Ep. 189 – Creating A Concept of Self

Insight Hour with Joseph Goldstein

Be Here Now Network

Joseph Goldstein, Mindfulness, Vipassana, Buddhism, Insightmeditation, Meditation, Society & Culture, Religion & Spirituality

4.8 • 864 Ratings

🗓️ 7 December 2023

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Describing how perceptions and constructs shape our experiences, Joseph Goldstein teaches on the concept of self.

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In this episode, Joseph describes:

The liberating jewel of the Buddha’s teachings
The Self as the fabrication of our minds
The relief of selflessness
Abandoning unwholesome qualities
Using Buddhist psychology to understand how The Self is created
Recognizing, naming, and remembering
Perception in the service of mindfulness
Seeing the frame instead of the picture
How concepts can limit our understanding
Division and the concept of space
Past, present, future, and the concept of time
The constriction within self-image
Projection and self-assessment
Age, culture, race, and other created constructs
When concepts can be useful

“Our perceptions are concepts about what we are experiencing. This overlay on experience very often conditions how we feel about that experience. And, one of the startling things about all this, is that often our perceptions are inaccurate and yet they are conditioning the experience we are having.”– Joseph Goldstein

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Transcript

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0:00.0	The root cause of so much suffering in the world is the attachment we have to the concept of self, to this mental fabrication. Welcome to the Joseph Goldstein Inside Hour.
0:33.0	This podcast is an expression of our shared interest in self-discovery.
0:39.0	Join Joseph as he shares his deep knowledge of the path of mindfulness.
0:45.0	If you are interested in supporting this podcast,
0:48.2	please go to be here now network.com
0:51.4	slash Joseph. So many aspects of the Buddhist teachings about the nature of suffering and the possibilities of freedom
1:12.0	resonate with our own common sense understanding of things, the importance
1:18.7	of non-harming as the foundation for living together,
1:24.0	whether locally or globally,
1:28.0	the understanding that all things in our lives are changing and that if we cling to or grasp at that which in its
1:38.8	nature changes we suffer. So these principles are not hard to understand, at least intellectually,
1:47.0	even if it takes practice to realize them. But there's one aspect of the Buddhist teaching that is really counterintuitive.
1:58.0	That really offers a very different way, a profoundly different way,
2:06.0	of understanding ourselves and the world.
2:09.0	And it's one that challenges our entire worldview and this is the deep understanding and realization of
2:18.6	selflessness on a tah a emptiness of self, the insubstantiality of all aspects of our experience.
2:30.8	So realizing selflessness,
2:33.8	Anatta, is the great liberating jewel of the Buddhist teachings. As our mindfulness and awareness of this mind body process grows more stable and
2:51.6	grows more precise we find that the self, what we think of the self is not what
3:01.0	we thought it to be.
3:03.4	We begin to understand that the body is not self,
3:08.5	that thoughts and emotions are not self, that even awareness or consciousness is not self. Gradually as we settle into the practice, we begin to see that the self is a concept. It's a
	...

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