realizing selflessness

[vinceschubert]

Gonna rewatch the Angelo video about deconstructing the thought “I am not awake,” pausing the video periodically to consider the questions/pointers . . .

i want to gently give you a hug and whisper to you that "you are your own best authority". ..but that authority isn't about judgement. If we pull the word apart we see "author" ity. There is no conclusion to arrive at here.
If you recognise that even your own experiencing is seen through the filters of beliefs that formed from your history, then no firm conclusion can be held as truth. With this in mind, curiosity becomes a rather beautiful resting place.
The moment you find yourself assuming that you know what it will be like, consider the above and adopt good humored curiosity without expecting any resolution.
Something rather beautiful is definitely happening in you. We can only assume that this is what we aspire to.
If we consider a story that previously something (unknown) inhibited a 'waking up' shift in you, whether is was blocking or restraining you, it is irrelevant.

“What's it like to perceive ordinary reality knowing I’m awake?”
I find my body and breathing relaxing a little and my mind quieting down a little

Forget a story about cause. It is happening. This shows that the body knows how. Isn't that great!

“What is the ‘I am not awake’-ness even referring to? Is it referring to the wide-openness that’s always here, before, during, and after that thought? That doesn’t quite make sense, does it?”
No, it doesn’t.

It is non-sense here too.

vince

[whoknows]

“What's it like to perceive ordinary reality knowing I’m awake?”
I find my body and breathing relaxing a little and my mind quieting down a little

Forget a story about cause. It is happening. This shows that the body knows how. Isn't that great!

I suppose.

Sometimes I feel okay in this odd limbo.
But sometimes, like right now, I feel immensely frustrated and impatient.
And I want to know what I can DO.
Or I want you to cast a magic awakening spell.

And yeah yeah, that’s all part of THIS too.
And what does “I” even refer to when I say I’m frustrated and impatient?
And what’s actually here?
AAARGGHH!!!

I feel annoyed by such pointers (at the moment).
I don’t want to have to do anything at all! (Which doesn’t seem to fit tidily with wanting to know what to DO . . . ?)
I don’t want to have to try shifting my perspective to include absolutely everything in THIS.
I don’t want to pause to look to see that the “I” who is supposedly frustrated can’t be found.
I don’t want to do an inventory of the actual sensations and thoughts that are here.
So, wait, not wanting to have to do anything like that in order to loosen up the selfing momentarily does actually fit tidily enough with wanting to know what to do to make a decisive shift happen, which I imagine as significantly reducing the need for what feel like little tricks that might reduce suffering very briefly.

Brain just keeps clamoring: What do I DO?! How do I hasten this process?! Or how do I see it right this instant?!

*Sigh.*

Gonna go back to my class discussion board and read the new posts from my students . . .

[vinceschubert]

OH, how interesting. Your brain shouts out "What do I do?" - i tell you what to do, and response is "no" then "Tell me what to do"
So a conclusion here is that the 'doing' is conditional.
The brain wants to do only what it thinks will work? or what is easy? or doesn't really want something to do?
Obviously you have no control or you wouldn't feel frustrated. Who would choose to feel that!

I want you to cast a magic awakening spell.

Okay, here's a magical awakening spell. It will only last for 27 seconds, but in that time you might just grok how it works.
Are you ready?
Abra kadabra Kimmity poo
Laughter is going to happen to you. (points finger with a gleam in eyes)

Did it work?

v

[whoknows]

Okay, here's a magical awakening spell. It will only last for 27 seconds, but in that time you might just grok how it works.
Are you ready?
Abra kadabra Kimmity poo
Laughter is going to happen to you. (points finger with a gleam in eyes)

Did it work?

Yup, it worked. :-)
Got a good chuckle out of your magic spell.
I even have a sense of how it works.

[whoknows]

OH, how interesting. Your brain shouts out "What do I do?" - i tell you what to do, and response is "no" then "Tell me what to do"
So a conclusion here is that the 'doing' is conditional.
The brain wants to do only what it thinks will work? or what is easy? or doesn't really want something to do?

Sometimes, if I’m given something to do, my brain will balk on the grounds that having to do anything seems to imply that what I’m looking for isn’t already here, despite what I keep being told and really want to believe. This is not only an abstract intellectual objection but also a deeply felt NO to anything less than radical grace.

(This is the equivalent of the Protestant critique of “works righteousness,” i.e., thinking you have to earn or achieve salvation by your own efforts or merits, as opposed to relying on God’s overflowing and unconditional love through faith in the saving work of Jesus Christ. Sometimes, I have an uncompromisingly sola fide approach to spirituality.)

