Impermanence and the self-sense

We can begin by just trying to find some genuine interest, curiosity, wonder. Can we genuinely want to explore the mystery of existence, the mystery of being alive? Sometimes in day-to-day life this priority gets a little bit demoted down the list, and it can be very helpful for our practice to connect back in with it. It’s not like we’re wanting to answer the deepest questions, but we’re wanting to plunge more into a sense of mystery and awe. So just see how much you can bring that orientation in right now. And then, beginning to check in with the conditions that you’re practising with this morning. Firstly, deeply becoming present with your body—with the moment-to-moment experience of your body. It can be helpful to just scan the body a few times, from the feet to the head to the fingers. Just checking that all parts of the body are met with awareness and noticing the most prominent sensations in your body. These are normally sensations corresponding to either physical discomfort or some kind of emotion, either pleasant or challenging. So notice this, and include your emotional state in this body awareness. There’s nothing to an emotion except sensations in the body—a felt sense in the body—and thoughts in the mind. And checking in with the mind—what’s the mind up to this morning? Is the mind having a run around, is it? Sort of drifting here and there, as always? There’s absolutely no need to make an enemy of the mind. So the body, the heart, the mind—showing up exactly as they are, just like this, beyond words, never reducible to simple descriptions. We can just spend some time really welcoming all of this, fully allowing ourselves to show up in this moment as we are. Then we’re going to begin to tune our awareness to notice the changing qualities of experience. We’ll start with just finding one of your fingers that has some sensation in it. Normally there are little tingles in the fingers or other sensations. Just stay with one finger and be very, very sensitively attuned to the comings and goings of sensation in that finger. Notice how these sensations are completely out of your control. Notice that these sensations are experiences that you are aware of. This is a very obvious fact on one level, but on another level, things happening in our body sometimes get mistaken for being part of the subject. But anything that can be witnessed by the subject must be an object—must be an experience. Now widen your field of attention to include your whole hand. Notice how many sensations seem to come into being when we look there. Were they already happening before we looked, or did we bring them into being? Sort of a mystery. Feeling the various tingles, movements of subtle tension, and space in your whole hand. Again, be very clear about a few things: I am not doing these sensations, I am watching them. They come and go completely apart from any act of will of mine. And they are experiences for me to be aware of. Notice that, to some extent, there probably is a sense of “me” associated with these sensations in your hand—like they belong to you in a way that, for example, the sounds around you don’t seem to. It can be interesting to actually move between something like hearing sounds and noticing: there isn’t a sense that this sound is me. There may be a sense that this hearing is mine, but the sound itself is not me, not mine. Then go back to the hand. Notice if there is more of a sense that this is me. And I’m not saying your hand is or isn’t you. But what we can do is just notice, and be very clear that—just like sounds are an experience and therefore cannot be the subject of experience, the “me”—just so, sensations in my hand are just an experience in awareness. They cannot be the subject of that experience. We’re going to open our awareness further to the whole of the body. Probably need to zoom out a little bit to allow this bubbling mass of sensation to be witnessed. We can sense that there’s a way we can feel the body as one changing experience—the experience of the whole body with its different regions shifting and changing and morphing in different ways. Or, we can experience the body as a kind of composite of very many tiny sensations. Just pick the one that feels easiest to notice—the quality of change. And we’ll repeat the same process of contemplation: noticing all of the experiences that make up your body, or this shifting experience of your body. This is happening completely by itself. The experience of my body is given to me, moment to moment, without me doing anything. Notice if there is a sense of this experience of the body being me or mine, and just investigate that. Can this impermanent experience that comes and goes—these tingles, this tension here and there, this feeling of space in different places, different temperatures—can these somehow constitute a self, who I am? What may well happen when you do this contemplation is that we recognise that the body sensations arising in consciousness cannot be me, because I’m here to watch them. And then the sense of “me” shifts to a sense of one watching all of this—I am the watcher. If this happens, we can notice that this too—the sense of the watcher, the meditator, the one who is witnessing the impermanence of the body—this too is an experience we can be aware of. Just like with the tingles in your finger—if it’s an object for awareness, it cannot be the subject. We can enter into a bit of an infinite loop that can make us go cross-eyed, if we chase the sense of self from one sense of watching to another. The important thing is that we recognise how the sense of me becomes attached to certain experiences, but it doesn’t survive a clear investigation. The way to investigate, in this way of practising, is to notice that this experience is an experience—and as such, cannot be the experiencer. This can lead to confusion, blankness, ungroundedness. Just notice that these too are experiences. They’re not really you either.