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From the Sense of Self to Sensing - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on March 31, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

From the Sense of Self to Sensing

Good morning everyone, and hope you can hear me out there in the hall okay. Thank you.

Last week, I gave a talk on the sense of self. The stronger the sense of self is, I believe—or I suggest—the less we are in our senses. One of the switches that happen when we meditate is we begin becoming embodied more and more in our senses: our physical senses, the sense of being in a body, embodied in a body, connected in the body.

To the degree to which the sense of self is related to thinking, ideas, stories, memories, and all that kind of stuff, it's very easy for people to identify this self as connected to thinking. We have this famous expression from French: "I think, therefore I am," which the French philosopher came up with. If the Buddhists were going to use the same three words, they would probably say, "I am, therefore I think." The "am-ness" comes first, and thinking is just like an appendage or addition on top of it. That thinking world can be a support for us; it augments the fuller way of being in the world, but it doesn't take predominance.

For some of us, there are times in our lives—probably some of you—where the thinking takes the lead. Living in the thinking, moving forward, and the momentum, the pressure to think, the forward directionality, the addiction to thinking, the magnetism of engaging in thoughts becomes a little bit like having the cart in front of the horse. It’s a little bit like the thoughts are ahead and the body is following along; the body is the appendage to thinking.

There's so much thinking going on, jumping around from one thought to the other, to what our plans are, what we have to do, figuring everything out. I know that I'm quite capable of beginning to just feel like there's a lot to do and my mind is just jumping around between them. The more I do that, the less I'm in touch with my body, the less that I'm here.

Things like sitting down to meditate begin to put the horse in front of the cart. Sitting down to meditate places the central sense of being alive here in this body, being connected here, more than the sense of aliveness somehow inhabiting the world of thinking, the drive to think.

One of the interesting questions to ask any of us is: "Where do you live?" Not your address, but where do you inhabit? There are plenty of people who live in their thinking; that's the world that they inhabit. In Buddhist practice, we're trying to live in our bodies more than in our minds—to be embodied here. The experience of being in the body belongs to the realm of senses, the sense capacities we have, and the world of sensations.

What is really rich and valuable in the teaching of the Buddha is that he distinguishes between two different areas of sensing.

First, there are those sensations that we experience that come from having our senses stimulated by the outer world. If it's cold outside, our temperature nerves sense the cold, and that has a whole effect on our system. The whole physiology begins to change and shift the more cold we feel as a way of taking care of ourselves. It's a rich, dynamic inner world that gets activated.

If our senses pick up warmth, it isn't just simply warmth on our skin, but that is tied to a whole dynamic system inside of temperature regulation, pores, sweat, and who knows all the things that go on. Lots of things go on. This world of senses is a rich world of regulation, of finding our way, understanding our way in this world.

If we have pain, pain is an extremely valuable thing to have. Generally, it gives us a signal that something is off that we should respond to.

Just as I say that, I remember a time when I was staying in a little hut in Thailand. I was sleeping, and I had a dream. In the dream, I was walking barefoot up a grassy knoll. When I came to the top of the knoll, I stepped down, and there was a stake in the grass. My toe went into that stake, and it hurt. But it was a dream, so it was okay—but it really hurt. I knew I was dreaming; it's just a dream, but it really hurt. So I opened my eyes to look, and there was this big ant biting my toe. I was getting a danger signal, but in this dream state, the message was coming through these images that I initially misinterpreted as "just a dream."

Again, there's this dynamic, rich system inside that gets activated by something like pain. Who knows all the things—physiologically, psychologically, mentally—that are triggered by it? In that situation, that dynamic inner world of pain played itself out in a dream. How did it get from the toe to the dream? It's a rich, dynamic world. It's not just pain, not just pleasure, not just these simple things. The senses we experience are richly connected.

What happens as we start meditating—I think in an ideal world, though it's not easy—is that we become more whole. The signal of danger comes in without my ordinary conscious mind, which is busy probably thinking about things—too busy to notice. But something is noticing. Something is taking in the danger, and it's being expressed someplace within. So the body is an antenna. The body picks up things, and it's part of that bigger apparatus of experiencing that's so valuable.

