Not-self-control: the middle way between discipline and disorder

Thoughts and reflections on a recent piece by Matthew C. Haug

Reading Matthew C. Haug’s recent article “New Year's resolutions and the myth of self-control” in IAI today, I was struck by a sentence in the subheading:

New research suggests the most self-controlled people don't rely on willpower, but prevent irresistible desires from emerging by creating environments where temptations simply don’t arise.

You could almost rewrite this as “new research suggests that Buddhist practice works”, and you wouldn’t be too far off the mark. After all, Dhamma practice is largely about working with conditionality, trying your best to put the right conditions in place so that afflictive mental states don’t arise — the practice isn’t about managing craving as it bubbles up, but uprooting the liability to craving entirely. As Bhikkhu Anigha of Hillside Hermitage often puts it (paraphrasing here): if you get to the point of having a near-irresistible craving, you’ve already let yourself go too far. You’ve overlooked the early warning signs and conditions that led to the current intensity of your desire. Better luck next time.

But despite the parallels, even someone with just a passing familiarity with Buddhism would likely notice something off: Haug’s article is describing self-control. Isn’t that fundamentally incompatible with the Buddhist concept of not-self or no-self?

Indeed it is — at least if we take self-control in a literal sense. Not-self isn’t just the rejection of self, it is precisely the rejection of the possibility of self-control: both aspects of the term are rejected in Buddhist thought. In fact, the Early Buddhist Texts reject self on the basis of the impossibility of being able to control the phenomena that we mistakenly take as self:

"[Form, feeling, perception, mental formations, and consciousness]¹, O monks, [are] not-self; if [form…consciousness] were self, then [form…consciousness] would not lead to affliction and it should obtain regarding feeling: 'May my [form…consciousness] be thus, may my [form…consciousness] not be thus'; and indeed, O monks, since [form…consciousness are] not-self, therefore [form…consciousness] lead to affliction and it does not obtain regarding [form…consciousness]: 'May my [form…consciousness] be thus, may my [form…consciousness] not be thus.'

(SN 22.59: Anatta-lakkhana Sutta: The Discourse on the Not-self Characteristic. Trans. Mendis, 2007)²

In other words, self is whatever we can directly control, and since we can’t directly control any aspect of our experience, there is no self. How, then, can research be so fundamentally antithetical to Buddhist thought while also seemingly so in line with it? What gives?

To answer that, let’s take a closer look at what Haug has to say. In the article, Haug presents two models of self-control: the enkratic and sophron models.

The enkratic model comes from the Aristotelian concept of enkrateia, which refers to having power over one’s self and is frequently translated as “continence”, i.e. containing your self and not letting it slip out into harmful action.³ This is the model that we most often associate with self-control: the enkratic individual is faced with a desire that goes against their evaluative judgments (“this is bad, but I want it”) and resists it through sheer willpower.

The sophron model, on the other hand, comes from the Greek word sophrosyne, which means “temperance” or “moderation”. Haug explains that a sophron individual isn’t resisting temptation, but just isn’t being tempted — their desires never go against their evaluative judgements in the first place. To achieve this, sophron individuals apply indirect strategies to avoid getting into situations where they would be forced to take an enkratic approach. In other words, they employ a “don’t even go there” strategy. Haug notes that the employment of these strategies could be viewed as a sort of indirect enkrateia and that a truly sophron person would never need to employ them, but he seems to say that the above conception still falls within sophronyse overall. I’ll defer to his judgment here and accept that sophron self-control can include indirect strategies.

Let’s see what this looks like practically. If a sophron individual is on a diet, then at the first sign that they’re beginning to fantasize about going to a bakery, they try to redirect their thinking: instead of focusing on the pleasant taste of a chocolate cake, they’ll tell themselves “that’s just a bunch of gross sugar and fat — it’s basically diabetes on a plate!” Since they don’t desire diabetes, they are no longer fighting against the desire for a pleasant taste experience, but are rather following the desire to avoid diabetes. Alternatively, if they pass by a bakery each day on their way to work, they could take another route to avoid it. By employing these sorts of strategies, they avoid putting themselves in the enkratic situation: standing in the bakery, mouth watering, looking at the chocolate lava cake, angel and devil on their shoulders trying to bargain with them. They just “don’t go there”.

