisionally for some time through the coming together of causes and conditions, and through our minds labeling them.
[6:07] Speaker: We go too far, and through deep habits that are imprinted even at the evolutionary level, we have this mistaken way of seeing things as permanent, partless, and independent from the continuous, changing reality around us.
[6:21] Speaker: That's what we call inherent existence, the inaccurate view of things as separate, unchanging, and partless.
[6:29] Speaker: In many ways, the whole point of the Buddhist path is to eventually see reality as it truly is, in all its interdependent changing wonder.
[6:38] Speaker: This is the most advanced topic in Buddhism, and in past times its study was even restricted to a small set of students.
[6:46] Speaker: But today this topic is openly discussed and taught by Buddhist masters like His Holiness the Dalai Lama, who mentions it often, even in his public teachings, for non-Buddhist audiences.
[6:57] Speaker: The Dalai Lama says that his audiences now are so highly educated in mathematical, logical, and critical reasoning that this topic is relatively easy for us to understand.
[7:08] Speaker: You might ask, though, whether the point of the Buddhist path isn't some esoteric understanding of reality, but simply to be happy, to benefit others, to cultivate altruism and compassion.
[7:21] Speaker: And the answer is also, of course, yes.
[7:25] Speaker: Emptiness and bodhicitta, this altruistic wish to perfect our minds for the benefit of all beings, are sometimes called the two wings of the bird.
[7:35] Speaker: Emptiness and bodhicitta are the two essential ultimate points to combine in order to reach the state Buddhists call enlightenment, where you've eliminated all diluted states of mind forever, and you have expanded your compassion to encompass all beings.
[7:51] Speaker: But there's a relationship between emptiness and compassion.
[7:55] Speaker: Because the Buddhist view is that this fundamental ignorance of seeing people and objects as solid, independent, and unchanging is the biggest obstacle and the root cause of the opposing delusions that get in our way, like attachment and anger.
[8:11] Speaker: Not seeing things through the accurate sense of empty, dependent origination is the substantial cause of our mind shrinking its circle of concern to only ourselves, giving up the expansive love and compassion that are essential for true happiness.
[8:27] Speaker: Beings like His Holiness the Dalai Lama, who have realized emptiness, tell us that this ignorance of how things exist is the fundamental root of our suffering.
[8:37] Speaker: If we could only see how things truly exist, we would be unable to generate the uncomfortable, disturbing reactions we have to people and objects and events around us, like anger, jealousy, and craving.
[8:51] Speaker: From the Buddhist perspective, all disturbing emotions trace themselves to this root delusion of ignorance as to how things truly exist.
[9:00] Speaker: They start with the delusions of attachment, exaggerating the positive effects of other things around us, and aversion, exaggerating the negative of things around us.
[9:11] Speaker: And then these strong base delusions get elaborated as jealousy, pride, competitiveness, addiction, and all the other forms of disturbing emotions.
[9:20] Speaker: This is the part of the reasoning where we motivate ourselves to want to pursue this idea of emptiness beyond the intellectual, to a point where we're not only curious but hungry for understanding reality as it is.
[9:33] Speaker: Not just because it's cool or interesting, but because this understanding will cut off the constant stream of attachment and frustration that needlessly fills our minds.
[9:43] Speaker: You don't need to take this idea of our ignorance about the ultimate nature of reality causing all our problems as a given truth.
[9:51] Speaker: As you may remember from earlier episodes, the Buddha himself and all the great Buddhist teachers that followed him have each taught that you must personally verify the Buddha's teachings using your critical reasoning and logic and your direct experience through reflection and meditation.
[10:08] Speaker: The Buddha taught us to be critical, to test and investigate what he discovered like a scientist, and to not take his words on faith or as dogma.
[10:17] Speaker: But at the same time, it's also not advised to cherry pick some aspects of Buddhism and dismiss others as unnecessary or uninteresting without trying to understand them.
[10:28] Speaker: If you were to study cooking or chemistry or physics or computer programming or music, it's not possible to accept only a few of the elements of a field of knowledge and toss out the others.
[10:40] Speaker: As an absurd example, you can't dismiss the validity of algebra but continue to love geometry.
[10:46] Speaker: They're both inseparable parts of the coherent system of mathematics.
[10:51] Speaker: All the components of any coherent system have been carefully discovered, verified, and continuously tested by those that master their fields.
[11:00] Speaker: As Venerable Robina Courtin mentioned in our interview with her, Buddhism is a complete systematic view of reality that creates the true causes of happiness for living beings.
