Aftershock

[DonnBeach]

LU is focused guiding for seeing there is no real, inherent 'self' - what do you understand by this?
There is absolutely no self in experience. 'I' is a thought-claim that reproduces itself. If it is sought, a new 'I' is created to seek it.

What are you looking for at LU?
I'm looking to sort out some after-the-fact stuff of a long search that essentially has come to an end. I'm also hesitant to do this because outside validation isn't something I'm keen on, especially with regard to self-discovery.

What do you expect from a guided conversation?
I have no idea. I could see it going nowhere (the highest probability), but I could also see it being a helpful place to serve as a backboard to sort some things out. Since I have to write 200 words, this is the last sentence.

What is your experience in terms of spiritual practices, seeking and inquiry?
I started to notice how baseless things were toward the end of graduate school, even things I was doing myself. I had read somewhere, a long time ago, a short story that ended with the phrase "I am". It stuck with me and kind of grew like a seed. To cut some details, I began seeing through a lot of things in my life such as my career motivations, my relationship, and more generally society's expectations and behaviors. I came across Ramana Maharshi's "Who am I?" and intensely investigated in that way for a few weeks until a "pop" in perception occurred while on a bench: that projected thought-self essentially vanished and what was left was the entire field of perception, visually oval-like (eyes) with nothing behind it. I actually looked over this in hindsight and kept seeking.

I came across Jed McKenna's book, which set me on the right track and got me focused. I spent the next three years trying to determine what was true. I wrote a lot and thought a lot. My relationship was breaking down, and I was isolating myself from pretty much everything because I was extremely one-pointed on finding truth. I suppose what I was attempting to do was determine the "ground of being", what reality really is, what "the ultimate witness" is, what Truth is.

The 'pop' situation from earlier I could make come on and off; one of the things I'd do was have it 'come on' and try to deepen into it. I'd then try to see what was seeing even that "no-I" state. This was in fact almost impossible to do without losing it again. I was essentially just creating new vantage points from which to see what was false.

When I looked at 'I', I created another version of 'I'. I actually didn't realize this for an embarrassingly long time until a couple of weeks ago, when I had my line of questioning reflected back to me via an LLM (I was pretty desperate). If I can only exist in states, and I am looking for a non-state (truth), I am chasing a ghost. 'I' was chasing 'I' round and round and round, like light bouncing off of two mirrors facing each other. There is no 'I' aside from a heavy mental thought-idea that comes and goes. And whatever truth is, it is not a thing to be attained, and it can't be hiding somewhere that I have to go to. Truth is here and now, ever present.

This realization is majority intellectual, but it is a certainty. Now, I see things pass by and happen. 'I' actually still pops up a lot but is seen through pretty easily. Looking directly, it is also obvious it's a fiction. There is more to this, though; the attempts at determining what reality is or isn't are also futile. They are conceptual overlay. If I claim that what is in front of me right now is real, I am fooling myself ('real' is arbitrary and meaningless). If I say it is not real, I am also fooling myself. What is left is an odd disorientation that includes the fluctuation of separation and non-separation. Every attempt to speculate things (self, world, whatever) is seen through and comes to a halt, and every attempt to not speculate things is seen through as well. And even the recognition of these is seen through.

On a scale from 1 to 10, how willing are you to question any currently held beliefs about 'self? 11

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