Hi Sarah,
I'll try to respond more frequently if you think that's a good strategy.
Does the little exercise to get a grasp of reality help at all?
I spend a lot of my time engaged in this kind of mindfulness practice, paying attention to the world through my senses, and most of the time it actually increases the sense of unreality rather than decreasing it. The more I pay attention , the more transparent and fluid the material world seems. It's been like that for 8 months now. So sadly these kinds of exercises are not grounding and stabilizing as they have been in the past. I'm not sure whether or not there's any meaningful self, but I am sure from my own experience that the consensus reality that humans usually experience, consisting of a solid physical world, is not an absolute truth. That's not something I can hold onto anymore.
As for how the thoughts are "mine", the only sense in which they're mine is that I'm the only one experiencing them. They cause sensations in my body. They focus on the circumstances of my life. I think they often feel like mine because they are familiar. The content is so often recycled, coming round and round again, that they feel as if they belong to me, but they're just popping into and out of existence.
And how would you describe your „self“ to me right now? It’s ok if it feels the same as at the beginning of this journey. Just look again and describe it like I‘d never heard it before.
There's not really any sense of a continuous or distinct self. More like masks that are put on and taken off, roles that I'm accustomed to performing. I'm more and more aware that the things I've been taught to consider "me" -thoughts, emotions, desires, memories, analyses - are completely fluid. More like a liquid than a solid, with no defined edges or anything to that can be claimed as a distinct self.
Thanks Sarah!
Moss
️, Sarah