If I asked about the whereabouts of your cell phone, you'd mentally check your pocket or purse and give a response based upon experience. If you weren't so confident as to your phone's location, you'd place a hand to your pocket, or maybe root around in your handbag, then likely feel a sense of assurance once the phone had been safely located.
When I ask that you check reality for a self, I'm asking that you look for it as you would a cell phone. And if your search ends without that self turning up, I'd tell you that the reason it's not there is not because it's some nebulous thing with the ability to hide better than anything ever hidden itself in the history of mankind. (I DO mean history of all mankind, too. There's not one individual whose been able to check for a self and present one).
There's a reason for this absence.
Someone once told me that though they couldn't locate a self, they weren't yet convinced that one didn't exist somewhere out there. Maybe in another dimension. That they hadn't yet found it wasn't proof that it didn't exist.
Let's test that.
If it's located somewhere out there, it's obviously completely disconnected from experience because otherwise it would easily be located. If it's disconnected, how is it a YOU?
And if you insist that this entity IS experienced through emotion or just plain feeling, to WHOM would that experience happen?
That last bit of circular logic usually goes undetected. It also the source of the confusion.
photo credit: Empty Pocket I by boproductions on deviantArt
