The Greatest Attachment

My Lab partner jai just came up with an inspiration insight...

After watching Dr Who last w/e he was taken by the fact that Dr Who once becoming a human didn't want to return to being the Dr because he had become attached to the human form. So it is with us Jai noticed.

Explaining that again just now he solved the biggest mystery I've had about the nature of self.

Why do we believe in a self at all? It stems from the fact that if you put a in pin into "me" then "I" feel pain while if you put a pin into "you" then "I" do not feel pain. Thus we naturally work to protect ourselves from pain and become indifferent to the pain of others.

But logicians will notice a circularity to this argument. 'If you put a pin into "me" then "I" feel pain' is hardly an explanation for the arising of self since we would need to know what self was in the first place to know where to put the pin!!

Never-the-less there is this feature of the world that certain things produce tangible pain and other things create pain in others but its not as tangible.

What the re-explanation from Jai provided was the insight that regardless of whether we experience the tangible form of subjective pain or the other-type of observed objective pain : in neither scenario is there need for a concept of self!! Before I had been unable to escape the thought there was.

Thus if we treat subjective pain, and objectibe pain as just features of the same world... why then treat one as Self and the other as Other.

There really is no need to think "myself" special, afterall everyone does so it sort of takes the specialness out of special ;-)

Thus we can let go of any notion of self.