The confused being must perish

It's a huge problem that the apparent vehicle to enlightenment is itself the problem.

This is why all Religions focus on subservience, submission and sacrifice.

Buddhism is often seen as a kind, peaceful and passive religion. Christianity is a bizarre cult of death and cannibalism. But actually both equally lead to the sacrifice of self: Buddha under a Bodhi tree, Jesus on a wooden cross.

So when we come to finally give up our worldly craziness and running around and actually draw our mind into either concentration (focused on a thing) or mindfulness (present moment awareness) who is doing this?

Same question: when we come to sit in meditation who is actually doing this?

These are especially odd questions when we observe that the process we undertake in meditation is actually an opening of our heart and mind to the world. A letting go of the being that apparently came to sit.

The truth is that this physical creature with all its bodily functions, and all its mental brain processing and sensing and feeling of emotions: this entire being happens by itself without any other input.

Even the bit which is going "okay what I'm going to do now is this" that is just a brain process.

Ah we go. So that makes "me" a "watcher" who just looks in on everything the body is doing but I am free and will leave this body when it died.

Absolutely NO. Even that is just a thought being had by the body!

From previous posts: "I" exists nowhere. You can't be sitting outside the body or disconnected from everything that is going on just watching it all passing by. Why does the body need someone passively sitting there watching it? What a waste of everyone's time.

But to think this completely distils out the problem. Such a thought is the very essence of unenlightenment. If you could bottle that thought, like a chilli sauce, you could poison anything with it. 

What is good about that thought is we no longer confuse our self with any phenomena. This is great. We are not so confused that we think we are our car, our house, our family, our job, name, body, senses and possibly thoughts too.

But we still haven't cut the fundamental root to thinking we are somebody residing separate from the world.

As a result we remain a person/being and just remove our self outside everything, still watching as mush as we used to when we sat inside the body or even our house (ready to chase intruders off our land). We still carry the fundamental problem of being somewhere and someone and something.

It is pointless. It achieves absolutely nothing now. Yet until we are ready to stop clutching at this teddy we are still bound. We know the teddy is not real now. We know there is no soul inside it. Yet it gives us comfort to clutch it. True growing up is when we put the teddy down and walk way.

It may break out heart to leave our self, to stop cherishing this being that we have bound to all these years from the moment we our senses and thoughts began to form. This being so cherished (hopefully but not necessarily) by our parents. But how much better to let it go now than be forced into a panic to drop it when it dies.

And if we learn to let go now, we are saved the whole problem of grasping another one in the future. What is called rebirth or reincarnation.

The point here is not that there is a "spirit" floating around grasping onto bodies. That is more of the confusion above of passive entities watching the world.

The point is that we stop trying to be an entity at all. We stop trying to get inside things, inhabit them or identify with them. There is nothing to do the inhabiting beyond the world that is already here! The spiritual idea of demon possession has a flaw: what if a demon possess the demon and so on ad infinitum. Classic logical regression argument. If you need to get into something to exist, then something can get into you! You cannot win in this way. We take none of this world as an example or reflection of our self. Sure we can support a football team, or a music band or a person such as we think we are. We can support them, but we are NOT them.

Which done badly might make us think we are God or something, and superior to all the other beings we see. But this still makes the mistake of "being something." When we let go of being something, we also see that there are no real beings "inside" anyone else. There is just the world.

Ouch isn't that a lonely world?

Letting go done badly again. This is still attached to the idea of beings. we only think "lonely" because we still think of "myself" and "other people."

Letting go means not taking things as important. I am not a thing, you are not a thing. There is no I or You really. I mean there is in a trivial sense of "do you want to go shopping with me?" even an enlightened being says that. The difference is that the unenlightened being thinks the whole of reality is built on that foundation of "me" and "you." The enlightened being sees "me" and "you" like it would a pet cat and dog.

