From Suffering to Peace

The issue of identity brings up the important question “Who am I?” This is perhaps life’s most perplexing riddle, one of the hardest nuts to crack. It surfaces more questions than answers. Who is this personality that I profess to be? Am I the same person as the one who was born, or am I different? If my body is me, then why do I seem to have so little control over it? The same is true of the mind. Can I really call all these thoughts mine? What happens to “me” when I die? Where do “I” go during sleep? And what of dementia and Alzheimer’s patients, who seem to lose all sense of identity and memory and even forget their personal history?

These questions have long troubled mystics, philosophers, and psychologists. Through mindfulness practice, we can explore these unchartered realms, bringing an attentiveness to examine the complex and subtle dimensions of self. As I discuss in the previous chapter, the notion of a fixed, separate self does not hold water under close scrutiny. In this chapter, I want to explore how we build a sense of identity around key areas of our personal experience, starting with identification with the body.

Most people would ordinarily say about themselves: I am my body and my body is me. There is generally not a lot of doubt or questioning about that. We relate to our physical experience as primary, as essentially defining who we are. We look in the mirror in the morning while washing our face and say, “Yep, that’s me.” We post photos on Instagram and Facebook as proof that this is who “we” are, how “we” look, and what “we” are doing. We can spend an inordinate amount of time, energy, and worry trying to improve our body, to make it look presentable or beautiful, often treating it as a reflection of our true self.

By bringing mindfulness to our somatic experience, we can behold the body in a different way. When we close our eyes, the body feels a lot less solid and substantial than it appears when we look in the mirror. Attuning to our immediate sensory experience, we discover that the body is made of innumerable fleeting, sensory impressions. The fixed notion of a head, legs, arms, and torso is replaced with a flow of sensations: pulsing, pressure, tingling, vibration, heaviness, lightness, contraction, warmth, coolness, itchiness, density, and so on. Or we may sense how the body feels spacious, vast, or like a flow of energy or light dancing within our interior landscape. Take a moment now to close your eyes and explore this in your experience.

In the intriguing book On Having No Head, the psychologist Douglas Harding describes how people can never see their own head directly. They can only intimate that it is there through touch, memory, and as a reflection in a mirror. Though we have a very fixed notion of our head, we can only know it through inner sensory experience, by sensing the muscles move on our face and so on. This is not unlike what happens when we meditate. As we cultivate mindfulness, we see that what we call “my body” is simply a concept that describes an incredibly complex and mysterious range of experience, the external shape or form being simply one dimension of it. Further, we experience how many of the body’s movements, sensations, and so on happen involuntarily, somewhat independent of us.

This leads to another existential question: If my body is me, then shouldn’t I control it? Of course, we do and can control our body’s movements. We can mostly move our limbs the way we want, direct our gaze, chew food, and so on. But much of what occurs in the body happens all by itself. For example, we don’t instruct our heart to beat — which it does on average 108,000 times per day — or our lungs to breathe, which they do about 23,000 times a day.

Astoundingly, over half our body weight is made up of microorganisms, parasites, and other bugs that live in and on us. The ratio of “other organisms” to our own body mass is 1.3:1. But don’t worry, they are not foreign invaders! They are essential to our survival and gut health. Our body and in particular our digestive tract contains a microbiome of trillions of cells. Yet we have little cognitive control over any of them. So if the proportion of what I call “me” (the nonforeign cells) is less than half of my overall body mass, whose body is this, anyway?

Perhaps the most potent reminder of the selfless nature of the body is when we age and get sick. When we become ill, we realize how little control we have over our physical experience. We can take our vitamin pills, aspirin, and other medicine, but the body is subject to physical laws, many of which are beyond our control. This is particularly true with aging. No matter how much we wish to stay young, and no matter what we do to maintain our vitality, our body degenerates, losing energy and suppleness, and it naturally declines over time. In this way, the body teaches us to surrender to these natural laws, reminding us that the body is not “ours.”