[11:10] Speaker: She said that a reasonable way to learn and explore any coherent system is to take on the full system as a hypothesis and validate its truth as a system and not as separable components or one-off practices.
[11:24] Speaker: It's wholly possible to approach this path from a secular skeptical point of view, but it's not likely effective to take the view of a dilettante who just samples a few bits from the platter of a coherent view of reality.
[11:38] Speaker: So this idea of fundamental ignorance about the true nature of reality being the root of our suffering is one to take on as a hypothesis.
[11:47] Speaker: The fundamental hypothesis of Buddhism as the true way to eliminate the causes of our mental suffering and create the causes for happiness.
[11:55] Speaker: To prove whether it's true or not, like any system, is first through learning, then through reflecting, and most of all through meditating on the illusory way that things appear conventionally, then critically analyzing and taking apart that reality to see if it really exists in the way it seems.
[12:15] Speaker: The profound aspect of meditating and reflecting on emptiness is that it's a continual process of searching, but not necessarily ever of finding.
[12:25] Speaker: When we apply this analysis to ourselves, we search for the illusory, solid, unchanging, independent, annoying self that gives us so much grief.
[12:34] Speaker: Does that person truly exist in the way they seem?
[12:38] Speaker: Next week, we'll go through a guided meditation on the dependent origination of the self, which is the most essential way to explore emptiness.
[12:46] Speaker: But in this episode, we go through the points of meditation as a discussion, thinking about them with eyes open.
[12:53] Speaker: It might be nice to listen to this episode, even as you're out on a walk engaging with reality.
[12:59] Speaker: Become familiar with these points and decide whether they make sense logically, whether it makes enough sense for us to provisionally accept this idea that the way we habitually see ourselves and others doesn't come close to the rich, interdependent, vibrantly changing, and alive beings that we all truly are.
[13:17] Speaker: When we meditated on the emptiness of objects, we used a three-part analysis that broke them down into the objects parts and then those parts parts, seeing that you can dissect an object even at the material level forever, down to the fundamental building blocks of matter and even energy itself.
[13:35] Speaker: We saw that through analysis we can become aware of the causes that brought those parts together, and the mind of the observer that wraps those caused parts into a labeled entity like phone, car, home, or meal.
[13:48] Speaker: The meditation on the dependent origination of objects, though, is really only a warm-up for meditating on the emptiness of the self.
[13:57] Speaker: We meditate on the emptiness of objects, kind of like the warmups an athlete might do before the real main event.
[14:04] Speaker: For meditating on emptiness, the main event is meditating on the emptiness of the self.
[14:10] Speaker: And there's a very serious way that objects differ from people and other living beings, which you're probably aware of, which is that unlike objects, we have minds, a sense of an independent self, awareness, and agency.
[14:24] Speaker: So the analysis of emptiness of a person is different from the emptiness of an object, because we not only consider the parts and causes of our body, but also analyze the mind itself and examine how the mind itself can be empty.
[14:40] Speaker: When we start to analyze the nature of our mind, in one sense it's wonderful and stimulating.
[14:47] Speaker: We did this as our very first meditation, meditating on the spatial and temporal aspects of awareness itself.
[14:53] Speaker: We got a sense of what our mind might be without thoughts and feelings and emotions.
[14:58] Speaker: What the space of the mind is like when we quiet ourselves enough to become aware of our subtler nature.
[15:05] Speaker: When we did that in meditation, it might have felt profound to see that there's a space or timeline in which thoughts and other mental experiences appear, but that we can also experience that space itself.
[15:18] Speaker: We are not our thoughts, but thoughts appear in some greater space of mind.
[15:23] Speaker: But the question that comes up when we start to look at the dependent origination of mind is what is the mind?
[15:30] Speaker: This is where, for some of us, a small leap is required to understand whether the mind is a material or immaterial phenomenon.
[15:39] Speaker: There are some hardcore materialists who assert that the mind is a side effect.
[15:44] Speaker: Some people use the more technical term epiphenomenon to describe what the mind is, as a side effect of material neurological activity.
[15:52] Speaker: There are some that assert that our mind is merely the brain.
[15:57] Speaker: The Buddhist view very much disagrees with this perspective that the mind is material, and it's worth arguing this for a moment before finally discussing the steps of meditation we go through in analyzing the dependent origination of the self.
[16:11] Speaker: What I'd like to emphasize here is that immaterial does not necessarily mean metaphysical or supernatural or magical or new age or anything that requires a belief in alternate planes of reality.
