Who gains pleasure?

It's a simple thought that to keep an account of all the things we have done, gained or lost we need someone to be the target.

And where is this target?

Well for sure we experienced those things, or more accurately there were the experiences.

But who did they happen to?

You can't be having an experience, and at the same time watching who it happens to!

You either have the experience, or you watch someone else having the experience. To use Buddha's example you either get shot by an arrow or you watch someone else get shot by an arrow and the two experiences are completely different. When we get shot by an arrow we definitely do not see the arrow getting close to someone, we just see the arrow getting closer. And when it hits us, we don't see it go into anyone, we instead get the pain and all the other feelings and sensations. And while the thought might occur to us "that arrow just hit me" this isn't actually the point, as we are already dealing with having been hit by an arrow which is pretty absolutely clear and who it hit is not important.

This is the difference between being our true self actually going through the experience, and watching someone else go through it.

Now when we come to think about it we do not adopt the actual experience view because that is gone. What we do is start looking at what happened to me as though I was another person. Which is kind of true as the person who experienced this is in the past. But we are being a bit dishonest. When it happens we are not another person. And when we think about it we are not another person. We are never another person, we are always ourself. But when we think about ourself we are actually disloyal and make this person into another person. It is that person who the "shit" stick to. And all the accounting we do of success and failure is to this person.

But this person is not me! I have been disloyal.

Now if we return to being loyal we see that we are always ourself, and we are never this "other" person who try to think about ourself as.

And this then has a massive implication: we are actually being disloyal to those "other" people.

The point is that we cannot think about a true person. A true person is experiencing the world, they are feeling and thinking. They are not what is thought: not if we are being loyal. We are the host of experience not the guest. And that destroys the ability to get a neat boundary on "people."

Now of course there are bodies. All experienceable, but not experience itself.

What we find if we remain loyal is there is no way of seeing ourself at the same time as we are seeing.

This is logical (not pushing SRH these days) but how can you be both what is seen and the seer, both subject and object).

The world of objects and things is just the product of experience. But these objects are not experience by themselves.

We are left in a paradox where we exist so that things can be experienced, but we cannot experience our self.

This leads in Buddhism to what is called emptiness. Buddha does not say we don't exist. But at the same time there is no boundary to get our heads around, or anything to grasp. It seems impossible but the self is nothing - which is exactly the gap between not-existing and existing: it is what is needed for things to exist!

It cannot be thought but what it does do is stop the accountant. If there is nothing to receive the pleasure or pain of the world then it just happens and gets forgotten. No one got joyful or got dented. You cannot suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune because there is no one there to get hit.

Experience happens, but then it goes away. And there is no one to experience it. Now we will think about what happened to us and we can create accounts like I had a good year or a bad year or to quote the Americans I am a winner or a loser. But this is accounts for something that is not solid.

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This is actually very obvious. If we take a dog and watch it go through some time. It is happy while eating and walking, perhaps unhappy when it has a fight with another dog, or it loses its ball. For the dog it is just a stream of experience one things leading to the next. This is exactly the Buddhist observation about life. But what a human does it use this stream as data for a story it builds, or more accurately a stream of narration is caused by the stream of experience. There are two streams. And in which stream do "I" exist? Well I'm in the narration stream. Dogs don't say "wow that was lucky" or "I am a winner or loser" as they don't have this narrative stream. But as we can observe this doesn't impact dog life in anyway. The narrative stream is useful, it means people like me can write blogs. But the problem is when we get confused and start holding onto narrative elements like they are fixed and real. The narrative stream has this ability to persist stories and feed on itself in a way the experience stream does not. If I burn my hand then this does feed through the experience stream in that I will have to live with a burned hand for a bit. But this is just the way it is. And if I behave in a bad way it is like burning my hand and I have to live with the consequences like bad moods in both myself and other people. But the narrative stream is much more immediate and self referential. You really can spiral into a world of nonsense in the narrative stream that no longer bears any resemblance to the experience stream. Not that this is the worst bit. The worst bit always is holding into this construction and treating it as solid and stone like. Your narrative stream made it! It is not solid!

So I recently got to experience toxic ego again. It is not an intellectual thing, despite this blog pushing for a rational explanation it does deeper than what you can see with simple analysis. The grasping and possession of a "land" called "me" goes to the root. While we can see it is nonsense, to really uproot this requires practice and the gradual undoing of the things in the stream that drive our creation of it in the narrative stream. Not that it needs to be a long arduous process, it just depends how much junk is in the narrative stream and how strongly we hold this as a solid fixed entity. That is as much about archaeology as the now. But all we can do is weather the selfing events as they arise and seek to not hold on. It is so tempting to hold on to ego and go down and die for it, but in the long term we will always appreciate letting go. That moment when friends pull someone back from a fight and say "they are not worth it" "let it go" is exactly the right attitude to selfing.