‘Not Self’ as a Practice

Back at Cittaviveka, we’ve just concluded the forest work month, which amounts to three weeks of work in our woods – cutting coppice for fuel, stacking logs, planting new trees and heather, and building boxes for bats to live in.

This work has been going on since 1986; gradually a self-sustaining woodland has come into being. The desolate silence of a commercial monoculture of non-native trees has been replaced with a mixed habitat of native broadleaf, heathland and wetland – and the insects and birds have returned, along with bats, badgers, deer and dormice.

This work has been carried almost entirely by volunteers, with whatever costs that accrued through using chainsaws or professionals being offset by the sale of firewood or by donations. The coppice that is cut produces new shoots, so the monastery gets heated with no loss of resources. And not only has the land and the wildlife improved, but the men who volunteer and spend three weeks in the monastery working together in the cold and rain with the monks speak warmly of the benefit. ‘It’s the best choice I’ve ever made in my life,’ said the Cambridge graduate. Some come year after year.

So how well does the notion of the self-centred human, motivated by profit and personal gain, stand up in this light?

What is noticeable is that when given a free choice, people incline towards voluntary service and towards taking on a challenge. Even in a non-Buddhist context: when there is some clear space and autonomy, people decide to learn to play piano, take on hospice work, give blood, teach Dhamma, create open source software – because they like to; especially if they feel that someone else will benefit from it. 

I would go so far as to say, that a person who doesn’t have an occasion to freely offer is liable to suffer from depression, narcissistic introversion, anxiety and isolation. 

This is ‘not-self’ as a practice. To emphasize: not-self isn’t a wipe-out of our individual freedom or vitality, but a direct pointer to what inhibits this heart and mind. It’s just these inclinations to own, defend, assert or compare – all the programs that making the mind into a self brings about. As a workaday practice, ‘not-self’ means ‘to others as to myself’; and in meditation it’s the ongoing reminder to meet and melt that sense of being alone in a world that has died to me. 

So, you do not-self through giving, through ethical integrity, through pruning desires down to needs, and through the patience, clarity and honesty of meditation. The results of developing such pāramī speak for themselves.

This reflection by Ajahn Sucitto is from the Ajahn Sucitto Reflections blog post “Common Ground,” Wednesday, 19 December 2012.