Thursday, December 15, 2011

Erasure

Note:  This post is written to dovetail This Excellent Commentary by Rikki Winchester.  Check it.

The most ridiculous idea that circulates post seeing no self is that it's a cure all.  Yes, this next statement is true:  Once seen No Self can't be unseen. 

But that's not the end of the self.

What it is, at first, is a relief.  A huge relief from the seeming burden of constantly creating a self, or of holding onto useless identity-based baggage.  Abused as a child?  That wasn't you.  Made several awful mistakes?  There's nothing for it to be attached to.  If the thought now pops up that the deed done was especially abhorrent, then should the opportunity to act similarly again arise, the behavior will most likely not be engaged in. 

All those mistakes or unfortunate things from the past aren't following a You around and so don't have to be repressed.   Good news, right?

On the flip side, if you're known to go around performing charitable acts on par with Mother Theresa, after which you play the Humble Card by proclaiming humility, the mouthful of false humble pie is unnecessary.  There's no one to take credit.  This time it's really true when you say, with a dismissive wave, "Aw, it was nothing, really."  Yeah.  Really.  It wasn't.

So you see, everything outwardly seems to remains the same.

Except it's entirely different.  And the difference is in an altered perspective within thought.  Your friends and family may not notice anything unusual at all, except that the neurotic behavior may have eased.  Or maybe the constant clinging to storylines start to fall flat.  Other changes?  The incessant chatter about your problems and your worries ring hollow, and it's possible that the image-propping monetary purchases begin to slow down.

Maybe.  Hard to say.  There's no one controlling it.  But the personality is likely to largely remain. 

Personality is a thought pattern, and the Self is still recreated with each new and habitual selfing thought that pops up.   What's more, that self is always created within the current moment even when that new thought is supposed to be accessing a cherished "memory".  The memory isn't past, it's happening now. When it's gone, it disappears completely, taking that just-created version of You with it, until next time the brain's electrical impulses take a similar route and produce another thought like it. 

But it won't be the same thought.

In that way, "You" have always been a Tabula Rasa.  Clean slate.  But that's a truth which still requires seeing through the false selfing thoughts as they arise, each time they arise.  This is especially true for the selves newly liberated.

No Self is not a one-and-done, not a cure-all.  Keep questioning, keep looking.  There's a whole lot more of the slate to clear.

Photo credit:  ThereXandXBackXAgain on deviantart

Sunday, December 11, 2011

As This Story Had Gone...

How it seems, presently, is that I started this looking, this digging to figure out what All This is all about, probably as a child.  It goes back as far as I can remember.  And there have been iterations.  


There will be more.


In the past few years, all of my searching for answers intensified as I perceived a self who would face greater and greater personal challenges to that fictitious state called Happiness.  My initial relentless pursuit was to establish a real coping mechanism to handle my story's "less desirable" aspects, those I imagined were coming soon.  Lots of people do the same, thinking that a spiritual or truth pursuit will spare the pain of a difficult situation.


There's no such thing.  Everything appears fully as there's nothing, no self, to prevent it.


Religion is a false buffer if it's used to shield.  And so is No Self. Everything that life is, is faced fully. There is no other way. The false shield of thought, the overlay, is a mask, a pattern of thinking that claims to try to alter the story. And yet within that fantasy, this masking is ultimately felt as more harmful than good.


So what do I mean about ending suffering with regard to seeing that there is no tangible self?  It's not that there is no pain, no anger, no anxiety.  Those are elements within Life Itself.  The freedom is in the fact that there's nowhere for it to stick.  Because when it comes up for any of us, the suffering is in hanging onto it as part of an identity, or trying to push it away as part of a desire to have it not be part of our identity.


Once it's seen that there is no identity except for one arbitrarily constructed in wisps of thought, there's no either clinging or pushing it away.  It just is, as it is, nothing more.  There's no one there to hold it or carry it.
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photo credit:  everRiviere on Deviantart

Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Fantastically Real is Better Than Fiction

One of the most interesting side effects of realization is when the stories we create are clearly seen for what they are.  In this case, it's the story of a ride in a Time and Space Machine.

Warning:  After realization it gets more and more difficult to lie, even to "yourself".  


And everything is just a story.


Here's one:

Just yesterday (a concept I have more and more difficulty parsing), I flew home to South Florida from Atlanta.  It's a relatively quick flight which lasts less than two hours by the clock.  The trip reminded me of another flight, a long one from New England to Hawaii involving multiple planes and a flight pattern over the Pacific to land in Oahu.

Or so the memory goes.  In another version of the story, I  flew high and fast through the night skies, over a massive body of ocean and under billions of stars, then hours later, arrived in another place, another time.

Both stories are good ones.  It's all in the telling.

But without those two particularly interesting conceptual overlays, what was the more immediate experience?

In yet another version, there was a sensation called "walking", of moving through an opening, sitting in a cramped area, warmth, feelings of discomfort, odd sensations of pulling and pushing, moving pictures on a white screen, a few big bumps, loud noises, then again the sensation called "walking" down an aisle, where people stood to say,

"Aloha!  Welcome to Oahu!"




There is another version that seems more fantastic than most, but a check of reality proves it out as the truest.   In this one there was nothing happening, not even time.  Thought and sensation arose from nothing, out of nowhere, seemingly following each other.  They arose to no one.  They appeared neither inside nor outside.  The entire experience had no beginning and no end, and was Life Itself.... no experiencer ever necessary.  


Fantasicly real.






photo credit:  bosniak on deviantart