From I-Me-Mine to This-We-Nobody's
Implicit in our last couple weeks looking at craving, plus last night's talk at Spirit Rock on Right View, is the teaching on selflessness, anatta. It's not just about moving "from Me to We," as the cliche sings, but about moving from the unconscious worldview that anything can be owned, controlled, border policed, or even defined in a way that produces lasting peace.
Of course I'm talking as much about postcolonial military-religious-capital-ethno states as much as I am about the psychological boundaries of self and other or the religious boundaries of sinner and savior. "We" still implies "Our" and maybe doesn't deconstruct the neoliberal world enough.
Nobody possesses anything.
This is the heart of anatta—not just the philosophical rebuttal of the old religious intuition that we have eternal individual souls. So tonight we'll look at this core insight.
Sutta reference: "The Not-Self Characteristic" (SN 22.59): https://suttacentral.net/sn22.59/en/sujato?lang=en&layout=plain&reference=none¬es=none&highlight=false&script=latin
