Here is possibly the simplest definition of Enlightenment and the problem of Life:
"The unenlightened, suffering being colours all experiences with the Dative case."
That is to say that all things that happen are seen as happening "to" rather than just happening.
Now all the practices of religion are to discourage this colouring of eventualities. This is hard, so the first stage is generosity and giving where we still accept that there are recipients of actions, but instead of making our self the habitual recipient of everything we try and make other people the recipient. This does amazing things as it weakens the grip on the self. But we are still colouring the world with the Dative case.
Perhaps now an expression of what the Dative is. When an action is done toward something then that thing is in the Dative case. So we might say that "Life threw Eric a curved ball", Life threw the ball, but Eric received it. In our habitual world model the World does things which create experiences that happen to us. So for instance I sit watching the sun rise. The World turns, the Sun rises and the light enters my eyes and creates the experience that I see of a Sunrise, and this experience appears to be given to me in the dative. It becomes my experience.
Now this model is the cinema model of the mind (Cartesian Cinema) which Daniel Dennett amongst others challenges. We understand our senses as a film that is playing and we are sitting watching that film. A simple bit of logic can show this is fallacious. Indeed SRH is here (SRH is one thread in this blog). We imagine a self sitting in the cinema in order to explain how we see what is going on. Yet how does the person sitting in the cinema know what is going on. Don't they need a cinema inside with yet another person sitting inside? This is Plato's Third Man fallacy. You don't need anyone in the cinema! The cinema is the experience! And this is all Buddha is saying with Non-Self.
If we go to the cinema and look at someone else we can see the light going into their eyes and they are watching the film. Perhaps at the scary bit they will turn their head away and then they are not seeing it anymore, or they turn to talk to a friend and then they aren't seeing it, but that is what experiencing a film looks like. We don't then put another person inside them to watch all the sensory data coming in!
Same is true for us. When we are watching a film, looking at the screen and seeing the film that IS experiencing the film. That is all there is. We don't need to imagine anyone inside us looking at that experience. The film is not happening to anyone, the experience of the film IS what "happening to someone" looks like! How could an experience not already be everything that "happening to someone means"? When things happen to us, they turn up in our senses. Those senses don't then happen to someone else watching those senses!
So when a thought happens, that is what having a thought looks like. We don't then attribute that thought to some else. When Descartes had his doubts, the DOUBTS WERE DESCARTES DOUBTING. He didn't need to add the I AM bit. Now in fact Descartes was aware of this. He actually expressed it like this: "I Think; I Am." He didn't want a "therefore" in there. The idea was that the thought itself was identical with the self. To have a thought was to exist. But one wonders exactly what he is trying to say here. Bertrand Russel suggests that actually we can just say "there are thoughts." So Descartes has done well to get away from the idea that there is a Self that is thinking. But he hasn't made the full move yet. It is true that the presence of doubts can't be undone with doubt (this is SRH). If you doubt that there are doubts you indeed have a contradiction. But isn't it sufficient to accept this? Doubting can exist, and when it does exist you can't doubt it. But Descartes sneaks in a "thinker" and a subjective case to his musings. There becomes a subject of his doubtings. Like the dative above this case is unnecessary. I realise exploring this that this is all very OCD, did Descartes have a spell of OCD in his stove?
Now I'm putting all this into the language of grammar to avoid talking about actual self. The whole point of this post is to show that we can live, and experience and think without a subjective or dative case. It is quite simply unnecessary. Non-Self is actually very simple to adopt, and if Buddha is correct this is the end of suffering and the problem of life. Just remove the unnecessary grammatical cases when talking about any of the processes of language and life itself.
Language is great for talking about ordinary things. "Throw me an apple" makes perfect sense in exactly a Wittgenstein like way. There is an apple, I want it, throw me it. But the sentence "throw me the sight of an apple" makes no sense. It is like saying to one painter "paint that apple" and to another "paint the experience of that apple." Well in fact they do have different meanings. In Realism you may want to copy exactly how the apple looks (like a photo), and in abstract painting you will be looking to interpret much more about the apple adding knowledge of its shape, and what it is. Perhaps because of its European association with the "fruit of the tree of life" or "Newton's gravity" or "the poison that tries to kill Snow White" we have a lot to put into understanding an apple. But keeping it literal, painting an apple and what it looks like are the same! You cannot use the language of the world to discuss the language of experience.
This is very Gilbert Ryle. I never understood his philosophy, but now perhaps I have an insight. But its because of SRH. The reason that the "sense" changes is the same as in logic where meta statements are different from the statements themselves. It's the same problem with "use" and "mention." When we have an experience that is in use, but we then mention it in a private conversation and think that this is a second "use." So the camera takes the movie as it happens (which is "use"), and then plays it back to an audience that doesn't see it as a reply (a mention) but thinks that this is the action happening for the first time. When we think thinks are happening to ourselves we are simply replaying the action that has already really happened.
I was once told of a Zen disciple who kept asking his master what is true self. Eventually the master said to the disciple there is no use I cannot teach you and he sent him away. As the disciple walked away the master called after him his name. The disciple turned around the master said that is true self. I may have got the story wrong, but the purpose here is to illustrate teh difference between our identity being "used" correctly as in turning around when our name is used and fallaciously when we think "my life is rubbish" or "you shouldn't do that to me." These selves are not real, they are replays, and we shouldn't speak or think of them like we do real things. Thinking they are real though we experience suffering.
And the same is true for humans. When things happen to us we get an experience. The experience does not happen to us!!!!
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