There are quite a few parallels with Buddhist thought here. Perhaps most obvious is the sophron focus on moderation, which sounds quite a bit like the popular (but inaccurate) conception of the Middle Way. Further, the sophron strategy lines up well with MN 20, the “Vitakkasanthana Sutta: The Relaxation of Thoughts”, in which the Buddha provides the steps one should take to avoid harmful thoughts and actions:

"There is the case where evil, unskillful thoughts — imbued with desire, aversion, or delusion — arise in a monk while he is referring to and attending to a particular theme. He should attend to another theme, apart from that one, connected with what is skillful. When he is attending to this other theme, apart from that one, connected with what is skillful, then those evil, unskillful thoughts — imbued with desire, aversion, or delusion — are abandoned and subside. With their abandoning, he steadies his mind right within, settles it, unifies it, and concentrates it. Just as a skilled carpenter or his apprentice would use a small peg to knock out, drive out, and pull out a large one; in the same way, if evil, unskillful thoughts — imbued with desire, aversion, or delusion — arise in a monk while he is referring to and attending to a particular theme, he should attend to another theme, apart from that one, connected with what is skillful. When he is attending to this other theme, apart from that one, connected with what is skillful, then those evil, unskillful thoughts — imbued with desire, aversion, or delusion — are abandoned and subside. With their abandoning, he steadies his mind right within, settles it, unifies it, and concentrates it.”

(MN 20: Vitakkasanthana Sutta: The Relaxation of Thoughts". Trans. Thanissaro Bhikkhu)⁴

A “theme” could be something like the unhealthiness of the food you’re craving (contemplating the repulsiveness of food is a standard Buddhist practice). If that doesn’t work, the Buddha suggests that the practitioner consider the downsides of their unskillful thoughts — the ways in which they bring harm to themselves and others. Failing that, the monk should stop paying attention to them and do something else. If the monk still struggles, the Buddha suggests they should try to relax their thoughts in the same way that if they were walking, they might ask themselves “why don’t I stand still?”

This all works quite well within the sophron model that Haug describes — so far, the Buddha has not recommended the use of willpower to overcome harmful desires. However, if all of those strategies still don’t work, the Buddha recommends a more enkratic approach as a last resort⁵:

"If evil, unskillful thoughts — imbued with desire, aversion or delusion — still arise in the monk while he is attending to the relaxing of thought-fabrication with regard to those thoughts, then — with his teeth clenched and his tongue pressed against the roof of his mouth — he should beat down, constrain, and crush his mind with his awareness.

(MN 20: Vitakkasanthana Sutta: The Relaxation of Thoughts". Trans. Thanissaro Bhikkhu)⁶

So far, there is solid alignment between the Buddhist thought and Haug’s conclusion that “excellent trait self-control seems to be a trait that is intermediate between enkrateia and sophrosyne” — at least in the sense that it requires elements of both. That seems like a middle way — but is it the Middle Way?

The Middle Way: Not-self-control

Haug presents two extremes of a spectrum: control of the self via enkrateia and control of the environment via sophronyse. On the surface, sophronyse seems to lack the self aspect, making it a type of “not-self-control”. But referring back to SN 22.59, we see that control in itself is constitutive of a sort of self view — we can only control the environment if we believe there is a self that can wield power over it. Control of the environment is a type of extension of the self into its surroundings. After all, as Haug notes, even the sophron model he provides here has enkratic elements — there’s still a self hiding there, it’s just more subtle and more distant.

Let me suggest an alternate line of inquiry. So far, the discussion has been around how self, desire, and control relate to one another. What if we remove “self” and “control” from the picture? In that case, we would be left with just desire. Suddenly, it’s unclear what the problem is — what needs to be figured out about desire? Desire is just desire. Craving is just craving. This is the middle way (emphasis mine):

"Then, Bāhiya, you should train yourself thus: In reference to the seen, there will be only the seen. In reference to the heard, only the heard. In reference to the sensed, only the sensed. In reference to the cognized, only the cognized. That is how you should train yourself. When for you there will be only the seen in reference to the seen, only the heard in reference to the heard, only the sensed in reference to the sensed, only the cognized in reference to the cognized, then, Bāhiya, there is no you in connection with that. When there is no you in connection with that, there is no you there. When there is no you there, you are neither here nor yonder nor between the two. This, just this, is the end of stress."

