I've spoken a lot about the illusion of the self in this course. However, as I made clear in a previous lesson, it's not that every notion of the self is illusory. What you discover in meditation is that you're not a thing, you're a process. We experience states of self and how we feel as selves seems to vary remarkably depending on the context.
I remember that when I was finishing graduate school. I had the experience of being a semi-famous author and a lowly graduate student simultaneously. So I could literally feel my sense of who I was change drastically by my walking from one building to the next on campus. I remember once meeting with my advisor who was understandably worried about my progress and feeling like a total loser and then I met his boss for dinner that night because he wanted my advice on how to launch his book with the same publisher, I was a much bigger author. It was just a crazy juxtaposition and who I was in those conversations seemed to be governed by my sense of how the other person saw me, really how I imagined the other person saw me. But we're all in this situation generally. We'll have encounters with people which seem to destabilize us or we don't feel we have access to our full capacities as human beings to our best selves.
So many encounters with other people are less than satisfying. And what makes them less than satisfying is generally the degree to which we're encumbered by neurotic self-concern. Let's say you're going home for the holidays and spending extended time with your family. Now your family will tend to see you as continuous with who you've always been for them.
So there's often a special dynamic there. No matter how much you've changed, your family will find a way to fit you to the pattern of who you used to be and then as if by magic you might begin to feel rather, like who you used to be. Now, there's no question that mindfulness can help free you in social situations like this.
But you don't want it to become a source of greater self-consciousness. When you're with others, your meditation practice shouldn't make you more aware of yourself. It's not a mode of inwardness that causes you to recoil even further from relationship. Ideally mindfulness should free you to pay more attention to whoever you're talking to.
And if you've broken through to the kind of mindfulness, which is synonymous with losing your sense of self, with the feeling of headlessness - to use Douglas Harden's,a analogy, then social situations become occasions where this change can be appreciated most vividly. When someone is looking at you, what are they looking at in your experience?
You are not a thing being looked at. You're the condition in which they and the world are appearing. Again, I'm not speaking metaphysically. I'm describing the actual character of conscious experience. You don't see your face. The only face you see belongs to the other person. If you follow that person's gaze back to where you think you are, you might suddenly experience that consciousness is just this space in which everything is appearing.
If you look for yourself in that moment, you might find that only the world remains. But whatever the character of your mindfulness at this point, It's role isn't to prevent negative states of mind from ever arising. You should go into these situations absolutely knowing that you will feel negative states of mind, Self-judgment, self-doubt, annoyance, anxiety. Go in like you're playing a video game. You absolutely know that certain challenges are going to appear on this level of the game. And this is the level of negative emotion. So simply feel them and then let them go. Don't act on them. Don't inscribe them in your life by saying something totally counterproductive.
Let these states of mind wash over you. If that's too hard, just let one of them wash over you. In your next social situation, just become interested in noticing one negative emotion and not doing anything with it. Just let it arise and pass away. But if things get bad it's helpful to remember that the people you're dealing with are suffering.
Almost everyone you meet is practically drowning in self-concern. just look at them. Listen to them. They are broadcasting their own self-doubt and anxiety and disappointment. They're worried about what others think of them. If you get out of yourself for a moment, if you can just take a step back from feeling implicated in what's happening around you you will generally see that you are surrounded by a carnival of human frailty.
So compassion is available. We are all on the Titanic together. This might sound depressing but the flip side is also true. This brief life together is a beautiful miracle. This is the only circumstance that exists to be enjoyed. Whatever is true out of the cosmos, this is it for us.
And wherever you are, whatever circumstance you find yourself in, however strained the conversation, this is the only life you have in this moment and you might as well enjoy it. At a minimum, you can become interested in your changes of state. Why is it that you feel so comfortable with one person and so awkward with another? How is it that other people have that much power over your mind? These changes are fascinating. And of course, none of these changes are who you really are. There is no one who you really are. There's a flow of experience. There are patterns of course and you can surely predict how you're likely to feel with certain people.
But you're only tending to conform to these patterns. You are not condemned to be the same person you were the last time around. And whatever happens when you leave a social situation, mindfulness allows you not to carry it around with you. You don't have to keep finishing whatever argument you had with your sister in your head.
You can let thoughts go. The time to talk to your sister was when she was standing in front of you. The moment you leave, you're now talking to yourself. And if you find yourself doing that, which you will, you should confront this paradox of self-talk. You know how that conversation went with your sister. You were there. So who are you telling now?