Behzad, you still around?

Can you take a look at this sense of existing of being alive and see if that is Alex?

No it is not personal. It just is. Alex is just a story.

Is this sense personal in any way?

Only in the sense that Alex's perspective looks at things. But the sense is not personal.

Can you see where it ...

Yes I see it. Maybe I don't. I'll try to look deeper.

I see it but there is a resistance to it.

I am spending a lot of time looking at the world, looking at the internal dialogue and while I cannot say that there Is an Alex to be seen, there is a sense that an Alex exists. Alex may not be separate from the world as such.

But I guess I am getting more ...

So here is where things are. I am aware of the fact that what you say is true.

One of the things I do involves hypnosis. In those situations I am instructing and another is following. Sometimes I hypnotize myself, programming myself with new thoughts and creating new actions.

Who is deciding that ...

Finally breathing again. I'll work on these questions.

I have a fever and terrible head cold. Will get back to you soon.

Where do you live behzad?

You seem in a very different time zone.

The self is seen through.

There is a luminous flow of life.

The I still keeps reasserting itself and dramas of ego keep playing out. They don't seem to linger.

I think there still may be something off. There's a melancholy ...

Nothing I guess. Just life.

I'm finding some anger and fear coming up sometimes though, there is some doubt about the usefulness of this realization.

I feel confused tonight.

I think I am seeing it clearly. It's just a made up thing, this self. It only exists because it keeps getting created by my mind. It's just a story. I could tell any story.

Okay, very close.

I am struggling with the reason for it all.

A rock or a body is a temporary collection of minerals, molecules and atoms. Atoms are packages of wavicles and probabilities. Ultimately a rock amounts to empty space with a few specks of information amidst a void.

The self is a ...

I don't know if I quite understand what a "self" is.

I mean, looking at those things...

sensations
thoughts
feelings
aliveness

obviously these are separate and autonomous things, driven by biological, historical and cosmic forces...

But the self seems to me to be the conglomeration of these ...

When this body/mind called Alex came to this earth, got born, did it have all the knowledge about buddhism, kabballah, non duality, material-shaivism, advaita vedanta, enlightenment, liberation etc. with it? Were all of this already in Alex as a baby?

This is an interesting question, because when ...

I am fine with dropping everything but the art.

Okay so I have been studying spirituality for a number of years, everything from kabballah to Buddhism. I'm more familiar with nondual source material- shaivism, advaita vedanta etc rather than the modern stuff.

I have done some self inquiry, vipassana and other meditation practices.

I am also an ...