Hi Bella,
Answers below.
1) Is there a separate entity 'self', 'me' 'I', at all, anywhere, in any way, shape or form?
Was there ever?
The separate self does not exist now and it never has. What may or may not exist are thoughts that may or may not identify as a self, but do not hold any weight beyond being thoughts. What I note with this question is that while I am saying that there is no real self, I also don't feel a strong compulsion to disprove it. The question of whether this thing really exists or not does not feel of great importance to me
2) Explain in detail what the illusion of separate self is, when it starts and how it works from your own experience.
Describe it fully as you see it now.
Right now as I am looking at this, I can see that there are thoughts that believe they are an individual self and awareness can identify with them, and that identification causes more signs of identification - emotions, thoughts, beliefs, etc. I don't know if I can say when it starts in a more universal sense, because when not identifying with self, ideas of beginning and end don't really fit. It just happens, or maybe it doesn't, I guess it doesn't matter. And being aware of this doesn't make these signs stop arising - for example I can see them as "thought that thinks about the self" "recognition of desire to move" etc. but not buy into it.
3) How does it feel to see this?
What is the difference from before you started this dialogue? Please report from the past few days.
It feels like no big deal. Or that it would be hard for me to make a big deal of it all. Between now and when I started this dialogue there are some things that are different and some that are the same. In a way nothing is different, nothing has actually changed. And then it's impossible to say that there wasn't a change too, so I'd say there is a deeper understanding of what was always true. From the past few days I've felt much less contracted around problems, less tense about resolution. I've even had some difficult days and negative emotions, but I don't have such strong reactions about the negativity of those emotions. These things don't reach as deep as they did before. The previous sense of "normalcy" was full of tension and anxiety and now it's the same feeling of "normal" but so much of that tension and anxiety is gone.
4) What was the last bit that pushed you over; made you look?
Sitting a few days without an answer to the question of "what decides for me?", and in a flash realizing that gravity happens all the time, I know I'm not causing it, and I've never felt anxious about not finding a unifying force behind it, and the same goes for all the thoughts, emotions, etc. that pass through my experience. The thought of "what causes all this" felt so inapplicable to experience that it was laughable.
5) a) Describe decision, intention, free will, choice and control. What makes things happen? How does it work? Give examples from your own recent experiences to how things happen and how things work.
Decision, intention, free well, choice, and control are all thoughts. Things happening is a thought. Cause and effect is a thought. The need to know this is a thought. Even if I could explain these things or prove they existed, who would I be trying to prove them to?? I'm not trying to sound flippant or clever here - these questions were prviously tremendously important to me so I'm finding a kind of happy lightness in the space that they used to take up
b) What are you responsible for? Give examples from your own recent experiences to how this works.
There is actually a massive sense of relief, an unburdening. Creating a self creates so many responsibilities - defending it, perpetuating it, even disparaging it - all of that is unnecessary, it doesn't have to happen and the world still goes on. It's like I was walking around holding bags of rocks and I realized that the rocks were not me, I could just let them go.
6) Anything to add?
A funny observation - seeing the terms "separate self", "separately entity" first felt odd to me because I have historically come across those words in discussions of feeling "one" with everything, but I feel not-separate/not-one. Also going through these questions made me much more aware of how much lighter I have felt lately, I guess I needed something to draw my attention to this as it just felt so normal and I didn't notice.
-Eric
