Choosing Compassion by Anam Thubten & Sharon Roe

Author:Anam Thubten & Sharon Roe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Shambhala
Published: 2019-08-05T16:00:00+00:00

10

going beyond self-image

Many people traveled to the East in the 1960s and 1970s and explored various Buddhist traditions and yogic disciplines. An American spiritual teacher studied with many masters in the East during those days. When people asked him what he learned from all of the masters, his answer was rather unusual. He told them what they didn’t they teach him rather than what they did teach him. He would say, “None of them teach to cling.” This is a brilliant answer. He knew how to point out the quintessence of all of the spiritual teachings. In other words, he didn’t miss the point. The heart of many of these ancient teachings is the notion of nongrasping. There are many ways this timeless wisdom can be applied. We can embody nongrasping in everyday life when we encounter a variety of situations that just happen to us when we are not expecting them, when we were, in fact, expecting something else. We can practice nongrasping simply by accepting the new occurrence, without grasping to what we were expecting.

Nongrasping can be practiced in relation to our material acquisitions and possessions. We can get very attached to what we own and also to what we want. We can become very lost in these things. We can also apply the principle of nongrasping to our concepts, ideas, and beliefs. We often become really attached to these, even though they are nonmaterial and insubstantial. One of the most powerful attachments that we are all dealing with, without even knowing it, is our attachment to self. This is called self-grasping, and it is an extremely powerful attachment. Many people are unhappy and suffer painfully in this world because they are attached to what we can call their self-image.

We walk around with an image in our head about who we are. Yet this self-image is totally false; this self-image is not who we really are; this self-image is not born with us. We never meet a newborn child who has a concept about who he or she is. Infants do not have any self-images. That’s why a newborn child is enlightened in some way. They are mystical transcenders in many ways because they don’t yet have an ego structure and obviously they don’t have any kind of self-image in their mind. However, as time goes by, everybody develops a sense of personal self and they go through the process of developing very strong self-images.

Like newborn children, animals also have no self-image, and they also do not project anything onto you. That’s the reason we feel so relaxed and comfortable around our pets. They love us unconditionally no matter how we look or what we are going through at the time. They never criticize us as a loser or as dumb.

In human development, it is natural to go through the stages from no ego structure, or born without any concepts in pure innocence, to a fully matured ego with a strong self-image. This self-image is so strong that we end up believing that this is who and what we are.

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