The more we can be connected to the body, the more we feel, "Oh, something's off here. What's going on?" Or, "If I go this direction, it just feels like a rightness, a goodness to it. This is wholesome; this direction is unwholesome. This activity is nourishing; this activity is not nourishing."

One of the great joys that I've had from doing this practice is really getting a sense of this inner nourishment that's possible. The feeling and sense of being nourished by the activities I do, and feeling what it's like to do something which is de-nourishing, the opposite. In Buddhist practice, generally, the guide for what we do is to choose what's nourishing, what's wholesome. It feels not just "right," but it actually feels like it fills us with a sense of rightness, goodness, and warmth, and makes us kind of better people. Avoid the stuff that does the opposite.

As we tune in to the body, we make this switch from having the cart in front of the horse to the horse... I don't know if the horse is in front, or I like to think of it as no cart involved. Rather than us being behind the horse pushing it, we're on the horse. The point being, we get to sit on the horse, and the horse is our whole being, the wholeness of it all. It's phenomenal that we have this apparatus, the body, that can support us. It has this intelligence in it, this antenna that gives us so much information.

To drop into this body... I love this pyramid that we used to have on the... do we have it anymore? Do we even have money anymore? This pyramid with the eye on the top of the pyramid. Sometimes I think of the human being as a pyramid where the body is the big wide foundation, then there's maybe the emotions in the middle, and then there's thoughts on the top. If you tip the pyramid over on its head, it's very unstable. But if you have it all in the right position, then it's stable.

The pride of place, because it's so insecure, is given to thinking. It gets to be up there where that little eye is. Maybe it has a good overview sometimes, but it's just a small part of who we are. A huge part of what we are is the body—not the hunk of flesh, but this rich, dynamic world of the senses that come alive through the body, the processing in the body.

So, that was all leading up to: the Buddha distinguishes between two kinds of sense experiences we can have in the body.

The ordinary one is when the senses are stimulated by the outside world. We hear a sound, and that can have this ripple effect within us that can be quite dynamic, more than we often realize. What we see through the eyes—that's maybe a little bit easier. But sounds, too, can be very soothing, very satisfying, very inspiring... voices of certain types. Some voices and music are jarring.

We can see things. Some sights are actually nourishing and supportive; they shift the inner landscape dramatically. I love water. When I drive around the Bay Area—it's rather unfortunate I have to usually be the driver—going across the San Mateo Bridge¹, or just at a little place on 101 going to San Francisco just before you get to Candlestick Park, I just love to look out across the water. I can't do enough of it if I'm driving. But to look out on flat, quiet, calm water is, for me, something that settles deep in me. I grew up around water, so maybe that's why.

Things come in through the eyes, tongue, smell, the body. Oddly enough—you have to hopefully go along with me in the psychology of Buddhism—the mind is a sense organ as well; it's a sixth sense organ. So our ability to have a thought and know we're thinking is the mind sense seeing it, knowing it.

Oddly enough—this is the odd part—those thoughts are sometimes considered to be external stimuli on that sense door. That seems strange because most of us are our thinking. What can be more personal? And now you're saying it's outside? One more thing outside that's coming?

It makes more sense if you begin understanding that the Buddha had a whole other area of sensing that was not the senses being stimulated by something outside. The distinction he made is between "sensations of the flesh" (where the flesh is somehow stimulated) and "sensations not of the flesh."² Usually translators don't want to translate it that way into English. One way they translate it is "worldly sensations" (or worldly feelings) and "non-worldly feelings." That, to me, is confusing. "Non-worldly"?

But what it is, is the sensation is not of the flesh. The things that arise in the sense field, but not because some particular thing stimulated the senses.

For example, I've been around little children. I used to go to my kids' nursery school, and there was lots of stimulation there. But something deep inside of me just got really sweet, really quiet, warm, kind of loving—especially when all the nursery kids were taking a nap. That is one of the great sights: to go there and sit with all these kids, so peaceful and quiet, napping. Who would want to wake them?

My older son actually got expelled from school the first chance... he started early with this because he went to pre-nursery school and he would wake up the other kids during the nap. The teacher just wouldn't have it. That was the beginning of his school career. So we found a better place for him.

