Choose from these words to fill the blanks below:

spirit, volition, Buddhist, four, persist, exist, not, physical, discourse, control, awareness, changes, not, person, five, experiential, senses, asserts, enlightenment, against, consciousness

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the concept of the       not-self

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two ways to understand it

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1. intellectual: reading about it

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2.                         experiential: meditating on it

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the discourse on the not-self

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where the Buddha talked about the not-self

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the second sermon he delivered after his                           enlightenment

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first was discourse on the         four truths

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testament to the importance of the not-self in                 Buddhist thought

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Anātman

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the Not-self, the illusion of self, something different from             spirit or soul, the unreal projected by ignorance on the real, the absence of a self, a thing with the property of not existing, a rendition of the impermanence of being

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what did the Buddha mean by the self?

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two ways

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1. delve into the philosophical                   discourse of the time and try to determine what the word meant to the Buddha

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2. infer what the Buddha meant by self from his argument               against the self

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if an alien came and found a paper written arguing that Santa couldn't           exist because a man can't visit more than a million homes a night, one could conclude that this what people believed

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in the same way we will understand what the Buddha mean by the self by looking at his arguments against the self

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the         five aggregates

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constitute everything about a             person

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1. form

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anything                 physical in the world

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your physical body

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2. feeling

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emotions

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3. perception

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our five             senses

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4. mental formations

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desires

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5. consciousness

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the phenomenon of subjective                   awareness

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you cannot find the self in any of these aggregates

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two characteristics of each of these

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1. impermanence, e.g. characterized by change

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if the self is characterized by change, is it proper to call it self?

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the self is something we believe to               persist through time

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consistent with how we view the self today, a continuity of identity

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self is a solid essence that endures through time

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the Buddha says too much               changes so it is hard to say a self is there

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2. associated with control

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if feelings were self, you could               control them

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if form (body) was self, you could control its shape and functionality

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the self is the thing that               asserts control

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the self should be under control, the self's house should be in order

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you ultimately don't have control over your body, feeling, perception, mental formations, and                           consciousness

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the self is about control and persistence through time

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and the fact is that there is       not as much control over the various faculties as we like to think

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and we are not as impermanent as we like to think, i.e. we can't remember thousands of memories we once had