Death is perhaps the ultimate teaching that who we are is not this body. We inhabit a physical form and wear body clothes for a while, but eventually we die and shed our physicality. That becomes so clear when we witness the death of a loved one. We may have cherished and nurtured their physical form when they were alive, but when they die, their body becomes a cold, inanimate lump of flesh and bone. It becomes obvious that who they are is not contained within that decaying matter. Their spirit, presence, or consciousness appears to leave behind the materiality of the body that housed them but which in essence was never who they really were.

I remember vividly when a friend of mine, Vanessa, died some years ago. She was a vital person, very active in the community, a philanthropist and mother. I have strong memories of her hiking, walking her dog, gardening, and generally living life to the full. Then she contracted breast cancer, which metastasized, and her life went through a radical change. Her vitality left her, and the chemotherapy sucked out her life force. After she died, going to see her as she was laid to rest was still quite a shock. Gone was the vitality, the color in her cheeks, the suppleness of her body. Absent was the sparkle in her eyes. What I saw was a lifeless corpse. It was clear to me that who Vanessa was in her essence was no longer residing in that physical body. Perhaps, in some ways, this allows us to let go more easily of the physical form of those we love.

In addition to identifying with the body, we often mistake our mind and its thoughts as who we are. In Apocalypse, D.H. Lawrence hypothesized poetically almost a century ago: “We will come to know that the mind is no more than the glittering of the sun reflected like shining lines on the surface of the water.” Neuroscientists have been trying to discover what the mind is for the past few decades, while mystics have been exploring this elusive part of human experience for millennia. Though they come at it from different perspectives, both would agree that it is hard to pin down, let alone define. Trying to understand or measure what consciousness is has proven to be elusive to science. It appears to be too subtle to even measure with existing scientific tools. The direct experience of meditators perhaps offers some clarity on this subtle experience.

We often pride ourselves on our thoughts, views, and ideas, considering them perhaps what is most unique and personal about us. For many, the mind and its perceptions are what people most associate with as “me.” But when we observe our mental processes, we see how they, too, are not wholly in our control. We are capable of intentional thought, yet tens of thousands of unbidden thoughts pour through our mind each day. They are triggered by a host of causes and conditions, including conversations, memories, life experiences, schooling, political and religious associations, and countless other influences. The mind flows with thoughts like a bubbling spring.

We like to think, as in The Wizard of Oz, that we are the person behind the curtain running the show. Yes, we can reason and pursue a particular line of thought, but can we really take ownership of the entire process? Are we responsible for the millions of thoughts that flood through our brain each year? How many do we will into being? As our heart beats, so our thoughts think themselves. Speaking to this topic, the psychologist Mark Epstein titled one of his books Thoughts without a Thinker. That title encapsulates this reality of thinking quite accurately; there is no “thinker” behind the thoughts, just thoughts thinking themselves.

The thinking process often amazes me when I write. I may have a particular topic in mind when I start writing, but what flows out of my pen onto the paper seems as if it comes through me, not from me. One of the delights of writing is to see how new ways to express ideas emerge as if from nowhere. Did “I” create those new turns of phrase or particular forms of expression, or did they just flow out of the confluence of my brain and all of the innumerable influences that I have been exposed to?

This raises a further existential question: Do we even have agency around our intentions and choices? When I scratch an itch, did I decide to move, and if so, who is deciding? When I swerve to avoid a lizard that runs in front of my bike, that action begins before I consciously register the situation, in the same way the eyes blink automatically when an object suddenly comes toward them. Instinct guides certain reactions, but even seemingly “directed” action is often conditioned by innumerable processes that often don’t come into conscious awareness. If I am sitting on a plane and my head turns to look out at the window at the dusty desert landscape below, did I choose to do that or was the movement triggered by a passing thought or memory or physical impulse that I was unaware of? It seems like “we” direct the show, but when we attend closely, we see how much happens by itself, the body breathing and the mind thinking without a “self” giving instructions.

