The Illusion of Self and Free Will

Our dear colleague, Jason Meno, generously invited five high-profile Buddhist monks / teachers, to appear on our Feeling Good Podcast, hoping we could feature one every week during our "Enlightenment Month."  He included his dear friend and ordained Buddhist monk, Tahn Palmetto. Happily, Tahn accepted Jason’s invitation, and we are thrilled to chat with him today about his feelings of depression as a young man in the army to his search for happiness and peace through meditation.

Tahn began his journey when we was young, 20 or 21 years old. After he enlisted in the army, he was lying on the floor, staring at the ceiling and realized he was depressed. He also realized that he didn’t actually want to go to war, and saw that the best of good intentions often lead to pretty terrible outcomes.

Jason and David described the basis of cognitive therapy, confirmed in Jason’s recent research on meditation, that the degree of upset from any negative thought depends on how strongly you believe it to be true. Tahn said he also realized that his negative feelings did not depend so much on what he was doing, but how much he believed his thoughts.

He got out of the army and searched for spiritual teachers, and eventually settled on Theravada Buddhism, also known as the Thai Forest Tradition. He said, “I found that you can have a lifestyle that triggers feelings of unhappiness, and committed my life to achieving happiness and peace.”

He said that some people who come to the monastery discover that they don’t want to commit themselves to the monastic life, and some commit to it but do it poorly. He said that your commitment will depend on how strongly you want to feel happy and enlightened. Believing that this is possible requires a paradigm switch.

It is possible to have a mind that is clear, but even on a clear day, there will be clouds. The clouds, however, are only temporary.

Our suffering comes and goes. If you twist your knee, it may hurt for life. But if you have a cold, you can recover completely. Even in a monastery, people have their squabbles. Within the Buddhist practice, Than explained that it is important to try to identify the disease and only then prescribe the effective treatment.

Jason mentioned that some people come to the monastery but leave feeling hopeless. Others stay and are successful. Tahn explained that in Asia it is common for someone to enter the monastic life for a brief period, for example when they are experiencing grief. He said that if you grieve over the loss of a loved one, time alone will heal your grief, and once the suffering is relieved, they leave the monastic life.

Rhonda asked if mindfulness meditation could be harmful to some people.

Tahn explained that mindfulness does not cause negative feelings, but often reveals the presence of negative feelings. If you have a condition that prevents you from experiencing enlightenment, the condition is getting in the way. Sometimes the practice will give you the stability and the peace of mind to deal with it.

If you come to the practice of mindfulness or the study of Buddhism for the wrong reasons, you might stay for the right reasons. If it does not work or help, you can always seek some other type of treatment.

Tahn explained that mindfulness or Buddhism addresses unhappiness caused by mental or physical pain, and that people are often surprised by how it helps them. He believes that mindfulness meditation is “the thing” that treats someone’s stress. It treats the “dukka,” which is a fundamental Buddhist teaching that refers to (according to the internet) the “suffering” or “unhappiness” of life. It is one of the first “noble truths” of Buddhism; namely, that suffering cannot be avoided.

Apparently dukka comes in three flavors:

• Physical and emotional pain and discomfort
• Suffering from the inability to accept change
• The profound dissatisfaction of existence.

Tahn said that you develop greater resources when you meditate. Then you may have extra resources to help others:

You learn to deal with everybody’s stuff. You learn to be aware of your body. This is your perspective for everything you do. It makes me happy to think about my eyeballs. When I meditate on this, it becomes funny, and I laugh.

Tahn suggested that when you meditate, you learn to be aware of your body, because that is the center point of your world. This is your perspective on everything that is going on in the world. When you become aware of your body and what it is doing, you know the context of everything in your life.

What does his day look like? Tahn said:

I answer emails, I troubleshoot problems. Lately we’ve had a problem with scorpions. But we don’t try to kill them.

Tahn talked about how Buddhism defines Truth as reality, and that the definition of happiness is “non-suffering.”

There are three patterns that lead to unhappiness:

1. Attachment, which he defined as greed and desire, especially when you seek some external object(s). An extreme example would be disregarding the needs of others or even endangering others to get the object of your desires, or an attitude of only wanting or caring for things that you like or want.
2. Aversion which refers to feelings of aggression, anger, and hatred. Aversion’s opposite is loving kindness. When we experience Aversion, we push away (usually aggressively) the things that we dislike. If we allow our ignorance to take over, we can conjure up hatred for the things that we dislike and the people we see as blocking our desires. We saw from the meditation experiment that Jason described last week, how meditating on loving kindness brought about a reduction in people’s negative thoughts.
3. Ignorance refers to delusion, confusion and dullness. Ignorance defuses understanding serving to confuse you and prevent you from doing something functional. This can be experienced as an inability to see the truth or reality of ourselves or the world around us. Asking questions like “Am I real” is the basis of the first two in this list.

Tahn also discussed how the mind precedes the thoughts.

Then we talked about the concept of the Self, in that we think that we exist. However, there is no stable “I.” All we find are temporary phenomena. For example, you don’t need to have a “self” to drive to a picnic. All you need is a car and a tank of gas.

The group discussed the Buddhist concept of “laughing enlightenment.”

Thank you for listening today!

Tahn, Jason, Rhonda, and David