But the sweetness... that would be considered "not of the flesh," even though we feel it in the flesh, we feel it in the body. But a particular thing isn't being stimulated. Maybe the way I felt was related to all kinds of things; it was part of the rich part of the inner landscape that was coming alive. I felt very nourished and supported by that.

In Buddhism, the classic reference point for this "not of the flesh" is sitting in meditation, minding your own business, and having nothing good coming from the outside, but starting to feel settled, calm, warm, connected, at ease. Feeling safe, feeling somehow involved in a nice way with the meditation. Then there starts being this suffusion of feeling of calm, feeling of pleasure, feeling of goodness, feeling of "Ah, I'm home," that you can't really pinpoint to a particular thing having been stimulated. It's not like someone went in there and tickled you in a particular place in your heart. It's something that's much more suffused, diffuse through the body.

You can have tension in your shoulder, and that's a very particular spot that you can bring your attention to—feel that tightness or hardness. Or the belly; when I'm afraid, I can feel the tightness in my belly, very clear space. But this "not of the flesh" thing doesn't have that specificity; it's something a little bit broader and wider.

The thinking mind that likes to have things, likes to want something, wants to define itself by something and hold on to it... there's not actually something to hold on to there because it's so diffuse. But it's some of the most valuable feelings we can have as a human being, these feelings "not of the flesh." That's where love—love that is wholesome and nourishing—comes out that way through us.

Love is sometimes confused with intense desire. There are a lot of things that get confused for this wholesome, "not of the flesh" love. Sometimes what people think of as love is the tremendous delight they have that someone else loves them. They don't actually love the other person; they just really thrive on being loved. So they say "I love you," but it's really because of how good they make me feel. "I'm important here." I don't know if that's the same kind of deep, satisfying way of feeling something that we have in Buddhism; that's partly based on attachment.

Sometimes love is confused with security, which is such an important thing to have for our very sense of being alive and well-being. Sometimes the person that provides us with security is that which we kind of think we love. Maybe it's a kind of love. But there's a different kind of love that's deep, that's effusive, that arises with this kind of warmth or delight or deep sense of appreciation. That's almost like there's no desire in it. It might give birth to certain kinds of motivations, inspirations, aspirations, expressions, but it's not caught in any attachment, any clinging, any need to have something happen.

So this "not of the flesh"—it's sensations, but it's a very different species of sensations than the species that come from a particular sense door being stimulated—including being stimulated by a particular thought.

I've been minding my own business in meditation, feeling quite content and happy, and then somehow my mind brings up a thought of someone who 15 years ago offended me. That's all it takes. Suddenly, I'm captured by that particular thought and stimulated by it. My calm just dissipated; now I'm tense. That went from zero to sixty in half a second. It's quite something what's possible in there.

Then it's very particular; things have gotten tight, things have gotten agitated by the stimulation from those thoughts. But what happens when the thoughts get quiet and peaceful, and our thoughts are not stimulating?

I've also been stimulated by thoughts of pleasure... I won't tell you the details, but you know... and it feels kind of delightful, pleasure suffusing my body. But it hasn't been nourishing. To confuse pleasure with nourishment is one of the things that we can distinguish. The ability to distinguish de-nourishing pleasure from nourishing pleasure is one of the things that comes with this heightened sensitivity to our body. Some pleasures are pleasant in the moment but are harmful for us in the long term. Some things that actually feel unpleasant in the moment can lead to a sense of profound well-being in this "not of the flesh" world that's part of who we are.

Taking care of young children, I've had to do some pretty unpleasant things conventionally. My favorite one to tell you—hopefully it's okay, maybe I should warn you what's coming: stay on your seat! No, but it was this amazing thing.

When my baby was pretty young and was sleeping next to us in bed, he got sick. Suddenly we had to deal with this sick baby. It was clear that he was going to throw up. I didn't know people could do this... it was very unpleasant on one hand, but it was also, at the same time... I was filled with a feeling of compassion, love, generosity, goodness. I took my hands, cupped them together to receive the vomit. Can you believe it? It never once had ever occurred to me that that was a possibility and that I would have these good, amazing... like, "Of course I'm going to do this for my child." Wow. It was unpleasant in some ways, but boy, the sense of it was really pleasant in this inner landscape that has come alive for me through this practice.