From this perspective, the concept of the self is just another thought. Time magazine once reviewed the neuroscientific literature from decades of studies about the self. In all those studies, researchers have been unable to locate a specific place in the brain where a self exists. Our sense of agency seems to lack any central command center. The so-called self is perhaps no more than an interconnected web of electrical and chemical impulses moving in the vast matrix of the brain, constellated perhaps within the default mode network.

In the 1990s, I studied with the Advaita Vedanta teacher Poonja-ji in India. He used to ask his students to notice how the “I” thought arises in the mind. For example, we may have a sublime experience in meditation, in which we experience peace and the mind feels silent and vast. Then after the fact, an “I” thought usually arises and “claims” the experience: “Look what happened to ‘me’ in meditation today,” we say to ourselves. “I had a cool, blissful experience.” The mind can then build a story that enhances a spiritual identity that we are usually eager to tell others about. In reality, that experience occurred void of any sense of I or me. What allowed that moment of spaciousness in the first place was in part due to the mind not being preoccupied with itself nor being lost in thoughts and narratives about “self.”

Mindfulness allows us to examine the process by which we create our own mistaken identity. We can observe how the mind conceptualizes experience into ideas like “me,” “mine,” and “self.” We can notice the process of how we try to reduce the unfathomable matrix of what it means to be human into the concept of an “I,” an individual self with a name like Bill or Jane. We can watch how we concoct concepts and take them to be reality. When we are unconscious of doing that, we create a lot of confusion because we keep building a house of cards on shifting sands. Trying to create solidity in something that is essentially groundless is stressful!

Of course, naming and differentiating things can be a useful convention. However, what is key is to not be defined by such labels or to think these concepts are substitutes for actual experience. For instance, if I am in a parking garage, it is helpful to know which car is “mine,” since I need it to drive home. Yet the car is only “mine” because of human concepts and agreements — I paid money to buy it, a conceptual transaction verified with my registration and title. And the car itself is just a collection of metal, rubber, and other parts, which when assembled in a certain way we label “car.” In the same way, modern society agrees on the concept of buying and owning land, but “possessing” land is a human fiction. When America’s first European colonists arrived, they brought this concept with them, but Native Americans were perplexed about this strange idea that a person could actually lay claim to, let alone own, land.

The identifying labels we use to define ourselves are the same. We give ourselves individual names, and these are helpful in everyday life. But we are not our names in the same way our pets are not their names. We named our family dog Patrick, but this label is merely a convenience, as are the words dog and pet. The problem is that we often mistake the name, the concept, the label, and the idea for the reality.

I spend a lot of time in nature, which makes this distinction between our concepts and reality very apparent. I love redwood trees. I admire their tall majesty, their thick rusty barks, and how light pours through their branches in the afternoon. I walk past a particular redwood tree regularly on my hikes, and my lived experience of this tree defies and overwhelms what I think I know about redwoods as a species. No amount of words, no idea or concept, can ever bring me close to the vitality of a living tree. The concept is like a finger pointing to the moon. The name refers to the thing, but it does not come close to the actual living, breathing aliveness, complexity, and uniqueness of a redwood.

The same is true for each person. We can spend an inordinate amount of time cultivating, crafting, and perfecting our personality, the type of person we want to be, and then broadcasting this personality to others, such as through social media. This is often an idealized portrait, a certain image we prefer, but how close is it to the ever-changing reality of who and how we really are? Indeed, social media only fosters and reinforces our ongoing cult and myth of personality.

But is this personality that we project to the world ultimately real? Further, does it really serve us to claim an identity that we must defend and bolster when it’s attacked or rejected? A discerning awareness helps us see that our “personality” is a collection of ideas, self-images, memories, views, and thoughts. We are conditioned, shaped, and influenced by our childhood, culture, religion, media, and a whole host of other seen and unseen forces. And like everything, personality is changeable. Sometimes we fight to maintain our identity and how it is perceived as if our lives depended on it, but this is an inherently unsettling process because there is never any solid ground on which to rest.

