Hi Perry,
Would you like to take a bash at the 'six questions'?
Ok, I'm happy to give them a go.
1) Is there a separate entity 'self', 'me' 'I', at all, anywhere, in any way, shape or form? Was there ever?
No. There is just experience in the present, which includes memories of the past. There certainly is a sense of self though, but it’s simply an ever arising set of thoughts and feelings, not an underlying agent, or little man in a control box orchestrating things.
2) Explain in detail what the illusion of separate self is, when it starts and how it works from your own experience. Describe it fully as you see it now.
It’s a very basic mistake that starts from misunderstanding consciousness in the present to mean there is ‘someone’ who is conscious, an actor behind the scenes. It must fulfil some sort of function at some point or why would we all do it, but it’s not an accurate description of what is really going on. In reality there are just conditions - habits, perpetuating themselves. Consciousness, awareness, a sense of identity even are in the mix, but they don’t exist separately to present experience as an independent ‘I’ behind the scenes guiding, deciding, choosing. So to hark back to my memory of being in the womb. The foetus woke up and was aware.... then woke up again some time later and was aware....and then again and again and again....until at some point he strung the experiences together and developed some sort of self-identification. Realising that he was in some way separate from his environment, his experience started to divide into inner and outer. Maybe that’s where we make the mistake of imagining a self. I really don’t know. This bit is rather speculative! Whatever there really is no ghost in the machine, just parts (to continue the mechanical metaphor) that work together to create thoughts (loads of them bubbling up) and feelings, and to process visual, auditory and tactile sensations. Quite why in the vastness of the universe, space and time, consciousness ends up doing this though, is a mystery.
3) How does it feel to see this? What is the difference from before you started this dialogue? Please report from the past few days.
At times I have felt a sense of huge potential, freedom, and lightness. But more generally in day-to-day life there is just a sense of greater spaciousness to experience. I still react to things but not so vehemently. My consciousness seems maybe a bit smoother and gentler. There is also a different sense of choice. Without that basic belief in an ‘I’ it seems easier just to assess the consequences of any particular course of action. It’s somehow less complicated to see that actions have consequences when there is no belief in a separate self to muddy the waters.
However, I am also perhaps slightly ‘unhinged’ in that my dream life has gone wild as bits of old psyche break off and come up to the surface. For instance on the retreat last week, lying in bed in the early hours I dreamed or remembered an incident from when I was about six. It’s nothing I’d ever forgotten but struck me in an entirely new way. One morning I woke up to be told that a motorcyclist had crashed into a skip outside the neighbour’s house and died. I think he was a teenager. Lying there I felt terror arise, but couldn’t understand why. Then afterwards talking it over with a friend, I remembered that the feeling tone at home that morning was a bit deadened. Something awful had happened but characteristically it was ‘sat upon’. The terror I felt on remembering the event last week was probably closer to the unrepressed feelings of a six-year-old. I imagine that my very deep conditioning not to feel much was loosening in response to seeing through the ‘I’.
Anyhow. That will have to do for now.
Very best wishes,
Trampas