[16:23] Speaker: I'd like to argue that no matter how much of a hardcore scientific skeptic you consider yourself, you already believe in immaterial things.
[16:31] Speaker: When I have this argument face to face with people who argue that everything has a material cause, I often ask them, do you believe in math?
[16:40] Speaker: And of course they answer yes, and then I ask, where is math?
[16:44] Speaker: Can you show me a math detector?
[16:46] Speaker: When you look for mathematics, you can't find the math itself as some material phenomenon in the world.
[16:52] Speaker: But the reality of mathematics is possibly the strongest, truest thing that human beings have substantiated.
[16:58] Speaker: The absolute reliability of arithmetic, algebra, geometry, up to Newtonian calculus and physics, Einsteinian relativity, and the probabilistic quantum equations that govern the workings of all our electronics and data.
[17:13] Speaker: Math is real, but it's not material.
[17:17] Speaker: Math can't be isolated to a textbook, or to someone's mind, or to the instantiation of mathematics in computer code, or even to the way that mathematics seems to be the model for how the universe works.
[17:30] Speaker: The universe simply operates, but mathematical equations model its working more precisely than any system ever discovered.
[17:39] Speaker: To be cute, I often follow up by asking this person, do you believe in love?
[17:45] Speaker: And there are a few that would say they don't.
[17:47] Speaker: We've all experienced love for our parents, siblings, lovers, parents, children, and heroes we admire.
[17:53] Speaker: But where is love?
[17:55] Speaker: Is it in our brain?
[17:57] Speaker: Our thoughts?
[17:58] Speaker: The books and movies about love?
[18:01] Speaker: Love is also immaterial.
[18:04] Speaker: There's no love detector.
[18:06] Speaker: But subjectively, we can each experience it, and it's as real as mathematics.
[18:11] Speaker: To get even more practical, even an email is immaterial.
[18:14] Speaker: Where is it?
[18:15] Speaker: There are many copies of an email's text.
[18:18] Speaker: Is the email in all the copies?
[18:20] Speaker: It can't be, because some of these various copies exist for a time and then are deleted.
[18:25] Speaker: Is the email in the one copy you read at the moment?
[18:28] Speaker: Is the email in computer hardware itself?
[18:31] Speaker: If so, which computer?
[18:33] Speaker: The one in your hand?
[18:34] Speaker: The ones in the cloud?
[18:36] Speaker: Is the email in your mind?
[18:38] Speaker: Is it found in the individual characters?
[18:42] Speaker: Is it in the ones and zeros that represents those L's, O's, and Vs?
[18:47] Speaker: Is it in the electron zipping around according to quantum equations, momentarily captured and measured?
[18:54] Speaker: Even an email is hard to find and seemingly immaterial, or at least dependently originated, between material and immaterial elements.
[19:03] Speaker: So if you have a hard time accepting the immateriality of the mind, try and consider your mind not as something spooky and supernatural like a soul or a ghost or even a computer program that could be uploaded to the matrix, but simply that the mind is as real as math or love or an email message.
[19:21] Speaker: Now we get to the point of how to do this meditation on the dependent origination of the self.
[19:26] Speaker: Today it's an introduction to the topic, and next week we'll do this more contemplatively and slowly in the context of a guided meditation.
[19:35] Speaker: When we look at ourselves in an unexamined way, we tend to see ourselves as permanent, partless, and independent.
[19:42] Speaker: We see ourselves as permanent in that as we go about our day, we aren't aware that we were once conceived and born, that we'll one day die, and that we are even now continuously changing.
[19:56] Speaker: We see ourselves as partless as a singular entity, me, Scott.
[20:01] Speaker: We don't tend to be aware that we're a bundle of countless trillions of parts and particles that are in continual flux and exchange, our muscles, organs, blood flowing, neurons flashing, metabolizing, excreting, cells being born, dying, fundamental particles exchanging electrons with one another.
[20:18] Speaker: And also that there's a partless mental aspect to ourselves too, that despite our constantly changing thoughts and feelings, somehow maintains a singular sense of I, me, mine.
[20:31] Speaker: Finally, we ordinarily see ourselves as independent, as separate from the things and people around us.
[20:39] Speaker: We fail to see the infinite web of causes and conditions, social, material, physical, universal, that brought us into being and that will ultimately dissolve back into the continuity of reality around us.
[20:52] Speaker: In earlier episodes we talked about the root delusion that is the cause of our problems, and we called it selfishness.
