Attachment, Non-Self, Emptiness

I never understood how these are all connected.

Great so we understand that when you think about what things are made of you have above all other things the sense of mass. Hold an apple in your hand and it has weight. Great this is a thing, it is something and its there.

Well yes and no. What actually are we talking about? The sensation in our hand, the thought in our head, a day dream where we suddenly realise there is no apple yet and we were just planning to get one. What exactly are we talking about? Well the sensation in our hand is not an apple! I mean it would take some feeling to get more data and then some thought to decide that it was an apple. We open our eyes and realise we've been tricked by a plastic model. Just mucking around we say, totally irrelevant we all know what an apple is, I eat them every day.

That is all just sensations and thoughts. You cannot escape that.

So the next level question is what are thoughts and sensations made of! Infinite descent set up here, cos if we insist on giving a "made of" answer we will never win cos whatever we say can have a "what is that made of?" asked of it. What is God made of?

The thing ultimately is things are just what they seem, no "made of" anything. They are empty.

That is one derivation of this obvious--when you see it--feature of the world. I gave a similar one a while ago regarding walls being made of bricks.

So emptiness. Great in the bag.

Non-self comes immediately next. So what am I made of? Well if all there is, is just thoughts and sensations, where am I?

So we get smart and go into the consciousness and say well I am the one who is aware. Kind of close. But what happens to us when we sleep. Who is sleeping? So we won't find our self in consciousness.

But the real problem at each stage is attachment. We are grasping onto things.

When we sit to meditate there is (probably) this overwhelming sense of taking someone with us to the cushion.

I am going to meditate, I am sitting to meditate, I am meditating. We are leading someone through all this.

It's so obvious that we never think about it. It's a rucksack we gradually got put on us when we were very young, or a pair of glasses we have always worn. We never think to take them off. That weight is just us, we are use to it, its what comes of existing.

Wrong!

The weight of having to drag this person around comes by a more exact name: attachment.

Now this seemingly harmless weight and attachment is actually the whole reason we get born and die!

Woah! WTF how did we get here?

Sitting on a cushion we have a weight. We have a mass, we are made of something, we exist. If I fall down the stairs it hurts, my body is physical and injured this is all very real.

No different from the apple!

Literally no different. Just sensations and thoughts.

No! we protest. I can eat an apple and so what. But I fall down the stairs and hit my head badly and I am dead. Big f**king massive deal.

So lets get clear about that. Yes massive head trauma will kill a human. So yes that body that falls down the stairs will die.

But this is not the issue. Lots of people die every day: quick calculation with 8 billion and 70 years of life each on average (assuming no population change) about 300,000 people die every day. It's not such a big deal.

But to me, when I lose MY life that is literally the end of the world.

Well its the end of the road for this body, and these eyes, and this brain and memory and emotional system. Yup that all ends. But does the world end?

No the world carries on just as before.

Its an odd thing then that the world carries on just as before with no real change, but somehow I vanish in a cataclysmic end.

That never felt right even from the start. Two completely different sides to death.

But we are really just back to sensations and thoughts. These end.

And so comes Oblivion we then argue.

No.

Oblivion where?

No oblivion in the world. 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust and there was not 1 drop of oblivion created. 80 million people died in total and not one drop of oblivion was created.

Where does this oblivion happen?

And to who?

It makes no sense.

People imagine that somehow the lights go out and they are cast into darkness. Or they realise that death means death and the film just ends, so in fact not even oblivion.

Seems wrong that everything should just hit a brick wall for one person but be of absolutely no fundamental effect on anything or anyone else.

Well we can relax because there is just one world and it is unaffected by death.

The problem sitting at the heart of all this is that bloke we think we take to the meditation cushion.

In reality that bloke is just a physical mass of body, some thoughts and whatever else is going on.

There is always something going on.

Stuff goes on all the time, it has absolutely nothing to do with us. We don't need to be present for it to be going on. Eyes see by themselves, brains think by themselves, hearts beat by themselves, consciousness is aware all by itself. We have no job or role in this world, there is nothing for us to do. We not need to be here. Were we to leave it would make no difference.

Perhaps we get depressed at the thought we're of no use and can just leave the room.

But once we have gone the room is exactly the same. The eyes still see, the brain still thinks, the consciousness is still aware. Things are just as they were.

This "smell" of "me" that hangs around, that taints the world around me, that makes thinks mind and puts a weight at the centre: that is attachment. Its made out of holding onto the things around us and making them mine.

And although that seems trivial this holding is why we think death happens to us, and why ultimately we feel that birth happened to us.

Sure it happened to this body. This body has senses and thoughts and it is well capable of studying all this and thinking long and hard about its own creation and ultimate demise. But its all just sensations and thought.

===

On subjects of consciousness there is this odd thing called self-consciousness. Now we know from SRH (see earlier blog)  that consciousness cannot be conscious of "itself" : this sets up an infinite regress. Yet there is this very off feature of higher levels of consciousness that they know they are conscious. I am not just conscious of a candle, I know that I am conscious of a candle.

If we attach to consciousness as self then we get into an SRH mess. What must be true and reveals our attachment is that the Present Moment does not come from consciousness. Consciousness itself depends on Present Moment. But we attach to consciousness thinking that this is "my" version of Present Moment, "my" perspective, "my" opinion etc. Very weak foundations for when we fall asleep what becomes of it all! No reason to hold on to, or attach, to consciousness as foundation of anything. It is not me or mine!