Cysquatch

[Ingen]

Thanks for your answer. Short and good.

The "mirage" analogy is good and I am sure this is true - but it is not my experience.

How do you imagine it would be if it *was* your experience? How would you experience "there is no I" when you are caught up in other thoughts and things?

You can only see things while you look. Life it is doing its thing whether you look, or not.

[Ingen]

Do you really want to find out the truth about "you"? Then it is time to engage some more…

There is no you in any shape or form.

What comes up when you consider that this might really be true?

[cysquatch]

When I consider there is no me in any shape or form I have a moment of complete emptiness but this is quickly filled with thoughts - mostly thoughts like "this is my experience, I made this happen" and I am back where I started. Its like teetering on the edge of something huge then an attack of vertigo makes me look away.

Also, I think I'm having difficulty be completely honest to myself about all this. I feel I need to forget everything I was expecting or I just start conceptualising - comparing and judging things with stuff I've read or how I think they should be.

[Ingen]

This is precisely the right place to look.

Let's brake it down:
-First there is a moment of complete emptiness.
-Then this void is filled with thoughts.
- then comes the thought "I" am back where "I" am started.

Where is an "I" in this process?

Keep looking, moment-to-moment, in your direct experience: is there is a you comparing and judging, or are concepts, comparisons and judgmental thoughts just arising, moment to moment?

[Ingen]

I have a moment of complete emptiness but this is quickly filled with thoughts

This sounds like that you are trying to get into a state of complete emptiness. Am I right? What I am pointing to here is not a special state that you should reach. The absence of a "you" is something that is already the case, in ordinary everyday experience. It is never not the case.

Somewhere I read the sentence: You can't crack the nut because there is no nut.

[cysquatch]

You are right - I expect to see "emptiness" so I'm creating this in my mind.

I clearly see that my "self" is just conditioned responses. It doesn't exist other than as a collection of ideas or thoughts. I see that I never existed, don't exist now and never can.

But everything still feels the same. There is no permanent shift in perspective. Like before, when focusing I seem to see this clearly but then it passes and I'm back in self. It doesn't seem to matter that I know self doesn't exist.

Having doubts about whether I actually see that there is no self or if I'm just convincing myself its true. But then I looked at the doubt - it was just a thought that arose in the mind from seemingly nowhere - then "I" was attached to it and it was taken personally and created a response (anxiety). But looking at it this way it then disappeared into nothing along with the anxiety. Rambling, I know.

[Ilona]

Hi cysquatch. I'll help you through as ingen is away.
Ok, so what I got from your exchange is that you are expecting a big boom to happen. It ain't gonna happen.
Remember when you was a child ( if not, just imagine) and you found out that Santa was not real, was there a big boom? There was a recognition of the fact that Santa is a fantasy and in real life there is no such thing as old man bringing presents to every kid in the world.

The belief in separate entity is just like that- a fantasy. So once you see that, there won't be a booom, the shift is subtle. And life will go on as it does now, nothing will change, so relax now and take a fresh look.

Is there an entity behind I? If it can not be found is it possible that it does not exist? Can you focus on the fact that it does not exist and see if you can notice that everywhere.

Would be great if you could get outside into nature, just stop and wait, watch what is happening and see if there is a manager anywhere.

Let me know what you find.

[Ingen]

Hi cysquatch, I'm back from holiday. Are you still interested in resolving this? You are soo close.

Like before, when focusing I seem to see this clearly but then it passes and I'm back in self

That is interesting. How *is* it to be back in self? How do you know? IS IT TRUE?

Lets say, you are wearing a clean t-shirt, but somehow you keep thinking it is stained, (because everybody you meet is wearing a stained t-shirt). When you look, you see it is clean. But you complain that "as soon as I am not looking, the stain shows up again".

Nothing will change when you realize that your t-shirt really is clean. It has never been dirty, so what is supposed to change? Maybe after some time you can relax, after all you know now that it is just a belief that makes you want to "get rid of the stain".

Nothing will change when you realize that life alone is driving the show, that "you" is a superstition. You will not become more peaceful all of a sudden. Although… when you see, in real time, how an imaginary "self" is being formed out of appearing thoughts, these thoughts are not so bothersome anymore. They even become quite interesting to watch, how they "try" to convince you of existing.

Please make this a top priority if you want to resolve it - no need to think about it for weeks.

Is there an I-unit when you are not looking?

[cysquatch]

Hello Ingen,

Great to hear from you again. Sorry I have not replied to Ilona, I have taken a short break.

This is where "I" am at:

There is no I.
I is not even a thought. Thoughts are real. Emotion is real. Feeling is real. Seeing is real.
I is just a thing to which thoughts refer. There is no thing which is "me". This is just added on to experience. Maybe its a way of a primative organ making sense of things.

I have been this "way" for a few days now. At first I cannot believe this is "It". I was expecting the full Eckhart Tolle (fireworks, bliss and sitting on park benches for a few years).

Only now do I understand when people say "you are already enlightened". I was always enlightened. I just didn't know it. Your simile about the t-shirt says it all. I believed that only when focusing - my self was didn't exist. If it didn't exist when focusing, how could it exist otherwise?!!!

This is going to take a while to get used to. I expected immediate change. Immediate freedom from all internal turmoil. Reality as I now perceive it (or should I say as it presents itself) has its own agenda. But there's no point in any resistance to what "is". All the time it has been this resistance which has been the problem. How could I have been so blind?

Everything has changed and nothing has changed. For a while all the paradoxes of "freedom, enlightenment, thruth realisation" have been perplexing. But now I realise paradoxes need no resolving. They are irresolvable. They just "are".

I still find it difficult to truly believe it has clicked. 2 years of searching, all of it instigated by severe illness making me question everything I believed in. Now I believe nothing. I don't exist.

I don't exist - that's not a belief. It's the most obvious thing you can ever discover.

[Ingen]

Dear cysquatch,

whoa. Amazing. You have exchanged the bottle of confusion with a bottle of wisdom. From my point of view there is nothing more to add here.

Would you explain what it was exactly that made you see through the illusion?

[Ingen]

For a while all the paradoxes of "freedom, enlightenment, thruth realisation" have been perplexing. But now I realise paradoxes need no resolving. They are irresolvable. They just "are".

One more question: Where do you see a paradox? This part I don't quite understand. I don't see any.

[cysquatch]

Hello Ingen,

Sorry for the delay in getting back to you.

(the bit about the paradoxes is a bit unclear - sorry, all I meant was regarding the "everything changing and nothing changing".) There is still the body, experience, emotion etc - its just that a shift in perception has ocurred.

The self has been revealed as a non-entity. It has no reality other than as an idea pointed to by thoughts. I think I saw this not long after we began corresponding but because this realisation didn't conform to my expectations, I failed to recognise it. You going on holiday was probably ideal for me as it allowed me to settle into it and allow my expectations to dissolve.

I'm not sure what specifically pushed me through the "gate" (or gateless gate - another paradox for you Ingen!). What resonates when I read back though your responses was when you said that I seemed to be trying to create some special state rather than recognising that the absence of self was an ordinary everyday experience. This is exactly what I had been doing - trying in my head to create some imagined version of freedom and hoping that it would stick. What I see now is the importance of dropping all expectations. Drop all ideas of what its going to be like. The fact is - its not going to be like anything you imagine. Don't continually look forward to what might happen, just concentrate on what your experience is NOW. Can you locate where thoughts arise? Do you have any control over this? Can you see that thought is real? Can you see that not everything thoughts refer to are real? Can you see that your self is simply something to which thoughts refer?