Hi Elizabeth,
It's down to observation. Watching how body reaches for the glass, or the fork.
Does anything own or do, in reality?
Look again at animals, small babies and children, trees, water, moon.
What moves? What lives, breathes, is perceived?
You need not have a rational response. Just look.
I'm going to preface these answers with this: I'm shutting off the rational part of my mind and trying to just say what I see when I just sit. I'm not sure most of this makes any sense, but I've had no luck trying to 'think it out' as it were so I'm going to try and talk about direct experience. If it doesn't make sense, please tell me so and I'll work on expressing myself better! :)
So: Nothing owns anything in reality. The do part of the question took me much longer to answer. The way I found to express it feels awkward to say, but what I saw sitting in the garden watching birds and trees and just being in the moment was this: Everything does what it is. A cat does what it is, and is what it does. There's no 'self' of a cat there telling the cat what it should or shouldn't do. I've been trying to refine my thoughts on it further but what I saw was a bird doing...what a bird is. I had an impression that the bird wasn't singing; there was birdsong, there was a bird. There was no cause there. They just were. They couldn't help but be. The bird was not choosing to do singing; the cat didn't decide to do some stretching. It was doing what it was, and it was what it was doing. I'm struggling to find a more eloquent way of conveying what I saw, but I hope that makes sense.
What moves? Everything. Everything moves, nothing is separate, everything is all moving and existing as one...thing. And you can pick out parts of the individual thing to focus on, like a bird or a cat, but they're not truly separate from anything around them.
'Close your eyes and search for the boundary of you. Where do you end and where does the world begin? In your direct experience, how tall are you? How old? How many toes do you have? Couldn't you be any shape? Can you feel a boundary between skin and clothes, or is this only a kind of blurry sensation?
Interestingly, I think I could be any shape when I sit. In my direct experience, I have no age. I just am right now. I can't sense how many toes I have exactly even if I move them. I'm as tall as I am; the question seems silly when I just am. It doesn't seem silly to my 'self'; my 'self' wants to get a number and then compare that number with other peoples numbers. In my direct experience, though, I experience myself as tall enough to see what I can see.
Where do I end and the world begins? I have no idea how to answer that question. I can't find a proper boundary, or if I do, it shifts along with my attention. I think this is related to birds doing what birds are, that idea that I saw. I noticed when I saw that as well that birds and their environment are...well...hrm. The environment affects the bird, and the bird affects the environment, but I wouldn't say one causes the other. It's like they cause each other at the same time. And I think perhaps the same is true of people, and of me specifically.
Smell a rose or dogshit. Without thinking, without telling stories: Is there a you smelling the flower? Or is there only the experience of smell...
When you open your eyes, what happens? Is there a you looking out of two holes in you head?
Are you doing seeing? Or are the sights just here, without any boundary?"
Now with practice, I can see bigger gaps before thinking and 'self' kicks back in. There's clearly only experience of smell. The sights are there, there is nobody 'seeing', there just is sight. It is, the same way a bird is, a tree is, the computer is, a body is. They just are. And when a body is breathing, the body isn't 'doing' breathing; the body is, and breathing is. Again, I'm not certain that makes much sense but that's been the experience I've noticed.
And there is no worry about sustaining any state or seeing. The point here is to observe and directly experience clearly at least once. The illusion is seen through, not permanently dispelled, although that apparently happens once in a while.
This was what kept tripping me up. I was thinking of it like a state, and so was telling my 'self' to get to being in that state. Which is a trap; there's no self to be doing anything in the first place. Which is the whole point. I'm glad that the illusion wasn't meant to be permanently dispelled, yet anyway; I thought I had messed it up in some way. That description matches how I have felt, though. I have seen through something, and keep seeing through it in short periods of time, and it is changing my perceptions.
So, more work, easy to do while painting. What's painting? What's moving the trees, flowing across your face, drying the paint? Where are the boundaries? :-)
Nothing is painting, painting is. The wind is moving the trees, drying the paint and flowing across my face, but the wind isn't -doing- those things. The wind is...is doing what it's being. I don't know how to say it more clearly, though I would dearly like to. My vocabulary is failing me a bit.
I can't find the boundaries. It's strange, because I think they should be there, but in my direct, undivided experience, when I look, I experience a blurry sensation of my physical body but no boundary between it and anything else. I guess perhaps when someone hits something else, I don't physically feel it? So perhaps the boundary is where my sensation of touch stops.