(Ud 1.10: “Bāhiya Sutta: Bāhiya". Trans. Thanissaro Bhikkhu)⁷

What we overlooked in the discussion about self-control is why self-control is important. We don’t engage in self-control just for kicks, we do so because we see it as a way to avoid suffering. We think that if we can just get our self under control or our environment under control—if we can manage to get everything just right—then finally we can avoid suffering. But this is of course a fool’s errand — we can’t make everything to our liking, and so we need another solution.

Haug’s article implicitly aims to help readers figure out how to avoid the enkratic suffering of resisting temptation, and his answer is to be a sophron person and make sure you don’t let temptation arise. But that doesn’t lead to an uprooting of the liability to the pain of desire, it just manages the desire — it controls the desire, taking it as an extension of self. If you slip up for a moment, the desire will burn you.

This risk is discussed in MN 21, the “Kakacupama Sutta: The Simile of the Saw”. In the sutta, the slave owner, Vehedika, is renowned as a calm, gentle, and even-tempered woman. Kali, a woman who is enslaved by her, wonders if Vehedika is truly of such a good character, or if she simply hasn’t encountered anything that has angered her. She sets out to test Vehedika by waking up later and later each day. Vehedika gets increasingly angry, eventually beating Kali with a rolling pin and making her bleed, showing Kali that Vehedika’s anger wasn’t absent, but only hidden, waiting for the right conditions to come out. The Buddha says of this:

"In the same way, monks, a monk may be ever so gentle, ever so even-tempered, ever so calm, as long as he is not touched by disagreeable aspects of speech. But it's when disagreeable aspects of speech touch him that he can be known from experience as gentle, even-tempered, & calm.

(MN 21: “Kakacupama Sutta: The Simile of the Saw”. Trans. Thanissaro Bhikkhu)⁸

The real goal we all implicitly want is not self-control nor environmental control, but the ability to have desire crop up and not suffer in the face of it — to stare it straight in the eyes and be unmoved. No resisting and no tense work to control everything around us. We don’t want to be like Vehedika: calm, happy, and composed when our objects of desire are out of sight and out of mind, but a ball of chaos and suffering as soon as they’re presented to us.

This imperturbability comes purely from non-identification with our desires, not from any sort of control. It comes from seeing desire like any other externally arisen phenomenon that has no import to you — like a pebble on the beach. If you take a stroll on the beach, you don’t need to avert your eyes lest you see a pebble, and you don’t need to struggle to resist one if it catches your eye. You see it. It’s a pebble. It’s not your pebble. You keep on walking. In the desired, just the desired. There’s no you there.

This approach to “self-control” doesn’t fall into the enkratic or the sophron camp. It is not enkratic because although you confront the desire, there is no resisting. It is not sophron because desires that go against your judgments can still occur. It is simply Dhammic.

Concluding thoughts (and an amnesic patient)

It’s important to note that both the enkratic and sophron approaches are part of the Dhammic path, but the path doesn’t lead to self-control: it leads to fixing the fundamental problem that motivates us towards self-control in the first place. That problem is suffering, which arises from identification with desire. Once the goal is reached, the path is abandoned, and the enkratic and sophron approaches are abandoned along with it.

I won’t go any deeper into non-identification in this post, as it would become far too long. Instead, I would like to make one more important note: non-identification with desire is not as simple as thinking an explicit thought like “that’s not me”. Self view arises implicitly alongside other phenomena — self is part of the context in which every aspect of our experience arises. It’s not something we can see directly, and so even explicit thoughts of not-self will still take place within the context of self until a sufficient level of practice has been achieved. The goal is to get rid of the self context — when that occurs, the thoughts no longer have a self to “stick” to, and there is no more resistance.

