Weekly Guiding Teacher Reflection

Dear Common Ground Friends,

The Buddha teaches that all fixed views, including any fixed conceptions about ourselves or others are, “a thicket of views, a wilderness of views, a contortion of views, a writhing of views, a fetter of views. It is accompanied by suffering... and does not lead to disenchantment, dispassion, cessation; to calm, direct knowledge, full awakening…” And yet, despite the very real suffering that arises with these rigid ideas about who I am, and who you are, let’s appreciate how necessary it is to use concepts of identity to illuminate the conditioning forces that make us unique. This clarity can help us to navigate our social lives in a more wise and compassionate way.

“In meditation we are not trying to deny personality. We are not trying to convince ourselves that we are non-people, grasping ideas such as “I have no nationality. I have no sex. I have no class. I have no race. The pure Dhamma is my true identity.” That kind of thinking is still another identity, isn’t it? That’s not it. Our practice is not about grasping the concepts of no-self. It is in realizing, in noting through awakened attention, the way things really are.”
Ajahn Sumedho, The Problem with Personality

It is our practice to observe how the mind constructs a social identity without becoming attached and confused by this construction. Our minds have been conditioned by our unique lived experiences. This means that our way of perceiving and constructing meaning is necessarily shaped by the reverberations from these past experiences. We can think of these habits of mind as one of my identities, one of my points of view, or simply as a particular way of perceiving. Our practice is to recognize how these ways of perceiving shape our subjective experience and our ways of engaging in the world without taking any constructed view or identity to be the final truth. No single identity ever captures the complex and dynamic nature of the way things are. Identities as unique patterns of perceiving and experiencing the world operate in all of our minds, all of the time, no exceptions. Wisdom is that aspect of mind that recognizes these unique perspectives as a dharma tool that can be used to illuminate what might otherwise go unacknowledged. Let’s aspire to live in this world with all our unavoidable views and identities without holding tight to any ideas about self and others in ways that perpetuate suffering – this is our practice.

Peace,
Mark Nunberg
Co-Guiding Teacher