The Story of Me
The sense of being a separate self is not a single misunderstanding but is held in place by three things working together: the belief in a self, the story we tell about who that self is, and a refusal to look at what is in front of us. You might recognise these as the first 3 fetters.
Years ago I experienced the belief in a self dropping away, then watched it gradually rebuild itself. What I have come to see since is that these fetters call for two different kinds of practice: emptiness practice, where we look directly for the self, and conditionality practice, where we work with the story. Much confusion comes from mixing the two up.
When the 'me' dropped away
The first time my belief in a self dropped away, many years ago, the words I said to myself were: “Wow, so everything that happened happened, but it didn’t happen to a me.” The experience lasted a few days. Then, imperceptibly, the belief in a self gradually reconstructed itself.
When I say the belief dropped away, I don’t mean I no longer existed. What disappeared was the idea, never true in the first place, that there was a “me” in here to whom everything happened, or who made everything happen.
Two threads in one title
This weekend I’m leading an online retreat on the first three of the ten fetters. Months ago I was asked for a title, and the one that popped into my mind was “The Story of Me”. It has since taken on a life of its own and led me somewhere new, as creative work tends to do. You start with a title, a question or an image, and you don’t know what you’ll make until you make it.
In this simple title there are two threads of practice. In one, we explore the “me” that seems to sit at the centre of everything; we are, quite literally, the centre of our own universe. In the other, we explore the story, because it is the story that makes the “me” seem so real. The story supports our sense of self, and the belief in a self validates the story.
You may recognise these as two of the fetters. The first, sakkāya-diṭṭhi, is the belief in a self. The third, sīlabbata-parāmāsa, is attachment to rules, rituals and norms, which all add up to a story of who we are: I’m a coffee person. I’m not a vegan. And so on.
Constructing a self
Imagine self-view as a single branch lying on the ground. You try to stand it up, and it falls over. Now add a second branch: not just a “me”, but a story of that me, who I am, what I believe, what I do and don’t do. You can lean the two against each other and perhaps get them to stand, though they’re still precarious. A third branch would give us a tripod, a stable structure. What can we add to hold up and reinforce both the belief in an independent self and the story of me?
The answer is the second fetter, doubt (vicikicchā). This isn’t healthy scepticism but more like a refusal to see what is right in front of our eyes. It’s closely connected to the tenth fetter, the deepest of all: ignorance, our ignoring of the way things are. We have never found a self. If someone asks us what this self is, we have no answer. We may even be committed to a Buddhist path that tells us no such self exists, and yet we’re still able to ignore that truth. This is the fetter of doubt.
With doubt in place, we have a stable, self-supporting structure. The sense of me is supported by the story of me, and the story is made convincing by the belief in a self. Doubt is like the ego’s personal minder, never letting the truth get anywhere close.
A tripod stands only as long as all three legs are in place. Remove one and the whole thing collapses. In the traditional account, seeing through all three at once is what makes the change lasting.
That wasn’t quite what happened to me. When the belief in a self dropped away, I had seen through the self, and I had seen the story as only a story. But I hadn’t rooted out doubt. It was still there. It let the sense of me creep back, and the story began to look convincing again. It's one thing for a belief to drop away, another for it to be completely rooted out.
Two tracks: emptiness and conditionality
It’s hard to work directly with doubt; it’s so slippery. But we can work with both the sense of self and the story of me, just not at the same time. One is an emptiness practice, the other a conditionality practice. They are two different tracks that can run in parallel through our lives, but at any given moment we are on one or the other.
The emptiness track. This is the track, where we look for the self, right here and now, in experience. We look for how we fabricate a self out of thoughts and sensations. Practising this way, the story of me is completely irrelevant. A story is linear by nature: it travels from the past, through the present, and on into the future. In insight practice we can’t find a past or a future other than as thoughts. All we have is the present moment, and in the present moment there are no stories.
The conditionality track. Here we work with the story of me: why I show up in the world the way I do, and everything that has happened to make me who I am. On this track the story is very relevant. We need to understand our lives as they unfold through time: the things that have happened to us and left traces, healthy and not so healthy. This is where we come to understand unhelpful patterns and let them go, while learning to trust more deeply all that is good about us.
It helps to know which track we’re on, because mixing them up is where practice goes astray. Someone on the conditionality track can spend years analysing their past, convinced that understanding the story will dissolve the self, when the self is being reinforced by the analysing. Someone on the emptiness track can use “there’s no one here” to avoid a painful pattern that needs patient attention, so that insight becomes a way of bypassing the story. Each track needs the other, but not in the same moment.
Wisdom and compassion
The great Tibetan teacher Tsongkapa warns that if we negate too little, that is, if we go on believing in the “me” and the story of me, we lose the emptiness side of the practice, the wisdom. But if we negate too much, if we conclude there is no me and the story isn’t real, we lose the compassion side. Either way, we’ve strayed from the true Dharma.
You can see the two tracks in this warning. The conditionality track, left on its own, risks negating too little: we stay inside the story and go on believing in it. The emptiness track, left on its own, risks negating too much: we decide there is nobody here and that nothing matters. We need both tracks to stay with wisdom and compassion.
By understanding emptiness, we find the absolute truth of things, yet that absolute truth refers back to relative things. If it didn’t, it would be pure negation.
Where this leads next
For years I mixed these two tracks up without realising, which left me confused and made it hard to talk about my practice. Seeing that there were two distinct tracks, and knowing which one I was on at any moment, clarified the path for me.
Join us for the online retreat on Saturday 17th and Sunday 18th October, where we’ll ask:
How do we work with both tracks in our lives and practice?
How does practising emptiness make it easier to work with our story?
How can attending to the story clear the way for more insight to arise?
And why can knowing which track we’re on at any given time bring clarity to our practice and help us communicate it to others?
We’ll be exploring both paths through meditation, movement, writing and reflection. And if you can’t make it, I’ll write about what we discover in the next blog post.
