How does it FEEL to SEE this?
Can you now say there is no "self" and never has been?
Well, ‘reality’ feels a bit odd at the moment, to be honest. In one sense everything is perfectly normal (I fuss about my husband eating well, I don’t like the mess he creates outside whilst he immerses himself in yet another shed building project, and so on), and yet I know nothing really matters on a deeper level. There is a peace that wasn’t there before. Things used to really matter. I am questioning things I have taken for granted for as long as I remember. Things like the choices I make. And what on Earth all of this ‘reality’ is.
I was feeling very sad yesterday, and this morning I wrote a poem:
No Man’s Land
Here in no man’s land there are trees.
Dead trees.
Some have been torn down,
Others have burnt
Into black, ghost-like stumps.
There is also a lot of mud,
Here in no man’s land.
An awful lot of mud.
I trudge slowly through it,
Looking for a glimmer of life.
To my left, the war rages on,
With large bangs,
Loud cries,
Flags flying,
Smoke and flashing lights.
In the distance,
I hear Marilyn,
Singing to the troops.
I hate her; I want to kill her,
But she’s already dead.
To my right, there is nothing.
No-thing.
My mind makes it into a thing:
A terrifying black hole.
That consumes the light.
At the event horizon,
Chögyam’s analogy
Makes so much sense.
It’s like falling, he says,
Without a parachute.
Nothing to stand on.
No ground.
Just endless falling,
The stories of me,
Evaporating in the wind.
But I’m not free.
Because something of ‘me’,
Remains here in no man’s land,
Caked in mud,
Cowering under a dead tree.
Still clinging on.
I then went for a run, to attempt to feel better. On the way back I saw some rubbish on the side of the road. I decided not to stop and pick it up. But then I found myself picking it up. I saw, I suppose, in that experience, that a separate self is not in control. A bit later, for a small amount of time, I wasn’t fully in my body, kind of half in half out, but it was just a brief experience. I remembered, too how, on my way home, how we had come to live here (on the Isle of Harris, in the north of Scotland) after a sudden deep intuition I had to move, after seeing a house for sale on a holiday here. It’s not the sort of place I would consciously choose to live: I always saw myself as a city-lover.
So, I’m now getting a bit confused about the difference between a self and an ego, but in terms of there being a separate person, somehow completely different to other aspects of life, a controller of me, it seems more clear that that has never existed. And yet thoughts say that I am clearly separate and in control of me, to the extent I can be, given outside influences. So the seeing comes and goes.
