Hi Coll,
does it feel your experience has moved beyond "agreeing with it intellectually" to directly experiencing self non existing?
if so will you share in detail how this has changed for you?
Yes, my experience has moved beyond an intellectual agreement with the notion of the self's non-existence.
Before participating in this dialogue, "non-self" appealed to me as a theory, but that's all it was — a concept, one which I approved of, one I wished to be true, because it is a component of (or at least compatible with) certain belief systems toward which I had an emotional attachment. I had no idea what it would be like to actually perceive non-self in practical terms. In fact, now that I think of it, it seems I was mostly happy simply to play with the idea of non-self in my thoughts, treating it like just another philosophical or theological tenet. At most, I expected that the experience of non-self must be tied to unusual states of consciousness, surely to be attained only by sages after years of practice. And yet I had also reached a point where I suspected that, if an experience of non-self were possible to attain at all, the path of studying ancient texts and doing religious practices for years on end might be just a way of avoiding what really needed to be done.
So, when I stumbled across a link to LU one day on a Buddhist forum, I was impressed with what I saw and decided to give it a shot. Initially I think I had some difficulty with the conversation here precisely because I was expecting some kind of striking epiphany, some mind-blowing experience, to precede any understanding of what non-self is. If you go back to early posts in the thread, you'll see comments I made about feeling a "resistance." Really, that was just a reluctance to look, a grasping for any flimsy excuse not to look into the process of thought — and thus an attempt to allow the ingrained habit of self-thought to continue in its usual mode of operation. Luckily, though, you snapped me out of it. Actually, it was surprisingly simple to see it. Once I stopped making excuses, there it was, very plainly. The sensation of being a self, the sensation that "I" am the protagonist of the story of "my" life, is the product of thought. And when the particular thought processes that lead to the impression of selfhood stop, the self is simply gone. It's not there. It's nowhere, because it has no permanence, no continuity beyond the moment in which thought renews the illusion. And curiously, directly apprehending the fact of the self's unreality did indeed trigger a very unusual state of consciousness, as I mentioned a while back — so you could say that happened in the reverse order from what I had anticipated.
Now, having seen it, the truth of the matter has become inescapable. The impression of a self arises, but soon fizzles away because I cannot help but see through it to the thought processes underlying the illusion. Consequently, old frustrations, old worries, old attachments are falling away as the mirage they depended on disappears. Where this is heading, I'm not sure. But in any case, I am glad that I had this conversation with you, Colleen.