1) Is there a 'me', at all, anywhere, in any way, shape or form? Was there ever?
I haven't been able to find one outside of imagination.
2) Explain in detail what the illusion of separate self is, when it starts and how it works.
Fuck. Okay, so I guess the initial mistake comes in at some point in early childhood when we start believing our thoughts due to fear and desire. We desire some things and want to avoid others, and we realize that we can use this powerful tool thought to help us acquire what we want and avoid what we don't. In order to make use of that though our schema needs a reference point; food doesn't need to go into just any mouth, it needs to go into THIS mouth. Mommy doesn't need to go just anywhere, she needs to come over here to ME. The thought networks get more and more complex, and at a certain point they BECOME our world. We get sucked in; we believe the thought stories. We believe that reference point, the central character in all thought-stories in our thought-world, is a real thing that is separate from the rest of the world.
How would a person without thought know separation? A baby lying in its crib looking up at a mobile and listening to its mother singing doesn't know the story of "me" and "crib" and "mobile" and "mom" and "singing"; without labeling and dividing mind it's all just one big THING, like how listening to a symphony on the radio would sound like just one interesting sound before you learned to differentiate and label the instruments. But then fuckin' thought comes in, then belief, and you've got a problem.
3) How does it feel to see this?
A fuck of a lot better than it did before I saw it. I suffered from depression for years, now I'm just happy.
4) How would you describe it to a curious seeker who may have never heard about.
Depends on the seeker, where I sense they're coming from and what they ask me. The basic gist of it would be that it isn't happening the way we think it's happening; that life as it is and life as the mind says it is could not possibly be more different, that it is possible to come to perceive the world without the screen of thought, and that doing so is the end of suffering. That's probably how I'd describe it.
5) What was the last bit that pushed you over, made you see?
If I had to pick one, it would probably be John Wheeler's pointing to the Self as That which precedes awareness. When that finally sunk in it was huge. But as I said it wasn't the beginning or the end.
