Hi Lee,
Thank you for your honest description how you see things right now. It’s good that you’ve shared it, since now I can address the beliefs and misconceptions, so hopefully that can help.
For some reason, it feels like a huge struggle to look at the questions today. I don't know why. It seems like I have no way of working on my inner child wounds since there is no self here to do anything.
Here is a misunderstanding here. You are mixing the point of view everyday reality with a deeper seeing.
Any emotional wounds that we carry is actually much EASIER to work with after the self is seen through. Your assumption is based on the idea that currently there IS a self, a doer, but this doer can disappear, so it won’t be able to work through the emotional wounds. But this is not the case.
There is NO doer here, and it has never ever been! So whether you see through the self illusion or not, it won’t change the fact that there has never been a doer here.
Even if you work with childhood traumas right now with the belief that there is a doer doing it, that’s just a belief and not a reality. There is no doer. Never has been. And yet, working with the childhood traumas has happened, can happen, and could happen even after this belief is seen through.
It's not that there is a doer here and then this doer can die… there is nothing there to die or disappear in the first place!
So you don’t have to worry about this… working with traumas is usually much easier after the self is seen through.
It feels impractical and irresponsible to say there is no one making it happen.
We are not saying it… that would be just another belief. It’s not about convincing yourself that there is no doer, while you still fully believe in that illusion.
The reason for these resisting ideas is that it isn’t really seen. It’s not an intellectual thing to say or to convince yourself. This is an experiential recognition of the fact that there is and has never been a self, a doer ever, and yet, things get done, decisions are made, traumas are healed.
So if I lash out at my brother or get mad at the old lady on the street I can simply say ''THERE IS NO ONE HERE GETTING MAD'' - this feels SOCIOPATHIC AND PSYCHOPATHIC to me.
Please look at your statement carefully. You say “it FEELS sociopathic…” , look closely, that is not a FEELING. That is just a thought believed. Can you see that this cannot be felt only thought of?
You are keeping this inquiry on the intellectual level, and your frustration and resistance is coming from that.
You are trying to make sense of these notions without actually seeing them, and thus misunderstanding how it actually is.
I feel like it is so irresponsibly impractical to not be able to work on the emotions happening.
But nobody said that. This is just an unquestioned assumption on your part. But it has nothing to do with reality. That assumption is simply not true.
For now, I don’t reply to the rest of your comment. Right now the important thing is to recognize that you are telling a story about awakening which is not how it actually is. So your emotional reaction (resistance) is to the story you tell yourself. You invented a story, and now you are resisting your creation. Can you see that?
Vivien