What exactly is non-attachment and letting go?

As I pursue this I get to a position that seems remarkable, easy to explain and yet unexpected so I guess not often articulated.

If we take our vision as a map of the world as look at this what exactly do we see?

It is like a 1st person player game. Indeed this is why a 1st person player game is designed like that.

We have things near us and the world stretching out in perspective until light is stopped by a wall or a forest or until it gets lost in the sky at the horizon.

So this seems pretty straightforward. But in there should be myself.

Easy I go and look in a mirror. There you go this is me.

Ignoring it's the wrong way around so its not exactly you, plus this is you on the outside which is why you don't see it looking around the 1st person player game.

You are looking out of those eyes in the mirror. And it suggests something inside.

And yet what can we see inside?

Nothing!

So we are in the same place as the opening of the Shurangama where Buddha is questioning Ananda on where he is.

What is inside is not visual. It is things like feelings and emotions, thoughts, imagination, dreams, some say visions and premonitions. Think that is about it.

Now we can get into a loop because we can argue that all the senses are inside too. So actually the field of vision we described above is really inside. This means there is nothing outside. Let us ignore this.

So time short the point here is that non-attachment is the ability to see all of this as part of the same world and although there is a 1st person that "person" is just part of the scene.

The key thing is that there is no "ghost" of a "me" that occupies or has a hold on anything. It is all just there. Both the inside and outside makes no difference.

Letting go fully is just accepting it all as it is. The remarkable thing as we let go is realising that things like consciousness and thoughts are not part of me. These treasured things that we hold on to have nothing to do with us and are as outside as the trees and the sky!

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So the classic problem of Solipsism is that the entire sensory world appears to be just for me. Everything that happens happens just for me. While other people may be present they do not share my experiences. They cannot see what I see, they cannot think what I think, they cannot feel what I feel. This is obvious when at the doctors and he asks does this hurt. He cannot tell and needs me to tell him. That pain and sensation is just for me.

From this we then decide that there is a person inside every body secretly sensing everything and the human world is made up of billions of such people shut off from each other with only language to join us together.

Firstly there is an interesting tautology here. When we have a thought, whose thought is it? Could it be someone else's thought? What would someone else's thoughts look like? How would we know. This is not to say that all thoughts are a single narrator delivering commentary. Some schizophrenics are very conscious of there being multiple voices, some frightening that they do not identify with. There are the famous stories of people doing things under instruction from voices in their head. We presume those voices are not their's and they are under the spell of someone else in their head. One possible candidate is God. The Yorkshire Ripper famously said that God told him to do it.

There is something strange about all this though. When we "read" something it seems we use "our" voice. Try reading this: https://monologueblogger.com/whats-wrong-with-a-bit-of-fun/ . Both Jake and Amanda sound the same. Then we can try and imagine what Jake and Amanda might really sound like and then we "perform" it in our heads. This is much harder and clearly different from our reading voice. What does "our" inner voice sound like? That is a very strange question and one I'm flagging for thinking about.

Anyway moving this along the suggestion here is that all these "private" voices belong to me. Even the frightening ones or the voices of God that tell me to do things. It is well understood that the brain is multifaceted and undergoes something like democracy as parts compete for control. As we try to understand what is going on and try to tell the story of a "single person" the likelihood is there won't be a single story. In extreme cases it is a good resolution to pretend that there is someone else present to help us manage parts of our self that are far outside the main story. This has 2 important sides. (1) we can maintain the main self and shift challenging stuff onto a foreign self - the bad voice in our head (2) it shows that the self is not just one "person" and can split into parts when other stories becomes too big to fit into one person. There is that ego collapse when we find we have done something we cannot believe we have done. The main story crashes as we realise we are not who we thought we were. We gain a new self, an outside shadow self, that is responsible for these things we cannot accommodate in the old self. eventually through work a new ego can form that accommodates it all. But this unity of self is not a fixed thing, and selves are not singular. All this is happening within "a" person with "one" inner voice. Really? And we still try to maintain the private and the public. Inside this private world is all this turmoil with multiple people and in the public world is a finished product to interact with other people. And these other people are in a similar state of private evolution and multiple states.

In extreme cases like with "split brain" patients the two private selves don't even know about each other. There really are two people in one person. And they really do not share any sensory data. I don't know if they both have separate inner voices. #TODO

So that long exposition was to get to the point: how do we know what is private and what is public. Even a voice of God in our head is only known by us. There appears to be a singular "us" that is witness to all the chaos described above, even when multiple selves are present. All this can happen in private and it is only when we speak to other people do they get to know this. A once schizophrenic told me he never knew multiple voices was unusual till he spoke to someone about it. But all this voices were private, they were his!

And this means that ANY voices we hear are mine! We cannot hear someone else's inner voice by definition. All the chaos described above is private and are the voices and turmoil of a person. You cannot hear someone else's voice. That is the tautology. There is no information in the statement "this is my inner voice". It couldn't be someone else's so what is the use in saying it is "mine."

So we get to an interesting place. All "our" experience is just experience. Saying it is "mine" doesn't tell us anything as experience can only be mine! The essence of the idea of "self" is the same as the vividness and reality of experience.

The idea of "self" then comes out only in language when we are talking to other people and putting all this experience into words. Then we get to add other people into the story, describe and compare experiences. Now it makes sense to say mine and yours. But the mine and yours are not features of the original experience!

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That exposition above is slightly different from what I was planning to say. The point I was going to make is that an eye obviously sees a perspective of the world. Naturally then each of the billions of eyes produces a perspective. And that perspective gets "seen" by each of the billions of brains. And naturally each brain says that it has seen a different thing. That is all obvious. The issue arises when we try to slot a "me" into that picture. The common thought is that "I" am seeing the scene in the eye. But actually this is wrong. I don't see. Seeing is done by the eye and the brain. And that same brain is right to think that it is seeing. So when "I" experience all this I experience a brain saying that has seen things. The Solipsism is not "me" it is the brain. True brains are stuck in skulls and bound by bodies. When we experience this we experience things from a body. But that does not make us bound in the body. It is like watching a video of prisoners that is being streamed from inside a prison. We can see and hear everything that the prisoners are seeing and hearing and for a minute we can absorb into this and forget that we are only watching it. But when we return to the room we find that we were only watching it and we are not ourselves a prisoner.

Of course we are still a prisoner because chances are we are still absorbed into the experiences of this body. But just like not being in the video from the prison, we are not in the experiences of the body. And when we think we are this is just the thoughts of that body. Why can't we experience other people's thoughts and experiences? Because the experiences of this body are bound to this body. The problem is that we think we can someone take the brain, thoughts, feelings and experiences with us when we unattach and liberate. No going to heaven does not mean we take our thoughts and feelings etc with us. They belong in the body. When we liberate we realise all this belongs in the body and is not mine. Liberation is realising this is not me.

That is best take on this right now.