I am seeking a guide

[codyjdennis]

Checking in

[blackfoot332]

Hey, are you still willing to point for me?

I've reviewed our conversation. I'm experiencing much frustration about this whole thing still. It seems like there are at least two approaches to use. One is to focus on stimulation/perception- sounds, tactile sensation (including the physical feelings in and of my body), smells, sight, taste. Another is to turn the attention to the sense of ego, the locus of the feeling of being a navigator, a self. To do the second one, there is an emotional aspect to tune in to as well as a thought aspect.


I've tried this second way recently and I've gotten the thrill for a moment or two of feeling like I am (pure awareness) peeking in on the unfolding of an unsentient person/world/life movie. Again, it was thrilling though, not just the calm of watching a movie. I achieved this by embracing the assumption that this no-self stuff was true, and by more and more intensely concentrating on that sense of ego and (maybe, I can't remember exactly) dissociating from it while revisiting the assumption again and again that all thoughts were coming out of the ether as far as I knew, and so were not me or mine. So this was all just the intense embracing of my confidence that no-self doesn't exist based on things I've read. I understand completely that liberation is not at all this exercise, this intellectual embrace of a belief and the forcing of it on myself.


The first strategy is what you'd focused on from the beginning, so I've revisited it.

I thought you made things very plain with the following lines:

The most essential question is always IS THERE or IS THERE NOT a self. It's a yes or no question.

Thinking is NOT direct experience.

First of all, it seems to me that if I call a thought to mind explicitly for its semantic meaning and direction, like the question "Is there or is there not a self?", the only way to understand it, decode it, is to think. Similarly, the only way to respond, which it is asking me to do, would be by creating semantic meaning myself, which again requires thought – to consider the question, develop an answer, and then code that satisfactorily into a coherent and appropriate response. And thought, as you clarify above, is NOT direct experience and therefore misses the "point" :) (happy with that one). So how do I “look” for a self?


What seems to me the bigger bit of this first strategy that's being lost in translation is that the question "Is there or is there not a self?" is completely meaningless to me, I have no idea how to even understand or interpret that question. If I ask myself, "Self, (I'm being silly here but I wonder does the problem start with who I'm addressing the question to? Mustn't it be to the self-thought/belief? How can I, believing that I am my story of self, address pure consciousness/awareness with that question when I don't know what pure consciousness/awareness is? Does "I" have the tools to have direct experience?) is there a self in hearing?", I put my attention on sounds (is this correct? Do I need to do more to examine hearing?). I hear the sounds. I don't have that experience I described over a year ago where I am immersed in the sounds as they were the current occupiers of "Dan's" attention, I can't repeat it still (By experience I mean that it's a different way of experiencing the world, I became un-isolated. I knew I preferred that new sense/orientation of perception/experience, and I felt it lined up with some of the nice spiritual blessings I'd read about, but I'm not sure I KNEW that it was "true" or more true.). Hearing the sounds becomes boring then frustrating. Is there a self there? A hearer? How would I know? How? I have no idea what I'm looking for, so it could be hiding in plain sight, or rather sound, for all I know. It's very unsatisfying to just settle on the fact that I have not found "it". It doesn't feel like I've been thorough, it doesn't even feel like I STARTED looking. When I hear sounds, I just hear sounds. What does that mean to me? It means that the self (here is my conditioned assumption that frustrates me with its obstruction) is very complex and I don't understand the first thing about it, which is no surprise because I'm not a doctor of psychology, all I'm doing is paying attention to the sounds as they feed into the self. No, I didn’t come back with snapshots of a self, but HOW is this conclusive? And I think conclusive is a perfect word to use, don't take the logical connotation, just take it as decisive, unquestionable, plainly evident/apparent, as how you’d describe liberation.

Perhaps a place to start to is to define a self, describe what I should be “looking” for with my mind’s eye. I’m asking for very specific traits of a self, or since that doesn’t exist, how does one prove its absence? One doesn’t prove anything, one observes and loses the illusion. How do I know there’s just hearing? It’s not just listening to sounds. Anyone can do that and never come close to this. It’s asking whether or not there’s a self there (hearing those sounds, as separate and in addition to the sounds themselves). I hope you understand what I’m getting at.

I know I believe in a self, or at least EXPERIENCE things that are consistent with this idea of self. "I" is where my attention is and "I" doesn't know what it's like to know the no-self truth, so "I" can't really believe in it, at least as a potential for itself. I believe in a ton of things that I can't point to. I believe in the Zika virus, though I'll never see it, I'll just see its effects, and that model is a good enough way to my understanding to describe those effects. I don't imagine this works, let me know.

Thank you!