As we go through our life, we understand it. We're guided by a very different sensibility when we're in touch with this world "not of the flesh." If it's all about the senses, all about the ideas, all about the thoughts, we really limit ourselves and we're not availing ourselves of the full richness of what it's like to be a human being.

This switch from being in thoughts to being embodied is huge. I would propose that this simple idea that's frequent now—that human beings evolved on the plains of Africa a long time ago to use all their senses... it's not a negotiation: "I'll do X and you do Y for me." It's more of a wellspring. It's a fountain that emerges from below. It's a generative world that flows upwards and outwards, as opposed to an impoverished world where we're taking in, taking in, and trying to fill ourselves.

It's really easy when the cart is in front of the horse—when we are in our thoughts—to miss this complicated inner world. Under the surface of what we see, if we're always in our thoughts—thinking, desiring, wanting, afraid, anxious, planning—there's a tremendous feeling of emptiness or lack that we feel because we're not paying attention to a big part of who we are. Something feels that lack, and one of the responses to that is then: think more, want more, look outside, search outside more. It's sometimes a self-perpetuating movement of being more and more disconnected, and therefore feeling more lack, and then trying to fill it outside. It goes on and on. Some people don't know any other way because they've never been trained, never told about this deep wellspring that's available inside.

To find this generative fountain of goodness that's within us is one of the reasons we sit to meditate and why we learn the art of doing a switch from being concerned with thoughts.

You still might think, "Isn't thinking a problem?" If there's a problem, it's being addicted to thinking. The problem isn't thinking; the solution isn't in the thinking, chasing the thoughts, participating in thoughts, living in the thoughts. What's really great is that if we can make that switch here into the body—which puts us in the present moment because this rich world of the body (or the heart, if you prefer) is always here; this can't be anywhere else—to find it, to switch and get grounded and centered here... you'll still think. And you'll think a lot better.

But it puts the thoughts in their right place, on the top of the pyramid. Your thinking will feel respected because you keep it up there on the very top, so it's not going to be insecure. It feels more capable to participate in the whole, participate in the way this very dynamic, rich, and fascinating inner world operates that we can't even see usually, it's so complicated.

To feel like we're part of this rich, generative, dynamic world of the senses of the flesh and of "not of the flesh," to feel the interplay and the connectivity and the wholeness, gives birth to a whole different way of being in the world. For some people, they will say, "There's much more interesting stuff going on here than me." There's something inside of me which is not me, which is really valuable, really significant. That's a source of what animates our life in a wonderful way.

In Buddhism, that's often associated with liberation and freedom. To be liberated from self, to be liberated from desires, to be liberated from hatred and fear, is a way of stepping back from the limited world of preoccupation and opening and allowing for this richer, generative world to move through us.

I'll end with this wonderful idea—at least for me—that that rich, inner, generative world doesn't make any sense to appropriate it as yourself. It doesn't make any sense to claim it as self. It doesn't make any sense to use it for your selfish purposes. It doesn't belong to that world of self-preoccupation, self-definition. It takes you beyond the sense of self to a sense of being alive, to a sense of compassion, care, love, joy, peace, warmth, friendliness—all kinds of beautiful things that we're capable of.

From sense of self to the senses. That's the path. So, thank you.

Q&A

Question: My name is Bonnie. I don't have a question, but I want to share what happened yesterday during the retreat here. I didn't come in the morning because I needed to swim. So I had a wonderful swim and I was looking forward to the afternoon. As you know, I haven't been back here in a long time. Within 10 minutes—I was doing some thinking about a relationship where there's a lot of ambiguity—I started getting this intense, crushing heart pain. I thought I was having a heart attack. It then moved into my jaw, and my thinking then went to, "Oh my God, what if I die right here?" I was just feeling shame: "I don't want to disrupt the Sangha³," or "Should I leave the room? Should I call... what do I do with this?"

