Bruce Tift

That's the kind of big, big shifts in life.

But also just that very, that very low level thing of like, you have some problem that you berate yourself for, like you're a procrastinator or you have some dissatisfaction about your personality, your body, your way of talking, could be any number of things, right? And, And I think it's the psychotherapist Bruce Tift who has this wonderful thought of like, what if you knew for a fact that some version of that problem was just going to be with you for the whole of the rest of your life?

Yeah.

Wouldn't that just be so liberating? Make friends with it, that's what I always

So we start out with this apparent contradiction between becoming a person with a solid sense of self, positive self-esteem, realizing our potentials, and on the other hand, this Buddhist teaching of the non-self, or anatta.

So I want to start with this question asked by Tammy Simon in the foreword to the book by Bruce Tift, Already Free.

And many of us have been reading that book for Mondo training and Ming Po has referred to it multiple times recently.

But Already Free, Buddhism Meets Psychotherapy on the Path of Liberation.

And then there's Jack Engler's quote that is the title for this Dharma Talk.

You have to be somebody before you can be nobody.

so we'll explore that idea in more detail and look at how the self according to western psychology and the non-self according to buddhist psychology actually complement each other and even agree more than you might think even maybe more so than what Bruce Tift is talking about in his book, Already Free.

In the book, Why Buddhism is True by Robert Wright, he points out that the Buddhist teaching on non-self is not an absolute negation of the self, but rather an invitation to see the self Not as a permanent and unchanging entity, but as a constantly changing process, a process, much like the flow of a river.