Sorting Yourselves Out
November 11, 2010
When the Buddha talks about our sense of who we are, he talks about it in the context of kamma, because we make a sense of who we are. He calls it “I-making” and “my-making.” And there’s not just one “I,” or one “my.” For each desire, you have a sense of self, especially the desires you’ve acted on. There’s the self that wants to experience pleasure as a result of the desire, there’s the self that wants to find the powers, or to develop the powers, to bring that desire about, and then there’s the author of the desire itself. So even with one desire, you have a cluster of three selves right there. Multiply that by all the different desires you’ve had, and you realize you’ve got a whole herd in here.