But of course sometimes, what’s more salient is that what I’m looking for is quite obviously not here yet. Sure, you can say that it’s always already here and it just needs to be uncovered or realized or grokked, but okay, that just means that the crucial uncovering or realizing or grokking hasn’t happened yet (or, in the Christian scheme, the crucial surrender to God). So what do I DO to make that happen as quickly and easily as possible? (How do I surrender? How do I let myself be converted?)

(I’ll blame it on the start of the new school year that this reads like a discussion board post to my class full of Christian seminarians learning about world religions.)

Obviously you have no control or you wouldn't feel frustrated. Who would choose to feel that!

Can’t seem to let go of wanting to control it — or wanting to control letting go of the need to control . . .

[whoknows]

See ya at the Zoom meeting.

[whoknows]

Two thoughts from the meeting:

- I thought it was interesting that when you asked whether there was a wall or a canyon in the road, those images didn’t seem right and what my mind came up with was a painted line.

- The metaphor of coming home is a powerful one for me (not any specific image of home from K's biography but just the general, archetypal idea). A song I love and find very moving is Peter Gabriel’s “Solsbury Hill,” in which a line from the refrain is “Grab your things, I’ve come to take you home.”

[vinceschubert]

The metaphor of coming home is a powerful one for me (not any specific image of home from K's biography but just the general, archetypal idea). A song I love and find very moving is Peter Gabriel’s “Solsbury Hill,” in which a line from the refrain is “Grab your things, I’ve come to take you home.”

Yes. Let the metaphor work without defining it.

Perhaps “coming home” isn’t arriving at a better experience. It’s the end of (the need for) seeking—however briefly—of the movement away from THIS.

Hear the line as though THIS itself is speaking to forty years of seeking: “Grab your things, I’ve come to take you home.”
Then look:
Where would K actually be taken?
Is home somewhere else—or is it the softening that happens when escape is no longer required?

- I thought it was interesting that when you asked whether there was a wall or a canyon in the road, those images didn’t seem right and what my mind came up with was a painted line.

What do you imagine that indicates? (don't worry about how right that thought is)


v

[whoknows]

Perhaps “coming home” isn’t arriving at a better experience. It’s the end of (the need for) seeking—however briefly—of the movement away from THIS.

Yes. That’s how I would understand “coming home.”

Hear the line as though THIS itself is speaking to forty years of seeking: “Grab your things, I’ve come to take you home.”
Then look:
Where would K actually be taken?
Is home somewhere else—or is it the softening that happens when escape is no longer required?

“Home” is found right here, in not having the restless longing to find something somewhere else.

I started my late-night sit by playing “Solsbury Hill.” The lovely opening guitar riff made me start to cry, which is how the song usually hits me.

In asking myself where K would be “taken,” in addition to imagining a general sense of comfort and ease and rightness and feeling like I’m where I belong, I was a little surprised that I got an image of the first house I remember living in, when I was three and four years old — the nicest place I’ve ever lived, a beautiful house in an idyllic area — until my parents got divorced. I also got an image of my college dorm, where I lived all four years and where most of my friends lived. I felt very much at home there.

- I thought it was interesting that when you asked whether there was a wall or a canyon in the road, those images didn’t seem right and what my mind came up with was a painted line.

What do you imagine that indicates? (don't worry about how right that thought is)

A line painted on a road is not a physical barrier or obstacle but just a socially agreed-upon demarcation. I suppose I feel like there might not be any other deep-seated fears to be unearthed or any egregious misunderstandings of “awakening” to straighten out — the kinds of things that might actually stand in the way. All that’s needed is something like realizing that this “barrier” does not actually stand in my way (that it’s a gateless gate). If you cross over a line painted on the road, I suppose you want to be sure that you’re not doing something dangerous and that there’s no cop nearby who might give you a ticket. But then you just go over the line. No big deal.

[whoknows]

A song that showed up in my YouTube suggestions after I played “Solsbury Hill” is U2’s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” Yep, still haven’t found it. But I hope that very soon I’ll be able to say something like, “It turns out that it’s not possible to find what was ‘I’ was looking for, but I found that there’s no ‘I,’ so the looking for something has fallen away.”

[whoknows]

This is one of those places with it's hard to separate LU inquiry from therapy.

It's no surprise that "Solsbury Hill" is moving to me, both for the promise of being taken "home" and also for its acoustic guitar part, which is beautiful and which, I realized, evokes "home" for me. My dad has been playing the guitar, singing, and writing songs since before I was born, so the music he played and the music he listened to were a big part of the soundtrack of my childhood.

