Presence, the “not-self” and transcendence

Today's podcast, heard while walking through a spectacular, sunny, seaside day - boats on the water, swimmers on the beach, strollers wandering the shingled shops - embraced the Noble Eightfold Path of Buddhism, and in particular, right speech, right action, and right livelihood (Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris, "The Selfish Case for Being Ethical", 5/10/2023, here). Always a good reminder.

But near the end (42:35), the conversation shifted suddenly to discuss the difference between "being present" (mindfulness of a moment) and "presence", which is:

"...saturating our consciousness with what we are aware of, so we know what we are aware of by becoming what we are aware of, and there's a presence that is bigger than the individual self ego-identity."

My ears perked up, ah-hah! A thread linking to transcendence! I am in training to look for those. I know them by a tingling feeling I get. Do you get those, too, when you experience something in life, big or small, that generates awe or joy?

The podcast conversation elaborated. According to guest Eugene Cash (San Francisco Insight instructor), presence is another step beyond mindfulness; that when one is fully present with a phenomenon, one may take one more step and "relax into that which is one with everything to get a taste of presence." Oh yes I thought, the connectedness of feeling "one with everything" is a major hint of awe or transcendence.

But then guest Eugene Cash (San Francisco Insight instructor) linked that connectedness with the Pali word anatta, a not-self experience. Immediately I was transported back to Eaton Hall's shabby large classroom in 2016. It was always over 80 degrees in that room, even in January. There was one outlet for forty students, there were large water stains on the acoustical tile ceiling, and the lighting was poor. Everything looked dingy and students couldn't see anything faintly projected onto the screen. In that vintage classroom, I had the privilege to take Introduction to Buddhism at Tufts University, and I was the only 50-something in a room of undergrads.

The professor spent a good bit of time on the concept of anatta/"not-self" and the context of its usage in bits of Pali scripture. The class analyzed many sutras, or discourses, in a volume called the Majjhima Nikaya, The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha. (How I love to say "Majjhima Nikaya" and how I wish I had my volume here to help me with this post right now, to touch, to feel, instead of packed away; the love I have of that book is irrational.) Of course, my volume was an English translation; the professor walked us through fragments of Pali texts and illuminated contextual word usages from assigned discourses in each class. For me, it was thrilling to be working with scriptures composed in a lost language between 3 BC and 2 CE. It was like being an idea archaeologist, developing an understanding of a major world religion's underpinnings, all of which predated Christianity.

Our discussions in that class, leaning towards the Theravada side of Buddhism, implied that a not-self experience was an advanced and complicated achievement of meditative study, that one nearing the level of "bhikku", or enlightened one, would experience the not-self in one of the final steps. Eugene, however, compared not-self to a momentary erosion of the ego allowing for connection to the oneness of the Universe - what I would call a moment of transcendence. Our man Dan picked up on the connection to the oneness as an inherent component of awe (see Dacher Keltner's book Awe and my posts on it). Good job, Dan; from there it is only a tiny step to transcendence.

From this momentary experience, I take heart that perhaps we mere mortals can experience microscopic bits of enlightenment or "not-self", from time to time. The key is to pay attention, notice, feel the telltale signals in your body that something special is happening, dwell in it, and commit it to memory. In turn, we become more sensitive to the next occurrence. It is encouraging to think that the elation we feel with an occurrence of awe may be a molecule of anatta, and that it may be available to all of us in the simplest of life events, like the elation when I hear a familiar Pali term while walking on a beautiful spring day.