What is your opinion on what I wrote?
This bit is very interesting, I hadn’t considered it,
“To say it is a perspective would be to allow the idea that there might be other ways of perceiving things. That there might be this 'one perspective' and there are others. This is a thought - An idea. There is simply 'awareness'.”
Definitely something I need to spend more time looking at.
These may further probe into areas that need examination and we can look at those if they come up.
I’ll try to make the answers a bit longer than usual so that any such areas will be a bit more obvious.
1) Is there a separate entity 'self', 'me' 'I', at all, anywhere, in any way, shape or form? Was there ever?
No and no.
2) How does it feel to see this? What is the difference (if any) between 'now' and compared with before you started this dialogue? Maybe give a report from the past few days.
It doesn’t feel different in an obvious way. It's more like 'oh of course there's no self, how silly of me' rather than some earth shattering realisation. It was pretty gradual so it’s hard to remember how things were before we started. However at the end of last week I wrote down a long list of concrete examples of how things are different so there have been very definite changes. For example leading up to specific situations where I would usually spend the hours before hand going through it all in my head and being generally anxious, now there’s none of that going on at all. There’s also been a couple of specific situations in the last week where I realised afterwards that they were situations where usually without fail I get extremely irritated but there was no reaction at all. I realised to get upset I would need to have had a fixed identity for myself, for the other people involved and also a very definite sense of how things ‘should’ be - an awful lot of balls to keep in the air! Who knew so much effort went into getting upset about things. Not that I’m claiming I never get annoyed.
Also there’s much less of a need to be a certain type of person (or be seen as a certain type of person) or the same fixation on how things are supposed to be (I have specific examples of this but they are a bit long winded). Relatively speaking now there’s almost no time spent planning ahead and spending ages weighing up wether or not I should do something or that kind of thing. - that’s a funny one because before we started when I understood to some extent in theory that there was no controller it led to laziness and poor choices but this time round it’s the opposite.
Last night I went out and got caught in some pretty bad weather and when I got back someone asked if I regretted going.. there’s zero feeling that anything could go any other way and that question is also hard to answer because it implies there was a controller who made a conscious decision.
Also I’m not sure if this is related to the self thing or as a result of the fact that I also started doing mental noting a lot in the last month but there’s a definite difference in how time is experienced... which sounds a bit weird but when teachers say things like there’s only the now and that kind of thing, my experience is actually closer to that these days. I know that sounds like someone who’s just read the power of now and is a little deluded or something but no joke there’s a big difference. Especially for very short term things, if there’s something I don’t want to do that’s about to take a few hours I don’t mind because it’ll be over and it will just feel like the next moment.. or maybe it’s more accurate to say the same moment I don’t know how to put it. I’m also wayyy more relaxed about the future now which is possibly because of this. Before we started there was massive stress about the future which has completely disappeared over the course of the last month so that’s a huge weight of my shoulders!
3) Was there a moment, perhaps something I said or something that you looked into that that pushed you over, made you look and realise?
The last little bit was last week when I was answering the questions from the 18th. I realised that even though I was saying there was no controller I was still spending large amounts of the days trying to kind of enforce self discipline and trying to persuade myself to act differently in specific situations. So I realised that I felt that there was an I controlling these thoughts. Now I know you’re not supposed to logic your way through these situations but that’s more or less what I did - I took every situation I could think of where it seemed like there was a self controlling the thoughts and argued from an evolutionary point of view why those thoughts were exactly the thoughts that would arise naturally. For example I was spending a lot of persuading myself and trying to force myself to act more sociably in some specific situations. From the perspective of evolution the feeling of not being well established in a group means survival is at risk so there’s going to be a reaction to act in more social ways. So in an animal capable of abstract thought, you would completely expect the thoughts I was having to arise.
Then later that day when I had a response ready with a few questions relating to what were perceived to be “non-autopilot” thoughts, I realised I understood the answers already.
I know that all that was completely going against the ideas of looking purely at direct experience but I’m just being honest about how it went!
Thanks,
Aoife.