My dad did a good job of being a father when I was a kid, even after my parents got divorced, but he has never seemed to know how to relate to an adolescent or adult child, and our relationship has long been distant and sometimes very strained. I think it's been more than fifteen years since I've seen him (though that's partially because we both hate traveling and we live far away from each other in a big country). These days, I send him and my step-mom texts or emails on their birthdays, Father's Day, Mother's Day, Christmas, and Easter and usually get a brief but polite reply back and occasionally a reply that's a little more personal or affectionate, but that's most of our communication.

Anyway, I just sent my dad a long email thanking him for making acoustic guitar part of the soundtrack of my childhood.

I suppose it's no wonder that one of my images of home is the first place I remember living, which was both the place where my family was still intact and also where I was young enough that I presumably hadn't yet gotten caught up in hardcore "selfing" and was still spending a lot of time simply being.

[vinceschubert]

That email feels significant—not because it repairs the whole relationship, but because affection found expression without waiting for the relationship to become different.

Notice how mind locates “home” in the past: the intact family, the first house, the child before intense selfing. Yet those are memories arising now. The guitar’s warmth, tenderness and ache are happening now. Perhaps home isn’t a childhood state to recover, but something in experiencing that has been forgotten but was never actually lost.

When the guitar evokes home, look before the images and biography arrive: How does “home” announce itself in the body? Does it have an age, a location—or anyone who needs to be doing that?

I hope that very soon I’ll be able to say something like, “It turns out that it’s not possible to find what was ‘I’ was looking for, but I found that there’s no ‘I,’ so the looking for something has fallen away.”

After such a long search, it’s understandable to want a clean ending. But notice the subtle trap: “Very soon, K will find no K—and then K will possess the certainty that seeking has ended.”

Seeking may continue to arise through conditioning. Its disappearance isn’t proof of no-self; the question is whether an actual seeker can be found now.

Was this hope selected? Is anyone generating it? If seeking never vanished completely, would that make a separate seeker real?

v

[whoknows]

That email feels significant—not because it repairs the whole relationship, but because affection found expression without waiting for the relationship to become different.

When I sent that email to my dad, I was aware that the most important thing was my sending it, not what sort of response I got, but I’m happy to report that I got a nice long friendly email back.

Notice how mind locates “home” in the past: the intact family, the first house, the child before intense selfing. Yet those are memories arising now. The guitar’s warmth, tenderness and ache are happening now. Perhaps home isn’t a childhood state to recover, but something in experiencing that has been forgotten but was never actually lost.

OK, yeah: “home” as something that can be experienced now.

When the guitar evokes home, look before the images and biography arrive: How does “home” announce itself in the body?

Hmm . . . Well, acoustic guitar can evoke a wistful nostalgia for “home,” a combination of warmth and beauty and sadness and longing. But I’m not sure I can pinpoint any of that in the body.

Does it have an age, a location—or anyone who needs to be doing that?

No, none of that.

Perhaps the more important question is not about the feeling of wistful longing for home but about the feeling of home by itself — what it is that’s being longed for — a sense of comfort, warmth, belonging, rightness, relaxation, coziness.
(I considered adding support or safety to that list, but they don’t seem to be at the core of it. I also considered adding love or friendship, but they don’t quite seem to belong either, though that seems odd. Maybe companionship is a little closer? But that's kind of included in “belonging.” Hm.)

But notice the subtle trap: “Very soon, K will find no K—and then K will possess the certainty that seeking has ended.”

Seeking may continue to arise through conditioning. Its disappearance isn’t proof of no-self;

Yeah. OK. Right.
(I might be guiding myself just fine sometimes, but this is the sort of thing where it’s really good to have another person as a guide and companion. I’m immensely grateful for you, vince. And I prefer these tears of gratitude to some of the other kinds of tears that have arisen during this process, though they’ve had their place too.)
So:
Seeking might continue due to conditioning, and that’s fine.
Seeking doesn’t have to completely vanish.

the question is whether an actual seeker can be found now.

Was this hope selected? Is anyone generating it? If seeking never vanished completely, would that make a separate seeker real?

No to all of that.
I’m trying to figure out how to file that . . .
So, when I notice seeking, there’s no need for dismay.
Just look to see whether a supposed seeker (the one who hopes to be taken somewhere or somewhen else called “home”) can be found here and now.
(Hmm. The seeker can't be found at all; "home" can be found here and now.)
Seeking doesn’t mean there’s a seeker.
Seeking doesn’t mean that no-self hasn’t been seen.