So that raises the issue of "carefree." An enlighetened being is "carefree." That might sound like careless. But in fact its the opposite. Why do people do bad things? In every case its because they only see half the picture. The most evil thing we can think of is a sadistic murder, done for its own sake. This is the absolute extreme of evil. But really all it is is someone being 100% confused. Okay there is the issue of why would someone take pleasure from killing with a knife say. At the end of the day killing is just taking a knife and cutting some flesh. Not much to it really. A butcher does this all day long. Someone working in a clothing shop cuts fabric all day long. It's just cutting, big deal. So perhaps there is sexual stuff in there, in that thoughts of male/female and other things can trigger a sexual response. But the real pleasure really comes from the killing "someone." Immediately that should link to the discussion here. How can you kill someone if people don't really exist? Might have jumped ahead too fast, to be really accurate I guess "suffering" could be linked to sexual arousal (anything could be linked to sexual arousal in theory, it's just a neural pathway) so there might be this complication. But at end of the day the ultimate evil is hurting "someone." Normal morality says we protect people, if only because we would want to be protected our self. As Jesus says "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" [Luke 6:31, Matthew 7:12]. But why should this be true? You can see a King or a Sadist thinking the opposite. I am King I can do whatever I want and my subjects must put up with it. You might think that was "carefree." But really it's the opposite. The (bad) King and the Sadist are the opposite of carefree, they care for themselves (too much)! The are full of the burden of caring for them self. This is why we think caring for other is hard work. If we fill our life caring for ourselves there is no room for anyone else. Being "good" can seen exhausting. It's why people (especially today) shy away from religion: they think it will take up too much time and not leave enough time for them self. I often struggle to offer food (a practice of mental sharing before a meal) because I am hungry and just want to eat. The thought of "other people" having my food is an unwelcome pressure. Living like this is heavy and burdened and difficult because we have too much care! It is just care for our self. There is a class of confusion called Libertarian and its even more extreme cousin Libertine where "freedom" come from doing what we want. That means caring for our self. The difference is that the Libertine (like de Sade) cares for no-one but themself and the Libertarian like J.S.Mill  (1806 – 1873) says that we care for our self where it does not cause harm to others. I always felt that the accounts of J.S. Mill would be impossibly complicated having to measure up the freedom between all the people he met to ensure he never went into "freedom debt" with anyone and took more than was fair. Very much a thinker of the European Free Market Capitalist Enlightenment. But from the discussion here all these types of "care" are burden because they do not deal with the problem which is "being bound" to selves. Being truly carefree is letting go of the self. Then there is no one to hurt, and no one to take pleasure, and no one to do accounts for. What would an enlightened sadist do in charge of a pet shop where a particular rabbit was scratching all the other rabbits. You might think they put that bad-rabbit in the cages to watch the rabbit causing harm. But who is gaining that sadistic pleasure? Actually just the bad-rabbit (the analogy is the the sadist is like the bad rabbit - they are one and the same), and because the sadist is no longer that bad-rabbit the pleasure is no longer his! It is just sadistic pleasure floating in the void. But there is also the pain of the other rabbits floating in the void too. Not being attached to anything, the enlightened sadistic bad-rabbit no longer takes sides and sees it all. So what does the enlightened sadistic bad-rabbit do? Well the obvious thing is to separate the rabbits. That's tough on the sadistic rabbit who gets miserable not being able to get kicks from inflicting pain, but its good for everyone else. But because we are also the sadistic bad-rabbit we find we have isolated our self and taken steps to improve the situation. An enlightened being automatically ends up doing what is crudely called "good" because they do not take sides and have no stake in the game anymore. They are truly carefree. So the greatest evil actually goes on a course correction automatically if/when enlightenment arises (which is the same as dropping the self). Or to turn that around evil is simply a measure of the degree of binding to self, in other words the degree to which we are not free! That's should come as a surprise to the Libertines!

But returning to the top, it is hard. When we are bound to self it looks like the self does everything. We live our life through this teddy and take it everywhere (or more the teddy takes us everywhere!). So we pick teddy up and put him in meditation and get him to watch his breath and it is hard. But what we don't see (yet) is we are not teddy. We are in fact nothing and nowhere.

We could say as we struggle with the teddy on the cushion, with it wanting to get up or its mind wandering, that really teddy comes to be on the cushion because we are there to see it. If we were not there then teddy would not be struggling on the cushion. You need to be there for a tree falling to actually be heard. So this correctly identifies that the key thing is not the body struggling to meditate on the cushion, but is something else that is awake to the present moment and is aware that teddy is struggling on the cushion. A child may act out a story with a teddy, but a bit or reflection shows the child that they are not the teddy. However now STOP. That is enough. What happens next normally when we realise our place in Present Moment is that we simply rip the "self" out of the meditating body on the cushion and put it in some place like "consciousness" so we say "I can see, or I am conscious etc" and we immediately steal Present Moment for our self and quickly whitewash over the insight there that actually Present Moment comes first before any thoughts of "me." When Present Moment takes over from "Body On Cushion" and we see that the Reality here in the room comes from the Present Moment not the "physical entity" then STOP. That is perfectly far enough. One step into "my consciousness" or whatever we think next is too far and back into self.

This sense of having to put a solid self into meditation only comes around because we are still confused. It looks like submission and humility when we still have attachment to self. But once that attachment is gone it is free and easy. The pleasure that comes from meditation is the pleasure of feeling carefree, the relief at some level from holding teddy so tight. But when we finally put teddy down, wow apparently it is very noticeable indeed. Eckhart Tolle famously went to living on a park bench for a while, Buddha sat under a tree for 40 days. When we finally put this burden down, wow the body is no longer tricked into this difficult struggle to protect "us." The world there after works all by itself unobstructed by this blind alley of veneration to a non-existing self. Saying that we realise how confused the atheist is. I bet all atheists ultimately abandon God to make room for themselves. Its good to let go, but not really any use if we just transfer that holding to something else. Its the holding itself we need be attentive to.

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This also solves the question that led me to temple in the first place. How I reasoned can a Buddhist community operate if enlightenment is a personal responsibility? So this is built on the foundation of "self" so the problem is obvious. As above, true it is the self that must grab itself and get onto the meditation cushion. But this is only the case as long as there is a grasping of self. Let go of self and its just a body getting onto the meditation cushion and focusing on the breath.

So Jesus and Buddha are not so far apart. Jesus most definitely had to let himself go to die on the cross without resistance or anger. But Buddha did the same when he touched the ground to ask for witness that he had seen through the illusion of Mara and no longer bound to a being that was coming from aversion and heading towards desire. Its not the aversion or the desire that was the point, it was that there was no holding to a being and so no way to come or go.

It's a shame they always put a person at the centre. Various things have been said about the Buddha. Once someone said to me to bow properly because Buddha is yourself. Its all very confusing because the root problem here is holding. But if we are to hold better to hold Buddha than whatever we think we are. But in the picture the ring of serenity around Buddha is not pushing out the fear and desire, it is showing that buddha is not bound to that body in the centre that might itself harbour fear and desire. This is where the Crazy Schools in Tibet and Vajrayana comes from. An enlightened being is bodily different from anyone else. Put them in the laboratory and they are the same as an unenlightened. They have the same bodily desires and mental processes. All except one: they no longer waste time on the belief they are somehow connected to the body. and as said above this is far more profound that becoming a disembodied spirit that can float off. They no longer grasp for any position or embodiment, realising they are nothing and no where.

That last line still sounds weird. How can something be nothing and no where? Easy when we just ignore being a thing in the first place, and so don't even grasp out for anything like a body or a person.