The West is a weird place. It's possible that the idea of self has existed for thousands of years but its only in the West that it has become such a dogma. Every aspect of Western life glorifies the individual. I have just argued with someone who claims that private property is freedom. Not realising that their boundary fence is also a prison. The same for self. What seems like freedom on the inside is a prison when viewed from the outside.
I had this experience in Scotland once. Within the confines of the Lord Castle it looks like paradise. But then you leave their grounds and walk into the wilderness and looking back from the hills what they have seems so small and irrelevant within the landscape and the walls of their paradise are just a prison.
Well so it is for the self. Have been thinking some more on this. So attached are we to the self that we can't conceive of ever being without it. Its very easy to read things on the non essential nature of self, the fact that we can live without it, and still not quite identify what they are talking about. What is this non-essential part of us that we are so welded to that we overlook it all the time, and confuse it with the essential? As argued before its actually all that stuff that has our name attached, the stuff we "think" is us that is actually not us.
I realise that we can read the 1st Chapter of the Shurangama Sutra and start to gain non attachment from the objects of mind and yet it remains "my mind." The weird thing for beings attached to self is not so much where we are in the universe, but that we are not! And that "not" is not oblivion and darkness bur rather we are "no where." We always try to anchor our self in the world. Perhaps this arm is mine, or these fingers that do the typing, or perhaps these words, or these ideas. Or perhaps this computer. We go searching everywhere in a massive cosmic game of pin the tail on the donkey. Yet why are we playing this game. Why does anything need to be mine or me?
It's Descartes all over again. Descartes observed the contradiction in thinking there are no thoughts. That is a thought and so contradicts itself. René Magritte did the same in a picture, although its very telling he needed to add text to his picture to cause contradiction. You cannot paint a contradiction, its purely a textual thing!
But Descartes at no point needed to mention the "self." There was no need to own those thoughts and claim that "he was thinking" nor that "he existed." As Bertrand Russell commented he need only have said "there are thoughts."
Now I don't think Russell realised the full significance of what he was saying there. All we can ever say is "there is x." At no time do we ever need to invoke a self! And that's the bizarre thing, we can live our whole life without ever "sticking the tail on the donkey" in this world in fact donkey's don't have tails. Humans do not have selves! There are humans, there are individuals, there is everything but a self. And its not like the donkey even notices whether you pin the tail on or not. Its completely extraneous.
Tho actually we do notice when we pin a self. Life starts to become very difficult as we look at everything from inside the "mothership" of self. This mothership of a body becomes "us" and suddenly everything that happens happens to "us" and everything becomes really personal. And we respond by being very "personal" to other people cos they are now different from us. We try and stick tails everywhere. You did this; I did that. This is yours; that is mine etc etc. But we can live without sticking a tail on.
This is most obvious when we consider death. Death will happen, that is a fact. But what we next want to know is when I will die. This is because I have a tail pinned on this body and what happens to it happens to me. But actually this body will die like all other bodies and that is just a fact. It has no great significance that it is my body that dies or whether it is another.
This is why morality occurs. When we have no tail pinned on then we treat all people equally and we are no longer biased to our self. To outsiders this looks like morality. But to those free from self its just obvious.
There is all kinds of metaphysics to try and tie us to the body. Belief in Souls that somehow inhabit bodies and make them me. But then even if this is true, why is that Soul mine? Its just another soul like all the others.
The root problem explained in previous posts is reflexivity. A self appears to be more interested in its reflection than in other selves. That reflection of a self back to itself seems to create a special type of attachment. We are all vulnerable to this narcissism. But actually when we see our reflection it is just another person, there is nothing special just because we are reflecting back to our self. It is true that only I can look into my eyes in a mirror and think that is me looking back. This is true, this makes me unique to myself. But this is like a fixed point in maths. Given that people have eyes and can see each other, and given that mirrors enable us to see reflections of anyone then it follows that we MUST be able to see our self. It would be a very weird world if we couldn't. And indeed sometimes we do look at our self. But like Descartes thinking his thoughts of doubt this does not need to involve a self. When we look at our self we are just using eyes to see a person who happens to be us. It could be anyone it just happens to be us now. There is no need to invoke a self. No need to try and own anything in this situation. Just see it for what it is, someone seeing another person who happens to be them self. It could just as easily be someone else.
It's important to see the trick that happens here. There is nothing different between looking at our self and seeing someone else. In both cases we are just looking at people with their own internal worlds and lives. Just in one case it is us, and in the other case it is someone else. Yet that is just the difference between a camera photographing itself in a mirror or another camera, there is no magic or anything special here. Or if there is magic it is true whether we look at our self or another. This very much is the magic of Love. When we Love someone we start to see them with the same fascination that we see our self. They become us in the mirror.
I wanted to add something here on suicide. When you up anchors and stop trying to own things in the world and try to find our self our there. When we are happy with just seeing everything as it is, without trying to add selves to it then the world becomes fundamentally simple. Whatever happens just happens. We no longer have thoughts like "this doesn't happen to other people", or "that is unfair", or "I can't take this any more", or "I don't deserve this", or "I hate myself" etc we may feel unhappy, disappointed, depressed, unable to cope, overwhelmed, alienated, abandoned, unloved, hopeless or anything but its just there its not "ours." Things happen both good and bad, but since they are not ours we don't have to push them away. They are no where near us because we never put a "tail on the donkey." If we are no where then how can anything ever get close to us? But for that matter how can anything be far away from us. Things just are. This is what Buddha is trying to say to Ananda that identifying with "things" in this world steals us from our true place in the world, which is just to not get involved and not go looking for our self anywhere in the world. So what is there to run from? And what is there to run towards? We are no where! So what does the suicider hope to achieve? They are already going nowhere so suicide actually changes nothing. But suicide does suggest that the person got embedded in the world and got confused that they were a thing and existed, when in fact they should have just let go and not owned what was happening to them. Imagine it is happening to someone else to start with and that you are free is very close to the truth already. Then realise that trying to pin the tail on other people is also a mistake so that neither you not anyone else owns anything and all are free already! That appears to be the right way to see these things. Then good and bad things become the same: just experiences that sail past as we watch them from the safety of shore.
I've heard people describe the experiences of the mind like watching a movie from the safety of the cinema and I've never liked this because it suggests a hiding and removal from the world, like recluses or people who get stuck in habitual lives cos they are too afraid or can't be bothered to engage with life and try something new. But this is what happens if we try and take the self out of the world. The self doesn't get to the safety of a cinema, the other shore (Gate, Gate, Paragate, Parasamgate) or a heaven, it doesn't hide: rather we step outside the self, there is no self there in the first place! We give up on self. That is the other shore, it is the realising that the ocean is the world with a self pinned on it. Unpin and the world becomes the other shore!
Perhaps the storm blows so hard that we cannot think, we lose direction, we get confused and we just want it to stop. It has blown so long we forgot what it was like before. On one hand this is the perfect time to learn to let go, but if we are confused and emotions are stirring our brain we won't be able to see this so clearly. But struggle tho we may, the truth is trying to get in and uproot our attachment to the world. We are trying to be taught the lesson to let go and realise we don't own anything here, we need to disown this world and step out of the vehicle of self. It's no where else either is what is confusing, we are not stepping from one world to another, but just not trying to stand at all. We don't need to stand to exist, we already exist and we can abandon standing. Let bodies do the stand that is what they do. We don't need to do that. Let things be what they are. Let all struggles take care of themselves. None of it is ours!
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