I filed this from one of your recent stories:

A particularly clever trap appears late in the journey:
I need to stop seeking.
. . . . .
The seeker can survive indefinitely by attempting to eliminate the seeker.
Notice the comedy.

Comedy noted.

Something I was noticing last night and this morning:
It seems that one of the main reasons I keep chattering to myself in my head a lot of the time is that I forget that I’d prefer not to. As soon as I notice I’m chattering away, I go, “Oh yeah,” and it drops, and I return attention to sense perceptions (at least momentarily, before the chatter starts up again). It seems like being in the here and now, or at least returning to the here and now, is, at this point, largely a matter of remembering to.
This observation went along with a more vague sense that seeing everything as THIS might also be very simple and might just be a matter of remembering to — or something like that. I'm not sure.

[vinceschubert]

It seems that one of the main reasons I keep chattering to myself in my head a lot of the time is that I forget that I’d prefer not to. As soon as I notice I’m chattering away, I go, “Oh yeah,” and it drops, and I return attention to sense perceptions (at least momentarily, before the chatter starts up again). It seems like being in the here and now, or at least returning to the here and now, is, at this point, largely a matter of remembering to.

Yes—with one important refinement: attention returns from inner chatter to sense perceptions, but K doesn’t return to the here and now. She never left it. The chatter was also THIS, happening here. It's just that this 'here and now includes a story that "this is here and now"

Noticing occurs, “Oh yeah” appears, and attention shifts. Was any of that selected by a rememberer? Was any of it done on purpose? Did any of include forethought/planning?

Perhaps seeing everything as THIS isn’t remembering to come back, but recognising that chatter, forgetting, noticing and silence never went anywhere else. At the moment of “return,” what actually returned?

[whoknows]

Yes—with one important refinement: attention returns from inner chatter to sense perceptions, but K doesn’t return to the here and now. She never left it. The chatter was also THIS, happening here. It's just that this 'here and now includes a story that "this is here and now"

Yep, got it. It’s all THIS, including chattering to myself, including stories about how chattering to myself isn’t as “here-and-now” as attending to sense perceptions.

Noticing occurs, “Oh yeah” appears, and attention shifts. Was any of that selected by a rememberer? Was any of it done on purpose? Did any of include forethought/planning?

From the relative/conventional perspective:
Noticing that the mind was caught up in thought isn’t done on purpose; it just happens when it happens. Immediately after the noticing, there might or might not be a remembering of the preference not to be caught up in thought, and if that “Oh yeah” happens, the remembering in that moment doesn’t seem to be done on purpose. The part that seems to be done on purpose is, sometimes, to not allow the mind to plunge right back into thought but, instead, to be gently deliberate about moving attention to, say, the visual field or the feel of the breath in the nostrils or some other sense perception(s). And the remembering and the deliberate attending to sense perceptions seem to come about based on a prior intention, decided on purpose, to try to do that when emerging from being caught up in thought.

From the absolute/no-self perspective:
No rememberer or doer or planner or intender or decider can be found in any of that. But I feel like I’m saying that more because I know it’s “correct” than because that’s how it seems to “me.” I can talk about it without invoking a “self” by saying that due to multifarious known, unknown, and unknowable conditions, thoughts arose that it would often be better to attend to sense perceptions than to be caught up in thoughts (when thoughts aren’t serving a useful purpose) and so, when having been caught up in thoughts is noticed, it would be good to deliberately shift attention to sense perceptions. And then thoughts arose ratifying those thoughts, and there we have an “intention.” So then, when the noticing of having been caught up in thoughts occurs, conditions have now been set up making it likelier than it would have been otherwise that the memory-thought will arise about wanting to shift to sense perceptions and then attention will shift to sense perceptions.

I notice that it felt tedious writing that second, “absolute” paragraph. Is it a helpful exercise to spell out that sort of thing sometimes, like, to get the mind used to the idea that a “self” isn’t needed? Or maybe you didn’t even intend for me to do that part?

Perhaps seeing everything as THIS isn’t remembering to come back, but recognising that chatter, forgetting, noticing and silence never went anywhere else. At the moment of “return,” what actually returned?

While “return” seems like a reasonable word for the shift from being caught up in thoughts to attending to sense perceptions, “return” probably isn’t the right word for what I was saying about remembering that it’s all THIS. As you say, maybe that’s more like a recognition. The mind gets caught up in thinking that it longs for something different from what is here and now but then remembers or recognizes, yet again, that (supposedly) THIS is it.