[20:59] Speaker: But that's not accurate from the analysis of ultimate reality.
[21:03] Speaker: Really, this root delusion, seeing ourselves inaccurately, is selfness, seeing an illusory, permanent, partless, independent self.
[21:12] Speaker: So the way the meditation works is interesting, because this more illusory type of self, the one that strongly believes I, me, mine, the one that gets angry and attached and craves, that strongly self-existent I is not always there.
[21:29] Speaker: When we're just going about our day absorbed in a task like making dinner or enjoying the company of a friend, this strong I is not always present.
[21:39] Speaker: In Buddhism, they call this the general I.
[21:42] Speaker: Not such a bad dude, not causing or experiencing severe mental delusions.
[21:47] Speaker: You're not realizing emptiness, but you're also not severely deluded in the grips of a strong delusional sense of self and the strong deluded states of attachment and aversion that arise from it.
[21:59] Speaker: So, the funny thing about the meditation on the dependent origination of the self is that you actually have to make this more annoying, independent self appear in order to analyze it.
[22:10] Speaker: There are different ways to do this.
[22:13] Speaker: One is to think of a time you were strongly criticized, or to think of moments you felt strong attachment or anger.
[22:21] Speaker: It's not too hard.
[22:23] Speaker: If you're more advanced and sufficiently mindful, you can become aware of this I called the inherently existing I as it appears during the course of your day when you get into a conflict or a moment of craving.
[22:34] Speaker: And then you can stop right there and apply this analysis.
[22:39] Speaker: But the first step is to actually let this stronger, more independent self arise somehow, which shouldn't be too hard for most of us.
[22:48] Speaker: And then we apply the three-part analysis to ourselves, with this added dimension of also examining the parts and causes of our mind.
[22:57] Speaker: We search for the labeled self that we put upon the continuously changing parts of the body and our continuously changing stream of mental experiences.
[23:06] Speaker: When we look at the parts of the self, we can start with the material aspects.
[23:13] Speaker: This is just the same as our meditation on impermanence, and you can spend a lot of time here if you like, looking at the gross parts of your body and the blood and food and signals passing through it.
[23:24] Speaker: The cells and neurotransmitters and pheromones at the microscopic level, the organelles, microstructures, viruses, bacteria, and billions of other microorganisms living inside us.
[23:36] Speaker: Then we go to the molecular level, where atoms are bound together into biochemical components.
[23:43] Speaker: And then to the atomic and subatomic level, and then somehow beyond those two, to areas scientists haven't yet broken through to, perhaps to the boundary where matter and energy transform into one another, or where the probabilities of quantum reality collapse into observable discrete changes in the universe.
[24:03] Speaker: As you do this analysis, the key point is to keep asking the question, is this me?
[24:10] Speaker: Am I my brain, my heart, my liver or spleen or blood or neurons?
[24:16] Speaker: Or all the oxygen or hydrogen or electrical signals or DNA in my body?
[24:21] Speaker: You don't need to come to a conclusion, but ask the questions deeply and continuously.
[24:27] Speaker: Now, unlike a material object, we also look at the parts of the mind.
[24:32] Speaker: This is less familiar to us, and you may want to go back to our meditation what is the mind to delve more deeply.
[24:40] Speaker: There are many ways to slice and dice the mind.
[24:43] Speaker: The first is twofold, to divide the mind into the spatio-temporal reality of the mind without thoughts and feelings.
[24:52] Speaker: And then the various thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and mental factors that label and react to and describe parts of reality.
[24:59] Speaker: In Buddhism we call these two mind and mental factors.
[25:04] Speaker: When we look at our mental factors, the two strongest ones we usually call out are feeling and perception.
[25:12] Speaker: Feeling is the way our mind forms a response of pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral about any object that passes through it, and then has the wish to repeat the pleasant, escape the unpleasant, and not care so much about the neutral.
[25:27] Speaker: Perception is the labeling capacity of our mind that takes the diversity of continuous, multipart reality and wraps various bundles with a label of a thing or experience or concept.
[25:40] Speaker: This mental factor is also sometimes called discrimination.
[25:44] Speaker: And then there are many other mental factors.
[25:47] Speaker: In one analysis, there are 49 more factors that you can memorize.
[25:52] Speaker: Other mental factors include positive and negative emotions like devotion or jealousy, and concepts like democracy and happiness.
[26:00] Speaker: One way to meditate on the parts of the mind is to step back and simply observe whatever passes through your mind and label those experiences using the traditional terms we've talked about if you know them, or in some other way that feels comfortable to you.