I decided to just be really still and to lean into the pain. I just trusted the process. I didn't know what was going to happen. I stopped letting go of the concern about the outcome. I've had this happen before, so it wasn't like the only unique experience, but I think this was really a metaphor as I sit here listening to you about where I am in my life right now. I don't want to go into all of that, but thank you for this because it definitely helped.

If I could share a contrasting situation: when I was back in Cambodia, I went back in January to see the kids. I was sick 20 out of 23 days, and I could not have been happier. It was the happiest time I've had in four years. I was just coughing and wrenching every minute of those 23 days, but the joy that I felt... as you were talking about watching those kids nap, the joy I felt just in their presence, watching them interact, watching them interact with me... so much happens in the experience.

Gil Fronsdal: Great, thank you very much.

Question: I'm Kathy. You might want to go see a doctor about your chest pain because women do present differently... anyway. After your talk... I'm going to sit here and say, "Don't think, don't think, don't think," because that's my inclination: to try not to think.

Gil Fronsdal: There might be another option. It might be more interesting to begin with to become friends with your thoughts. How do you do that? Respect them, listen to them, allow them to be there, but don't be in them.

The metaphor I used yesterday is: if you have a friend who's distressed and in trouble, and they ask you, "Can we meet in the park and go for a walk?" You accompany them, listening to what they have to say. But if you get as distressed as they are, then you're probably not going to be supportive. You have to accompany them with a respectful, listening, caring way—maybe calm, maybe equanimous⁴—so that they really know you're hearing them. It's meaningful for them that they know you're hearing them without being distressed. And you don't pull out your phone to check your emails while they're doing that; you're really there for them.

To say "be friends with your thoughts" is to do maybe the same to your thinking. Don't believe them, don't be involved in them, don't participate in them, but accompany them. And as you accompany them, see if you can feel what more is going on under the surface. Thoughts are really just kind of like a surface phenomena; usually they're not as important as we think they are.

If you're able to listen to your friend—in this case, you—in a deeper way, listen with calm, with equanimity... don't look at your phone (which means don't start thinking about something else), just really be there. You might start noticing that your thoughts are arising out of some emotional source. It might be you're afraid, or angry, or anticipating, or delighted, or there's a desire, or there's an aversion. You start seeing there: thoughts are, again, the tip of an iceberg, tip of a pyramid. If you're really a good listener, a good friend, you start listening and feeling what's deeper, because that's what your friend wants. They want to be met in that deeper place.

Question: My name is Sylvie. When you were talking, that was very powerful. I wanted to maybe paraphrase in a different way to make sure that I understood... So the feelings or the senses that are stimulated by the outside, right? And then there are feeling or sensations or phenomena that are coming from the inside. Is it that when we remove the sense of self—and the self is stimulated by what it contacts with in the external world—and we go deep down, like what you are talking about... I had a sense that then we reach kind of the elemental building blocks of our being in a way.

The reason why you were talking about compassion and love... what comes to me is when we come down to that elemental, sentient being kind of operating system, then we are interconnected with both the planet and other beings. And so but that is why this love or compassion is coming: there is no more "I'm Sylvie." I'm really part of the ecology of the universe.

Gil Fronsdal: Very nice, I like this very much. But I'd like to respond a little bit. I agree with you, but I want to be a little bit careful with a couple of things.

One is, we don't want to make the "sense of self" too much of a problem, because it's vague what we're talking about when we say "sense of self." More central to the issue is attachment—clinging to something. Sense of self often comes with attachment, but it doesn't have to. If there's no attachment, maybe it's okay; it's safe enough. But it's the attachment.

The reason why... the attachment narrows the attention. It keeps us out of touch with a wider field of who we are. It's through attachment, then, that we're not in touch with all the different rich ways in which our senses take in other people. We have mirror neurons, we have all these different ways in which we are attuned in a very deep way to other people, that we feel really connected in a very rich way. Attachment is the barrier for that.

Sylvie: I mean, in a way, you're saying that the attachment is what comes on top of our elemental humanity. It covers it.

Gil Fronsdal: Covers it, right. So we can't be in touch with it.

Sylvie: Yes. And so when we are at that attached level, we cannot really be fully connected with the universe and other people.

Gil Fronsdal: Yes. Very nice, thank you.