I'd like to give a dharma talk, a talk on Buddhist psychology, and I'm going to make it as simple and as pertinent to your experience as I can. Perhaps the most important distinguishing feature about Buddhist psychology is the teaching about dependent arising or dependent origination. When most people hear this it may sound like something very complicated, very difficult to understand. And I'm going to try to make it so it's a bit easier for you. Because it's critical to understand it.
What the Buddha saw was that people didn't quite have a correct perspective on their experiences; that there was something off in how people saw things happen inside of them. And one way in which he saw that it was off is that people seem to think that things are caused in them by another. That your feelings are there because of something else - another person, another being. Something outside of oneself. He also saw that people tend to say that things are caused inside of them by a self. By "oneself," as if there's a being inside of you that creates these things. And he also saw that people would interpret their experience, would look at their experience, as being accidental. That their feelings, their moods, their actions just came about accidentally; or came about spontaneously; or because of destiny. That people would have these various ideas that would completely take out any sense of personal responsibility.
So what he saw, say the more correct way, was that what is going on inside of us is caused by conditions. And that's what dependent arising is about. It's happening, not because there's a self or because someone else causes it, or by accident, but because of the conditions. The conditions are there. And the clearest way he stated it is that when there's one thing present, there has to be another thing present. And that's the nature of conditionality. There's not just one thing. So whatever you feel, whatever you go through is not just one thing. Say, for example, if you look at something like anger. You might think that someone said something or did something to you and that made you angry, that caused the anger. What the Buddha would say is that that didn't cause the anger. You heard the person's words and from hearing those words, you had a certain feeling about them. It was most likely unpleasant to you. And from that feeling, there was a perception, there was an idea. An idea that either someone hated you, or disliked you, or you felt humiliated or something like that. There was some kind of perception about oneself, perhaps. And that arose because of that feeling. And from that perception arose a lot of thinking. That you started to really get kind of obsessed by it. And that obsession got out of control. And you got angry. And so it's not that the person made you angry. It's that inside of you the conditions were there to hear certain words in a certain way and for anger to arise within you, and for it to consume you and take you over.
Now what happens in some meditation practices people believe, or are taught, is that if you try to get as close to just the sense experience, just hearing words without any feeling, without any concepts, then there will be no anger. There will be no desire. You'll stop that process. But that's not exactly what the Buddha taught. What he was really referring to is, first just know that this process is there. And that it's running on out of control. And you really can't do anything about it. You're, in a sense, stuck with it. You're stuck with hearing certain things a certain way and thinking about them in a certain way and continuing on and on in that kind of obsessive manner. It just kind of starts to burn. And that's dependent arising. That's really what the core of it is. It's not because of another person or because of a self. And the whole thing around self is very important here. That it's the anger that is coming up is not coming up from a place of a person who is hurt, in a sense of a self. What it's coming up from is in a way various perceptions and habits and things that have formed inside of us that create a perception of a perception of a person being hurt; or create an experience of a person being hurt.
This is where, I think, Buddhist psychology gets a little bit more complicated. It is not about trying to say, at first, that there's no self. It's really more about saying that your experience is far more complex to give it a kind of unifying character, to keep saying it's always this "one and the same being" over and over again who's experiencing this. It's much more complex than that. And it's happening in certain ways so that you start to see that your experience has that kind of sense of it. People use the word "out of control." It's a really great way to describe dependent arising. That it is not you controlling it. It is just coming up of its own. Now this, of course, will seem scary. It seems like, well if that happens, then I will be out of control. I won't be able to do anything. But the truth is that as you sit, as you stay with your experience, you'll find you can see this. You can see how this works. How you hear a sound and suddenly you feel afraid or you feel delighted or you feel upset or you feel anxious. And it's coming up. And you start to see that your experience is part of this kind of interplay with your senses and what's going on inside of you. And that's dependent origination, that's what it's really about. It's about that kind of interplay with you and the world, and what is triggered from that and how that develops on its own.
When you sit like this, when you sit in a way where you're letting your experience unfold, where you're just letting things happen and you're not putting in so much effort to do something particular, to have things be a certain way, you're actually more subject to this process of dependent arising. Your self is less in the picture in your sittings. So, for instance, when you sit down and suddenly you're thinking about something that you're going to do later on, you may find that if you allow yourself to think a bit about that and to go on in that way, you can see that there are some conditions for that thinking. It's not just idle thinking. What you're thinking about doing later on, say, about meeting somebody or having a conversation, there could be some excitement that's keeping it going, there could be a longing to be with a person that keeps it going. There can be so many factors going on inside of you. And you can start to watch it. And notice it. And as you notice it that way you may start to realize that a lot of your decisions are not made from a point of view of a self. They're made from this process going on and you grabbing hold of one part of it and, in this process of decisions about what I'm going to say to somebody, I'm picking out these words. Or I'm picking out this attitude, or I'm picking out this position. And you can start to see that that's what's going on inside of you. You're choosing. You're picking and then, maybe later on when you see that person, that's what you say, that's the posture you take, those are the things you bring to it. And that's partly how our minds work around this.
Often people will look at Buddhist psychology as really saying don't look at self and there is no self. But the truth is that the way we look at our mental experiences, we will keep putting together a self. And that's one thing that you find in Buddhist language often: self is constructed. Self is something that is put together. It's arranged. It's made. And when you make it, say when you decide to act a certain way towards somebody, well, you may not just do that once, you may do that again and again and create a habit. And that seems like that self, that made self, is your real self. And it goes on and on and on like that. And this is very difficult to see. But it's something that you do start to get glimpses of as you just watch your experience in meditation.