Friday, August 20, 2010

Selflessness

"The Buddhist teaching of no-self says that the person I think I am is, in a certain way, not real, at least not in the way I conceive it and enact it in my daily life. But it's important to understand that this isn't a doctrine or a theory, it's just a description of what Buddhists generation after generation have verified as true. The "self" is an aggregation, a collection of sub-components that can be broken down endlessly. Similarly, anything your mind can identify as a discrete item is actually an accumulation. There is no real self anywhere, not in you, not in anything you sense or can identify."
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"So what is the experience of selflessness? It is simply the act of not seeing a collection of constantly shifting phenomena or perceptions as a single fixed entity. What is it really? It is actually a collection of phenomena or perceptions."

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