Yet again the homunculous but better

 So here’s the core problem:

We see someone. Now we model this as two separate things: the person and a mysterious other thing, often called our self, but actually it is a very weird thing. It is more like a fleck of dust on a camera lens which ends up on all our photos. It is definitely not like the person we are looking at, and it has no obvious location. It is definitely outside the experience of seeing the person. We normal model this as a dot outside a picture of what we are seeing. This dot somehow become “me looking”.

Fig1. What the unenlightened think seeing is all about

Now because we have a dot inside us we now imagine that the person we are looking at has a dot inside them which must then, copying our model, have a picture of the world inside them that the dot is looking at.

This then raises the question of why my dot can only see my picture, and their dot can only see their picture.

We have this idea now of consciousness being someone trapped inside each of our heads along with a dot on the inside. One dot per person.

It is an odd but extremely common thought. How can I get inside your head, and what is it like in there. Other thoughts include perhaps my picture of the world is the only one and other people don’t have dots inside.

It is a definitely weird position because going back to the start I am just looking at a person which is the simplest and most normal thing. How does it get so complex and weird.

So it all revolves around this dot.

While I am looking at someone this is an actual experience that really happens. The dot however is not certain at all. It always seems to be there and it doesn’t seem to actually contribute anything. It is definitely not an actual experience, it is as said more like a stain in experience itself.

So let us accurately locate this dot. If you cannot sense it then it’s not in experience. That leaves only one other place: thoughts. So the dot is thought and laid on top of experience. The flex of dust is actually in the electronics of the camera. The actually imagine is good: seeing a person, but when we analyse this to recognise it as a “person” etc it is then that we add the dot. I called this the model above: this is the stage when we decide what is what in our world. That is when we get to add things.

The logical flaw is now deductible. If we are adding the dot: who is adding it? In the model the dot is “me” and I, the dot, am looking at the person. But if the dot is separate from the picture and I can see this then I am neither the dot nor the picture. Which is another way to see that if I add the dot then I am not really the dot.

The dot is really unnecessary now.

So what happens if we skip the dot from our model.

Well we are just looking at someone. Now because that is all there is we don’t bother to construct a secondary person or dot looking at this experience. And that means we don’t need to invent a dot “inside” other people to look at what they are seeing as if it was a separate thing. We therefore don’t get into the situation of wondering what if my dot was to get into their head and sit along side their dot to see what they are seeing.

No one is “seeing” anything! There are not dots watching everything we see as a secondary process.

Seeing someone is just seeing someone. Indeed that is a complex process that involves sense and consciousness but it all happens once. By the time a picture is there, the seeing has already happened. So there is no need for the thought “I am seeing in my head” to ever happen.

Since seeing does not happen in my head I don’t need to imagine it happening in anyone else's either. All those weird thoughts are irrelevant.

Be happy at having seen someone! It already happened.

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To reiterate this. The thing we find it hard to comprehend is that seeing has already happened and our attempts to explain how this happens leads to the mental invention of a "self" entity which we think was instrumental in seeing happening. This is kind of correct, but we give this mental creation far too much credit. It cannot be responsible for the seeing, because that has already happened. It is just a model of what happened and actually is neither real or actually involved. We can see and experience and think and feel without the need for this mental construction. When Buddha or Eckhart Tolle or anyone else drops this mental they are realising that it is not actually in the steam of existence and we can completely do without it. As Buddha says it is useful to put it back for the purposes of mundane communication, but it is lethal to consider it a real entity.