You are correct. I’m not sure why I was ever afraid of my thoughts. Now, they can come and go without any resistance. Looking at my thoughts, I also realize that I am not thinking any of these thoughts. They seem to arise when certain stimuli comes up. When someone says a certain phrase or brings up ...

You are right. The more I do this, the less troublesome thoughts are. Every once in a while, I still get caught up in a narrative, but it happens less and less. It seems that it takes a little time to counteract 30 years of habitual response to my thoughts.

Looking at it closely, I can see you are correct. When I don’t put myself in the middle of these predictions, it seems like either these events just occur(but not to my story of me), or I wonder the event should even worry me or impact me in any way. It seems like much(if not all) of the things I’m ...

On further introspection, when looking at the difference between when I seem to be identifying with my thoughts and when there is no “I” at the center of my anxieties or difficult feelings, I can find no actual difference. The only difference I can find is a thought about a thought, which seems ...

Throughout the the day, after looking, I seem to lose the sense that a me exists. All that exists, is an awareness of consciousness and the different aspects of consciousness. I notice some tension or habitual reactions to the stimuli around, but without identification with these sensations just ...

When I realize that my abstraction or story of “I” is placed at the center of these stories, it seems that stories that I make up don’t happen to me since there is no me for them to happen to. These made up events(if they ever do happen), would be happenings, but they wouldnt be things that are ...

I’ve been spending a good deal of time looking inward, and I cannot find a self in consciousness. I’m having trouble finding a self that controls my actions. It seems like much of that I do comes from some process not in consiousness and if it is a thought out action, these thoughts are definitely ...

Where I tend to get stuck is that I can’t get over the idea that there is a self that ultimately controls my actions. I feel that when confronted with certain situations, I consciously decide to react in a certain way. I don’t associate habitual actions with a sense of self, but the deliberate ...

That sounds great John. I appreciate your help.

The only thing that I can think of when it comes to thought adding to this raw experience is that thought seems to want to interpret this direct data and make it meaningful. Often these interpretations seem to be false. Since my mind seems to hate uncertainty, it seems to want to take in incomplete ...

I have spent a good deal of time on the excercise. When I observe my thoughts, I find that they tend to be quite random. Sometimes they are reactions to the stimuli around me, and sometimes they are related to previous thoughts. For example, when I find myself angry, I try to find other examples of ...

Hey Ben,

After sitting with this for a while my idea of “I” seems to come from my thoughts or mental formations. Which causes me to wonder ultimately if my sense of self is ultimately the thinker inside my mind that controls my decisions.

Ben, I appreciate your help. When I look into what my mind divides into the self, the following things stick out, there seem to be many parts that make up my sense of I:

I am my body, I have a physical existence in the world. My body seems to be an important part of myself. It controls ...

LU is focused guiding for seeing there is no real, inherent 'self' - what do you understand by this?
This is a program to help people see through the illusion of a constant unchanging self.

What are you looking for at LU?
I’m looking to explore this concept more fully as well as guidance on how ...