It is said that after a person has practiced to a certain extent, he or she can attain three cognitions.
The first cognition is impermanence, which means that nothing is eternal and unchanging, everything is changing. The only constant in this world is change.
The second cognition is "suffering", and as we have already said in the previous article, "suffering" comes from "dissatisfaction".
The third cognition is "selflessness," which means that you don't exist. Maybe we're living in a virtual program, maybe everything around us is an illusion. I may be hallucinating myself. The first Buddhist sutra to record this idea is called the Sutra of the Emptiness of the Five Aggregates.
The Sutra of the Five Aggregates of Emptiness records the dialogue between the Buddha and the five monks. When the Buddha met five monks by chance, the Buddha used logical reasoning to guide the five monks to think about philosophical questions, so that they could realize that the five aggregates that make up the "self" are all illusory. After these five monks understood the Buddha's teachings, they immediately changed from ordinary monks to arhats, and achieved positive results!
So what are the five aggregates? The aggregates are the five things that make up the self
1.The color aggregate is the human body;
2.Receiving aggregates are the basic feelings of human beings, such as pain, happiness, worry, etc.;
3.Thinking is the basic perception of people, such as sight, hearing, and smell;
4.Aggregates refer to our mental form, that is, our thoughts and behaviors, including some complex thoughts, some habits and tendencies of our actions.
5.Cognition refers to human consciousness.
Buddhas generally engaged in philosophical speculative heuristic teaching. The Buddha asked the first monk, do you think your body is yours? The monk replied yes, the body is a part of me. The Buddha said that if something is yours, then you should be able to change and control it according to your own wishes. For example, if your body is sick, can you say that it will be cured? If you don't look good, can you make yourself look good right away? The monk replied that he could not. The Buddha said that since the body is not under your control, it is not a part of you.
The Buddha spoke to the second monk and said that our basic feelings are not under our control. When we are in pain, we can't do it if we don't want to. So feelings are just something that affects you, not a part of you. By analogy, the Buddha came to the conclusion that none of the aggregates is the self. Only what you can control is truly your own. If understood in this way, these teachings of the Buddha are also very down-to-earth, and they are not as unfathomable as many people say.
Since the Buddha said that "I" is not the aggregates, then what am I? Does "I" exist or not? Is "me" something other than the aggregates, or is the fifth aggregate of the aggregates (i.e., consciousness) me? Consciousness is connected to other things, but other things don't constitute the self, the real self is the detachment of the other aggregates from consciousness, and the little thing that is left is the self? ......How do you understand the phrase "I don't exist"? Perhaps it is the translation of Buddhist scriptures or other issues that later generations have not yet made a clear statement.
Therefore, you can't really understand Buddhism by studying Buddhism alone, and you have to reach a certain level through practice before you can truly appreciate what the Buddha meant. Everyone's experience, experience, environment, physical condition, and so on are different, so different practitioners also have their own perceptions, and basically there is no clear answer. But what we do know is that "I" is indeed not our own "king".
The psychology of selflessness
For some brain diseases, doctors cut the corpus callosum between the left and right sides of the patient's brain, so that the patient's left and right brains could not exchange information, which provided an opportunity for scientists studying the brain.
We know that the left brain of a person controls the right half of the body, and the right brain controls the left half of the body. If you ask the patient's left eye to look at a note that says, "Please go out for a walk now," he will stand up and do so. Note that only his right brain knows this command, not the left hemisphere. And the area responsible for language is in the left hemisphere. Now when he's going out, you go over and ask him, why go out? Guess what he'd answer? The left brain is responsible for answering the question, but the left brain doesn't see the note, and it doesn't communicate with the right brain, so the left brain doesn't know why "self" is going out, right? The correct response for the patient should be "I don't know". As a result, the left-brain approach is to make up an answer for you on the spot, such as, "I'm going to get a can of Coke to drink." And the left brain was convinced of the answer it had concocted, and the left brain thought it had made the decision to go outside.
A series of such experiments have been provenIt's not our consciousness that makes the decision, it's that the decision has been made, and the consciousness comes to find a reason for the decision. It is one ego that makes the decision, and another ego that finds the reason. So which "self" counts?
In this way, the "narrative self" that our brain manifests is not a "king" at all, but more like a spokesperson for a king. The army had already finished fighting, and when the reporter came to ask why it was fighting, the king's spokesman had to find a better reason to explain - it was not this "spokesman" who really made the decision.
If the ego in charge of speaking to the outside world has no decision-making power at all, why should it look for a reasonable explanation? This is a function that has been given to us in the course of human evolution. "Everything has an explanation, everything has a fall, everything has an echo", do these things so that others can think that you are a reliable person, otherwise if you say, "I don't know why I did that, anyway, I did it", then you will become more and more unreliable in the eyes of others. Furthermore, you have to believe that you are a reliable person, that you feel that you are organized, that you know what you are doing, that you are not a casual person – so that you can live in harmony with yourself!
The brain sometimes deliberately forgets the things that it has done badly, and only remembers its own highlights. The brain can even overestimate our own level. That said, communicating precisely with the world is not what the brain is good atWhat the brain prefers to do is to deceive itself and then the world. In some ways, then, the "self" is an illusion, and we can say the least that we don't have a single self.
There is no self, no one, no beings. Ji Xianwei.