For an example of how this works, take a look at Klein’s and Nichols’s paper “Memory and the Sense of Personal Identity”, in which they discuss the case of an amnesic patient, R.B., who was able to recall all his memories, but felt that they were no longer “his”:

R.B. was able to remember particular incidents from his life accompanied by temporal, spatial, and self-referential knowledge, but he did not feel the memories he experienced belonged to him. In his words, they lacked ‘ownership’.

(Memory and the Sense of Personal Identity. Klein and Nichols)⁹

This led Klein and Nichols to conclude that:

R.B.’s recollections during his ‘unowned’ period can be explained in the context of the view that there is specialized neural machinery that inserts the conceptual element self into the agent slot of an episodic memory attribution (Klein forthcoming b; see also Klein et al. 2004)

(Memory and the Sense of Personal Identity. Klein and Nichols)¹⁰

Further (bolded emphasis mine):

Importantly, during his ‘unowned’ period R.B. had no trouble representing that R.B. had experiences on a beach in New London. He presumably also had no trouble representing that his body was present for those experiences. He knows that the memories are about him rather than his mother. And he can auto-cue the memories at will. So, in that sense, the memories involve self-reference. However, there seems to be another type of self-reference that typically accompanies episodic recollections (‘ownership’, ‘mineness’) that has been impaired in his case. His apparent deficit was in representing, from the first person, ‘I had these experiences’. The nature of this deficit remains unclear. One natural explanation is that there is a special kind of conceptual self-representation that is missing in R.B.’s episodic memories. There is independent reason to think that there is a special kind of conceptual self-representation corresponding to (some uses of ) ‘I’ (see, for example, Rey 1997, p. 291; Nichols 2008, pp. 522–3).

(Memory and the Sense of Personal Identity. Klein and Nichols)¹¹

In short: R.B. was capable of having propositional thoughts like “I was there”, but there was no felt sense of “I” arising with those propositions. That is the sense of self that Dhamma practice seeks to eliminate. And when that occurs, the sense of desire doesn’t arise even when a thought of desire occurs. At that stage, enkrateia and sophronyse no longer apply.

For a more in-depth look at how self view functions, take a look at my recent post, The Negation of Self. I plan to cover R.B.’s case and Klein’s and Nichols’s paper in more depth in a future post, so keep your eyes peeled for that. Make sure to subscribe if you don’t want to miss it (Dhamma content will always remain free, other content TBD, but leaning towards all content free):

Thanks for reading! Until next time.

Best wishes,

Otto

1. The sutta repeats this passage five times, each time referring individually to form, feeling, perception, mental formations, or consciousness. I have here put them in all at once for clarity and brevity’s sake.

2. "Anatta-lakkhana Sutta: The Discourse on the Not-self Characteristic" (SN 22.59), translated from the Pali by N.K.G. Mendis. Access to Insight (BCBS Edition), 13 June 2010, http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn22/sn22.059.mend.html.

3. There’s an interesting parallel here, as Dhamma practice also focuses on containing the effluents and not letting craving “slip into” harmful bodily, verbal, or mental action, but the focus on containing the self in enkrateia indicates there are some important differences between these two concepts, even if they’re somewhat aligned.

4. "Vitakkasanthana Sutta: The Relaxation of Thoughts" (MN 20), translated from the Pali by Thanissaro Bhikkhu. Access to Insight (BCBS Edition), 30 November 2013, http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/mn/mn.020.than.html.

5. Technically, the strategy the Buddha provides here isn’t really enkratic, as it doesn’t aim to control the self, but rather to set up bodily conditions for the desire to go away. Still, we can consider it basically enkratic.

6. ibid.

7. "Bāhiya Sutta: Bāhiya" (Ud 1.10), translated from the Pali by Thanissaro Bhikkhu. Access to Insight (BCBS Edition), 3 September 2012, http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/kn/ud/ud.1.10.than.html.

8. "Kakacupama Sutta: The Simile of the Saw" (MN 21), translated from the Pali by Thanissaro Bhikkhu. Access to Insight (BCBS Edition), 30 November 2013, http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/mn/mn.021x.than.html.

9. Klein, Stan & Nichols, Shaun. (2012). Memory and the Sense of Personal Identity. Mind. 121. 677-702. 10.2307/23321780.

10. ibid.

11. ibid.