[26:14] Speaker: The key is to retain that distance from your thoughts and feelings.
[26:18] Speaker: As each one of them arises, ask, is this where I can find me?
[26:22] Speaker: The second aspect of our mind, in addition to this incredible stream of diverse mental experiences, mental factors, is the space of the mind itself.
[26:34] Speaker: Step back from the contents of a mind and look at the container of the mind.
[26:39] Speaker: Here also you look with openness.
[26:43] Speaker: You can examine the dimensionality of the mind.
[26:46] Speaker: Do you experience the mind with a shape, size, color, or luminosity?
[26:50] Speaker: We call this aspect of the mind consciousness or awareness.
[26:55] Speaker: You may come to some profound sense that you can experience the mind as a vast, clear, knowing space where thoughts and feelings arise and fall from some great luminous ground.
[27:06] Speaker: But don't stop there.
[27:09] Speaker: If you do experience the mind as something, start to examine it and ask, am I this thing?
[27:16] Speaker: If the space of awareness appears to have dimensionality and qualities, examine whether you can find yourself in any one of those portions of mental space or in the qualities of the mind.
[27:27] Speaker: If you can't be found in any one of them, could you possibly be the collection of them?
[27:33] Speaker: The mind has a temporal aspect too.
[27:37] Speaker: You may notice that your awareness, whether with or without thoughts, is chained into smaller moments of conscious experience.
[27:45] Speaker: If you watch closely, you may even catch a glimpse of a thought or feeling, or simply the experience of mind itself arising, abiding, and then vanishing, and then another taking its place.
[27:56] Speaker: Ask yourself if you are any one of these moments of consciousness, or are you the collection?
[28:03] Speaker: Where did the one that just vanished go?
[28:06] Speaker: Are you still it?
[28:07] Speaker: And the one that's coming up, are you that one or the one you're experiencing right now?
[28:13] Speaker: Each of these moments of consciousness, whether containing mental factors, thoughts, feelings, or free from them, since it has a beginning and end, can be subdivided into two sub moments if we split it at the middle.
[28:26] Speaker: When we do that, do we find ourselves in one, the other, both, or neither?
[28:33] Speaker: If you do this ad infinitum, do you find a quantum of consciousness?
[28:39] Speaker: Keep searching for yourself and whatever you explore mentally, that's the point.
[28:45] Speaker: Next you move on to reflecting on causes.
[28:51] Speaker: First, what are the causes of your body?
[28:54] Speaker: Small parts of your mother and father to start with, but then the workings of cellular reproduction that took food and fluids from your mother's body and ingestion and gradually transformed them into your body.
[29:06] Speaker: Over time, you kept eating and breathing and exercising and countless people around you, but especially your mother cared for you, nourished you, made you stronger and healthier.
[29:18] Speaker: Thich Nhat Hanh puts it so elegantly when he says you are only made of non you elements.
[29:25] Speaker: Everything that is you came from outside you, parts of your parents, food, dirt, air.
[29:32] Speaker: Back through the history of civilization, evolution, life on Earth, the formation of our solar system, stellar explosions that created all the heavy elements like carbon and nitrogen, and the Big Bang itself at the start of this universe.
[29:47] Speaker: You can be creative here and come up with much more than this short list.
[29:51] Speaker: The causes of your body.
[29:54] Speaker: And as you do, search for yourself in any one of these causes.
[29:57] Speaker: We sometimes get mad at our parents, putting the blame on them for bringing us into this world.
[30:02] Speaker: But are they the first cause of our existence on earth?
[30:06] Speaker: The mind also has causes, and these become subtler and subtler.
[30:13] Speaker: As you reflect on each of them, keep searching for yourself among these causes.
[30:18] Speaker: Every word you know someone else invented, and you learned from someone else.
[30:23] Speaker: A large cause of who you are are your parents and teachers that taught you most of what you know.
[30:30] Speaker: And then the books and media and knowledge around you all created by others.
[30:34] Speaker: But then there are these subtler aspects of mind that we become aware of mental factors, feelings, perceptions, moments of awareness.
[30:45] Speaker: Examine these subtler aspects of your mind and question the causes of your stream of consciousness.
[30:51] Speaker: There is a doctrinaire Buddhist view that the cause of a moment of consciousness is simply the previous one.
[30:58] Speaker: And it's worth taking this on as a hypothesis and examining it.
[31:02] Speaker: Searching for yourself in this view of mental cause and effect.
