Generosity as a path to selflessness
The Buddha said that Right View is believing in giving, in making offerings, in sacrifice. Why does he say that? Because it is a direct method that leads to the experience of anatta or not-self.
Simply put, the experience of anatta refers to the absence of selfishness. If you give something away with genuine generosity and not just for egocentric or manipulative purposes, you also give a strong blow to the ego.
When the Buddha says, for example, that consciousness is not self, he also says it is not “mine.”
When you verify that, something that characterizes such experience is that you literally feel that consciousness stops being yours. It feels like you gave it away naturally.
But by giving it away like that, consciousness does not go anywhere.
One day it will be gone, but that will happen when its conditions cease. Consciousness will still be there, but it has already been given away. It no longer belongs to anyone.
So when the Buddha talks about adopting the perspective of gift-giving, offering-making, and sacrifice, he is giving us a method to begin cultivating dispossession a la anatta.
Maybe in the beginning you imagine yourself giving away food, clothes, money, or books. Technically, you do not consider any of that as self, just as you would consider that consciousness is.
But the curious thing is that we do consider these objects as self. To the mind, all possessions are extensions of our identity. That's why it's hard to give away possessions.
An identity is not a simple thing. It is a complex event, like a tree with many branches that extend beyond the trunk.
The same goes for possessions. The self extends to our books, clothes, home, work, and even knowledge or habits.
When people want to give up a vice, such as smoking or drinking, it isn't easy because you are not only letting go of a pleasant habit, but you are also giving up an essential part of your identity.
Giving up a harmful habit is an egoic death and very few people want to die.
That is why the Buddha emphasizes giving, making offerings, and sacrifice. To be open to dispossession, which is an essential characteristic of anatta.
Giving gifts, making offerings, or sacrificing yourself through service to others are skillful means to achieve natural dispossession.
As a lay practitioner, is it necessary to give away your cell phone or work tools to someone else? Well no, if you gave that away you wouldn't be able to do your job.
If you could give away your ability to be conscious to someone else, that would be like falling into a coma. That is not the Right view that the Buddha teaches.
The correct practice is giving things away by realizing they are not self. Thus, you can dispossess yourself of your phone or consciousness without giving that away to someone else.
The steps to give away, offer, or sacrifice your possessions by performing anatta are:
Remember that your possessions are impermanent and depend on conditions. In the case of your phone, this is remembering that it has a limited life because it depends on internal parts that also have a limited life. No matter what you do, one day it will stop working.
Remember that an impermanent event can never be a permanent self. The cell phone is like a river that is never the same. They are both changing, it's just that change is more explicit on the river than on the phone. How can you consider a river yours if it is never the same? How can you consider the river a permanent self if it is never the same? Impossible. The same thing happens with the phone.
Reflect on the two previous steps until eventually, you perceive the phone (or your consciousness) as the river that changes every moment. When you feel that the phone is one more impermanent event you cannot possess (like the river, weather, day and night), it is no longer “yours”.
What is the benefit of living under this perspective? If your cell phone stops working, it won’t feel bad.
If you dispossess yourself of consciousness, not only will you have less fear that it will cease one day, but you will also have freed it from the possessive and egocentric prison, which yields many more benefits.
I will address those benefits in another essay.