What is the non-self?
It’s who you are when there are no personal attachments. This sounds mystical, but we shouldn’t be distracted by semantics. The non-self is natural; it’s rooted in everyday experience. When you wake up in the morning there’s a moment before your mind gets filled with all the things you have to do today. In that moment you exist without a self. You don’t think about your name or your bank account; you don’t even think about your spouse and children. You just are. Enlightenment extends that state and deepens it. You aren’t burdened by having to remember who you are, ever again.
When I wake up in the morning I remember who I am almost immediately. How does that change?
By gradually shifting your allegiance. Consider how you relate to your body. You mostly forget about it. Heartbeat, metabolism, body temperature, electrolyte balance-literally dozens of processes go on automatically, and your nervous system coordinates them perfectly without interference from the conscious mind. Buddha suggests that you can let go of many things that you’re certain you must control. Instead of devoting so much effort and struggle to thinking, planning, running after pleasure, and avoiding pain, you can surrender and put those functions on automatic, also. This is accomplished gradually by a practice called mindfulness.
You mean, I simply stop thinking?
You stop investing yourself in thinking, because Buddha teaches that you haven’t been in control of your mind anyway. The mind is a series of fleeting, impermanent events, and trying to ground yourself in impermanence is an illusion. Time is exactly the same, a sequence of fleeting events that has no solid basis. Once you hear this teaching, you put it into practice through mindfulness. Whenever you are tempted by the illusion, you remind yourself that it’s not real. In a way, a better term might be re-mindfulness.
The process of shifting your consciousness takes time. This is an evolution, not a revolution. We’re all pulled in by the temptation to choose between A and B. Duality makes us believe that making good decisions and avoiding bad ones is all-important. Buddha disagrees-he says that getting out of duality is all-important, and you’ll never escape as long as you keep burying yourself deeper into the game of “A-or-B?” Reality isn’t A or B. It’s both and it’s neither. Mindfulness keeps you aware of that fact.
How am I to understand “both and neither”?
You can’t, not with the mind. The mind is basically a machine that processes the world only in terms of “I want this” and “I don’t want that.” Buddha taught that you can step outside the machinery and simply watch it working. You witness the whole fantastic jumble of desires, fears, wishes, and memories that is the mind. When you gain practice doing that in meditation, things change. You begin to be aware of yourself in a simpler way, without so much mental jumble. In time your allegiance shifts, and the space between thoughts-the silent gap-dominates instead of thoughts.
Is that Nirvana?
No, it’s just a sign that you are successfully practicing mindfulness. The silent gap between thoughts goes by too fast for anyone to live there. You have to give the gap a chance to expand, and at the same time silence deepens. It may sound strange, but your mind can be silent the whole time it’s also thinking. Ordinarily, silence and thought are considered opposites, but when you go beyond opposites, they merge. You identify with the timeless source of thought rather than the thoughts emerging from it.
What advantage does this bring? Assuming I take the time and effort to achieve such a state.
One can speak of the advantages in glowing terms that sound very alluring. You gain peace; you no longer suffer. Death no longer holds any fear. You stand unshakably on your own Being. In reality the gains are highly individual and proceed at their own pace. Everyone is in a different state of unreality that’s highly personal. I may be obsessive, while the person next to me may be anxious and the person next to him depressed. In meditation these knots of discord and conflict begin to unravel of their own accord. Yet there’s always an evolutionary unfolding. In your own way you walk the path to peace, non-suffering, fearlessness, and everything else Buddha exemplified.
From the outside this third way of following Buddha looks mystical, but over time it becomes as natural as breathing. Buddhism survives today and thrives all around the world because it is so open-ended. You don’t have to obey a set of rules or worship God or the gods. You don’t even have to be spiritual. All you have to do is look into yourself and yearn to become clear, to wake up and be complete. Buddhism counts on the fact that everyone possesses at least a bit of these motivations. Mindfulness and meditation form the basis of Buddhist practice-although every sect and teacher has a particular slant on them. Za-zen, the style of Buddhist meditation practiced in Japan, isn’t the same as Vipasana meditation in South Asia. In the end, however, Buddhism is a do-it-yourself project, and that’s the secret of its appeal in the modern world. Don’t we all ultimately concentrate on personal suffering and what our individual fate will be? Buddha asked for nothing else as a starting point, and yet he promised that the end point would be eternity.
Acknowledgments
First and foremost I must thank a friend whose imagination sparked this project, film director Shekhar Kapur. We spent long, fascinating sessions together trying to imagine Buddha’s life. Without his contributions, the best parts of this book would never have appeared.
Thanks to Gideon Weil, my editor, who made invaluable suggestions every step of the way and intervened at just the right moments.
As always, my family and everyone at the Chopra Center provided their support and love. I am deeply grateful and hope that this book makes you proud.
About the Author
DEEPAK CHOPRA, the founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing, is the preeminent teacher of Eastern philosophy to the Western World. He has been a bestselling author for decades, and his writings have sold millions of copies. Visit the author online at www.chopra.com.