With mindfulness, we can observe this process and track how we construct our own sense of self. When you wake up in the morning, notice if you start to worry about how an important meeting at work will go and whether you will be perceived well. As you dress, muse on the image you want to portray. If you trip over the sidewalk, notice how you immediately feel self-conscious, as if all eyes are on you and judging you for your mistake. Notice how you feel after receiving an unfavorable performance review from your boss or when you get home and your kids give you loving and appreciative hugs. Observe the ways that your sense of self, and of self-worth, are undermined and bolstered at various times. Because external circumstances are forever out of our control, our personality always undergoes turbulence like a plane riding through a storm.

Rather than judge this process and these reactions, hold this tenuous, uncertain experience with a compassionate attention. In essential ways, we remain like teenagers still trying to develop their sense of identity and feeling terror over every perceived social slight and rejection. We are fragile social creatures. And the more we are attached to an identity, to a persona, the more we will feel anxiety and stress. A kind, caring response is vital for dealing with the vulnerability of this fragile sense of self — especially for all the ways we believe it is who we are and struggle to present a positive version to the world. Not only is this self-compassion important but we can also extend this kindness to others when we see them holding on to a self-image or identity as if their lives depended on it. Wes Nisker, a colleague and meditation teacher, gave this solution to the problem of our identity or personality:

One suggestion is to regard your personality as a pet. It follows you around anyway, so give it a name and make friends with it. Keep it on a leash when you need to, and let it run free when you feel that is appropriate. Train it as well as you can, and then accept its idiosyncrasies, but always remember that your pet is not you. Your pet has its own life, and just happens to be in an intimate relationship with you, whoever you may be, hiding there behind your personality.

• PRACTICE •

Examining the Nature of Self

In the previous meditation, we explored the changing, transient, insubstantial nature of self. This meditation looks at how we identify with various aspects of our experience so that we can free ourselves from this misidentification, which is a limiting, painful habit that misleads and constricts us.

Sit comfortably, close your eyes, and rest your attention on your breath. Observe how the breath breathes itself. Perhaps you identify the breath as yours, since to a degree you can influence it. Notice how this “I” thought arises and claims the breath as your own, as if you can possess it. As you inhale and exhale, inquire if this is true or if breath is like the breeze on your face or the sound of a bird — felt but not owned by you.

Now turn your attention to your thoughts. Observe thoughts as they come and go; see how they have a life of their own. Thoughts think themselves, triggered by a host of conditions, including memory, perception, and sense experience. Can you really claim that all the thoughts pouring through your head belong to you or are “yours”? See how thoughts are like clouds moving across the sky of awareness. Does that allow you to reduce the sense of ownership or identification with them?

Next, attend to the ebb and flow of emotions, which are often triggered by thoughts, conversations, memories, and sensations. Notice the process of identification, where you may observe a sense of ownership of these feelings, as you did with thoughts. See that they occur selflessly, in their own way, in their own time. While you can influence them, you can’t control or own them. Observing your emotional experience with awareness allows a greater sense of space and perspective, and it helps you avoid becoming so caught up in or defined by or painfully identified with your ever-changing moods.

Notice how it feels to observe your inner experience through the spacious lens of mindfulness, where you can learn to release identifying with your individual body, thoughts, and emotions. What happens to your sense of “self” when you do this? The more we see the selfless nature of all experience, the more it allows us to feel an expanding connection to all life. Limiting our sense of “self” to this body and mind means believing and feeling we are separate, distinct, and even isolated from everything else. Meanwhile, releasing our identification with this narrow sense of self can open a connection within the vaster web of life. Rather than feeding the fear and anxiety of separation, this experience fosters a sense of ease and peace. Notice if this is true for you as you practice seeing through the “selfing” process in meditation and in life.

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