In a “Bird of Spirit” blog entry from October, 2011, titled “Buddhism Versus Franklinism,” I alluded to “the Buddhist notion of destroying the self.” Recently, I received a correction on this statement from a professional colleague named Dave Merrill, who is a local Buddhist practitioner and student teacher of the Buddha path. Dave also teaches specialized breathing techniques, and more information about his breath work is available on his website, www.breathnorthwest.com. Dave explained to me that Buddhists don’t say you should destroy the self, because how can you destroy something that does not already exist? According to Buddhist teaching, the “I” does not exist in the first place. Instead, we create our own phenomena, our own “samsara.” What each of us does every day, without realizing it, is that we construct and re-construct our illusory “self,” so that we have an erroneous conviction of our own independent existence. Buddhism teaches that this process is simply a bad habit, because the self is an illusion.
This assertion that the self is an illusion reminds me of an image of a face on a television set or a computer screen. We look at the picture and we see a face, but in actual fact it is an optical illusion made up of a finite number of pixels on the screen; it doesn’t exist as an independent entity. The only thing that really exists is the bursts of color in each individual cell or pixel. As if to drive home this point, I have seen clever posters of large faces that are in turn composed of an array of tiny individual faces: each pixel or visual cell contains a face that presumably, if you were to take a microscope to it, would be composed of an array of infinitesimal faces, and so on and so on.
That God or Buddha nature transcends the linguistic symbol, “face,” or the psychological concept, “self,” is eloquently described in the first chapter of Jessica Maxwell’s marvelous book, “Roll Around Heaven: An All-True, Accidental Spiritual Adventure.” In the opening chapter, Jessica relates her memory of seeing a gigantic picture of her father’s face etched upon the sky at the moment of his death. The giant face of her father communicated to her the bliss he was feeling in being reunited with “Reality,” as Buddhists might put it, or otherwise with God. The reason her father was experiencing bliss at that moment was presumably due to the fact that he had entirely stopped perceiving himself as anything separate from the universe or from God. Look for future “Bird of Spirit” blog entries on what the “self” might mean, and whether our sense of self, or of having a self, is in fact nothing but an illusion.
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