No Self, No God, No Problem
Recently I have been talking about how nonduality is integrated into and expressed in everyday life. In the past couple of episodes I have been addressing moral and political decisions, such as politics and war. Specifically I have talked about the Gaza war and dualistic American politics of right versus left, conservatives versus liberals, Republicans versus Democrats.
The responses I have received indicate to me that I am not communicating very well that nonduality is not political position or a worldview or a philosophy or a religion or an idea or a principle or something like that. That means that I need to get back to basics once again. So that is what I am doing today.
I have said before that I see two approaches to awakening to Ultimate Reality. Self-inquiry and God-inquiry. We look inward in search of a self and we look outward in search of a God. Both inquiries end up in the same place: the realization that there is no self and no God.
What I mean by that is that there is no separate self and separate God as traditionally understood. When it is seen that there is no separate self and separate god, it is seen there is no problem. All problems, including the problem of suffering and the problem or evil drop away when Reality is seen.
Let me start with self-inquiry, which results in the discovery of no-self. Buddhists call this anatta. It is a mistake to think this is a doctrine or a belief. It is seen directly as the truth of reality. There is no self. That contradicts what society teaches us and what most religions, including Christianity teaches us. We have been taught by our society and our parents that there is an individual self, separate from others. But when we look for it, we can’t find it.
There is no entity inside us – in our heads, in our hearts, or in our souls, that oversees our lives. There is no overseer. No personal decision maker. No homunculus inside our bodies pulling all the strings. Instead the self is seen to be an idea. I liken it to an application – a software program developed by evolution that runs in the hardware of the brain.
It is a very useful application. It helps tremendously in our survival. It is responsible for our species arising from a physically weak and vulnerable hominid to becoming the dominant species on the planet. In the words of the Book of Genesis, we have become “fruitful and multiplied; we have filled the earth and subdued it; we have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” And the results for the earth have been disastrous.
But when we look carefully for this self, it disappears. It is seen to be nothing more than a label we have applied to the process of being human. The self is not an entity, and it is not in charge of anything. It is not in control of what ideas come to mind. Ideas arise unbidden. We have no control over them. It is not in charge of the body. We have no control over the functions of the body. The heart beats and the lungs breathe and the blood flows and the digestive system digests and the urinary tract processes and the kidneys and liver and pancreas and every other organ works without any direction from us.
We seem to have some limited control over some things. I decide when to go for a walk or whether to lift my hand or what I am going to have for lunch. But even those are not as much under our control as we pretend, as evident in the inability to lose weight or stop smoking or exercise more and so forth. Any control - if it exists at all - is limited. And it is not the ego – the personal self – that is in control. The decision-making process is much more complex and deeper than that.
The ego – which is the personal self - is just along for the ride. It is just a passenger on this journey called human life. It has very little influence, even though it thinks it is the top dog. When we examine our decisions closely we see we are controlled almost completely by instinct, emotions, fears, physical needs, psychological needs, and social needs. They work together and balance each other while the mind watches and a decision is made, but not by us. There is a will, but it is not the ego’s and it is not free. Scientific experiments have demonstrated that decision’s are made at an unconscious level before the consciousness becomes aware of it.
When we look carefully at our life, we see we are not the self or the body or the mind. Furthermore we are much more than a single human creature. We are more than what goes on in this one body and mind. Our decisions are more controlled by forces outside this body than inside it.
What we really are does not stop at the epidermis. The skin is not the boundary of our identity. There is continuous interchange between the body and the environment. With the air, without which we would not exist, including air pressure. We are dependent upon the right mixtures of gasses in the air for breathing. And upon the right temperature and moisture and water and sunlight and nutrients in the food that we eat.
The more we examine our lives the more we realize that we do not exist apart from everything outside the body as well as within it. That outside includes human society, without which we would not have survived a day after birth. It includes planet earth, which itself is dependent on the sun and the moon and the solar system and so forth.
What we are includes everything that we call the universe. We cannot exist without the universe. We are literally the universe. If are going to talk about a self, then it is a universal Self, with a capital S. That is the whole self that makes decisions, not a separate little individual entity. We are a huge universal cosmic Self. That is running the Show – with a capital S.
This cosmic Self is sometimes called God. This is not the God conceived by western religion. The theistic God is a fiction made in the image of the individual separate self. We think of ourselves as separate, personal, individual selves and therefore picture God as a big separate personal individual self. The Big Boss. The supreme Alpha male, sitting in heaven meting out reward and punishment. We have made this God in our own image and worshiped this idol. But that God is no more real than the human self it is patterned after.
When we look for such a being we cannot find it any more than we can find a self. There is no self and there is no God. When we see this clearly, we also see that we are one with the Universal Self, which is the Universal God. So there is a Self but it is the Cosmic Self, and there is God but it is the Cosmic God, God beyond God. Not a being, but Being Itself, the Ground of Being.
The self-realization of no-self and no-god paradoxically reveals True Self and True God. With this comes the realization that there is no problem. No self, no God, no problem. There is no problem of suffering and evil. How could there be? There is no theistic deity causing or allowing the suffering, hence no moral issue. There is simply the processes of the whole working together as a dance of duality, yin and yang, suffering and pleasure, right and wrong, good and evil, life and death, like the swirl of patterns on a weather map.
We are the whole. When we identify as the whole and not as a separate little part, then all philosophical and theological and emotional and psychological problems are seen in a immensely bigger context. That larger context brings Peace. That context is Love that includes and resolves all lesser realities. That Context – with a capital C – for a wont of a better term, is what I call God. And that is all there is. No problem.