[31:06] Speaker: But then also look wide open at this question what is the cause of my subtle awareness, my sense of being aware and present, and my capacity to know and feel.
[31:17] Speaker: Then we look at the mind in still another way, honing in on the mind's role in forming our sense of self.
[31:26] Speaker: Not selfishness, which is a side effect, but selfness.
[31:30] Speaker: I am Scott.
[31:32] Speaker: Scott is the label I place upon the continuously changing parts of the body, this stream of subjective mental experiences, the infinite causes that brought them together here, and that will ultimately dissolve them apart.
[31:45] Speaker: But what am I?
[31:47] Speaker: Who am I?
[31:49] Speaker: As you ask this question, you can sometimes experience a feeling almost like in the Matrix, when time slows down, and you feel able to see reality from a distance almost the way Neil was able to step around bullets.
[32:03] Speaker: Who am I?
[32:05] Speaker: When that person was yelling at me, who was that person?
[32:09] Speaker: Who was the person that got angry back at them?
[32:13] Speaker: Was I the feeling of anger, my red face?
[32:16] Speaker: My brain activity, my lips moving, my lungs pumping, the air vibrating, the sound coming from my mouth.
[32:24] Speaker: Sometimes this can make you laugh, and you have a feeling that I'm not any of these.
[32:30] Speaker: Who was that person getting angry?
[32:32] Speaker: On what basis was there even a valid reason to posit a separate me and them and join a fight over these illusions?
[32:39] Speaker: You can be completely open in this analysis.
[32:43] Speaker: If you really believe in the materiality of the mind, then meditate that way.
[32:48] Speaker: Try to find the mind wholly in the body and brain.
[32:51] Speaker: But also investigate what thoughts are.
[32:54] Speaker: Where are they and how they can be divided, even if you believe they stem wholly from material causes?
[33:00] Speaker: There isn't necessarily a right answer in the process of meditating on emptiness of the self, dependent origination of the self, but you do need to ask the right questions.
[33:11] Speaker: Keep asking, is this me?
[33:14] Speaker: Can I be found in this physical part, this mental moment?
[33:17] Speaker: Come to see the more subtle, changing, flexible, interdependent way that you exist moment to moment, to escape the painful illusion of separateness and neediness that binds us to continued feelings of craving and anger.
[33:32] Speaker: So that's the way to meditate on the dependent origination of the self.
[33:38] Speaker: Next week we'll do this more slowly, more spaciously, in a meditative space.
[33:43] Speaker: Even though I myself haven't realized emptiness like a great master, you can see how we ordinary people can have a profound and productive experience with this meditation.
[33:53] Speaker: How if we were able to do this every day and eventually in many moments of our day, how this way of seeing ourselves as profoundly interconnected and interdependent with all of reality and all others might really take the edge off our feelings of separateness and neediness.
[34:09] Speaker: We do exist, but the way we exist is so much more expansive and profound and inclusive than we habitually feel.
[34:18] Speaker: This meditation is an invitation almost to step up and become a true citizen of the universe, to feel continuously interconnected and to find a more expansive sense of self that's interrelational, intersubjective, open, connected, and happy, rather than independent, partless, solid, and unhappy.
[34:39] Speaker: Thanks for joining me in this episode of A Skeptic's Path to Enlightenment.
[34:49] Speaker: This is a tricky topic, and I'm not a person who has realized emptiness, unfortunately.
[34:54] Speaker: So all your comments and questions are welcome.
[34:56] Speaker: And ones that I can't answer, I have fantastic sources to go to in both Living Masters and authentic Buddhist texts.
[35:03] Speaker: You can read a transcript of this episode on our website at skepticspath.org and also offer your comments there.
[35:10] Speaker: Or follow along with us on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn.
[35:14] Speaker: We also have a private meditation discussion group.
[35:17] Speaker: You can join on our website, and we routinely run courses that go through these topics in depth.
[35:23] Speaker: If you enjoyed this episode, please consider making a donation to our podcast.
[35:28] Speaker: A Skeptic's Path to Enlightenment is a nonprofit organization supported by donations that keep our podcast free and ad-free.
[35:35] Speaker: To support us now, visit our website at skepticspath.org.
[35:39] Speaker: We accept cash, credit, bitcoin, and other cryptocurrencies, and your donations are tax deductible in the US.
[35:46] Speaker: Thanks to my partner and producer Stephen Butler for so beautifully producing these episodes and helping to structure the content and correct my mistakes with valid scholarly references from the precious lineages of Indian and Tibetan Buddhism.

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