Ok, I first got into this whole thing via meditation. Doesn't matter what anyone thinks of it, that's how it started for me. I knew nothing about it, and the reason I wanted to know more about it was because one day I learned that vipassana means something to the effect of "seeing things the way they are". This struck me, because I was looking for something, I didn't know what, all I knew for sure was that people are constantly behaving according to mistaken conceptions. So I heard about vipassana somewhere in summer 2009, started learning about it, then took up the practice starting summer 2010.
Meanwhile continued to learn the theory and philosophy behind it, and that's when I stumbled into Alan Watts' material, which was for me the first and incredibly clear exposition of eastern philosophy and, particularly, nonduality. The occasion when I think I got my final push, was as follows in december 2010 after having been soaked in Alan Watts' audio recordings for weeks. But it happened when I took out the headphones and started observing the real world.
I was a bus driver, and one day while waiting between routes at a train station, I was just looking outside at people going about their business, and imagining them as kind of nexuses of regular old "stuff" of the world coming together to form those people, moving around on its own, interacting with itself, often lost in thought, often hostile, etc., and mostly oblivious to its own nature. I had no intention with it other than just to contemplate what I had learned from Alan Watts and see how it applies to reality. Then my focus widened to include not only people but the background, the station, the trees, the sky, the birds, and all of it just happening as a result of this "stuff" coming together in perpetual motion and interaction, all by itself.
Then it was time to start the next route, and all this moved a bit to the back of my mind, but after a couple of minutes of driving, from one moment to the next I blipped into some kind of afterglow of "bliss" (only way I know how to describe it, sorry), and at that moment not only the world was happening by itself, but this bus driver was part of the world happening by itself. Reality suddenly kinda fit like a glove, but without the hand. The bus was driving, there was a driver, there was traffic, there were passengers, there were trees beside the road, and it was all going on by itself. The bliss gradually faded over a period of maybe a half hour or so, although the rest of the day even back at home I remained in this total place of stillness. Which I was hoping for, actually, because at the time I only interpreted it as some kind of "meditative experience" and I wanted to use it to rev up formal practice that day.
But as time went on I started noticing deep and consistent changes in my view on things and the way I respond to circumstances, etc. My meditation practice didn't otherwise seem to take off very much, but those changes stayed. My view has changed in that whatever happens now immediately makes sense in terms of nonduality and conditioned origination. I don't mean a nondual state of consciousness, I just mean a more clear cognition of cause and effect in everyday events. Other changes are described in the below quote which is from that other forum where I recently described them as best I can, but it's hard to put my finger on anything specific. It's really more like a myriad of side-effects, and this quote is only for purposes of illustration, and it was written with an eye on determining if it fits the traditional theravada buddhist description of classical enlightenment, a.k.a. stream entry (which by the way is only the first stage in that model):
I started noticing substantial differences in the way I look at things, what people are doing to themselves, what I've been doing to myself (and still am, albeit to a somewhat lesser extent).
I started noticing that what "guru's" and teachers were talking about suddenly made undeniable down-to-earth sense, in ways that I previously would definately have dismissed as meaningless nonsense. I noticed that the one description of stream entry that I knew of at that time (by Shinzen), seemed to apply to me, even though I had read it a couple of times before and it never occured to me before. So when I looked for more descriptions, as well as more guru talk, it only seemed to confirm more and more.
But most importantly, with time, I noticed consistent changes in how I respond to things. I'm incomparably more confident. I'm often more clear in my thinking and more centered in my being. I see much more of how my ego motivates certain impulses. I get a lot less caught in emotional spirals, or if I do, I know it for what it is and I come out of it a lot sooner than I would have before. I'm usually aware of my "persona" at any given moment. People respond to me differently (in a positive way), and there's an unexpected and deep connection with the (then 9-month-old) child of my closest friends.
And those same friends have also repeatedly commented on how patient I am and how well I seem to handle things nowadays, most recently when I became unemployed, losing the first job I've ever had that I would really have preferred to keep. I don't often feel startled, insulted, worried, frightened, etc. Or if I do it's again only briefly. Also my brother has repeatedly commented on how impressed he is with the way things are going lately, and coming from my brother, that is saying something. He even joked that if mom would still be alive, she'd be surprised to see that nowadays I'm the more sensible one.
And, I laugh a lot in situations where I see my folly. And yeah, no more attachment to ritual, no more skeptical doubt, no more identity view. Now I don't know if any of this is conclusive, and I'm very wary of what is called confirmation bias. I know how easy it is to fool myself. But I do know that all of the above changes happened in fairly short order, in retrospect around the same time as the below mentioned "bliss" episode, and I don't know what else might explain them.
How I would describe no-self to someone who has no idea what it means? I'm not sure I would be a good teacher. But I guess one way to put it would be that there is nobody standing separate from reality who is watching what happens or manipulating the outcome. So whatever is happening inside or outside this body or mind, happens only as an integral part of reality transacting with itself. So this includes any function of what you consider to be "you" and "yours". Limbs, internal organs, the brain, the senses, all of them in continuous interaction with eachother as part of the larger process that is nature. And so there is no "you" who owns or controls any of those processes, and inside/outside is a distinction that ultimately does not exist. It is a distinction created by the mind, based on the belief of "me", which is based on the feeling of "me", which is based only in the senses, which are just part of, and operating within, reality.
Yeah I tend to get verbose. It's a weakness ;).