Death and Narcissus

Self-Love really is the absolutely worst poison of all. It is all that underlies our fear, difficulty and unwillingness to face the very normal and easy thing of death. The problem is that like Narcissus in the painting we are drawn to identify with, inhabit and live within our reflection.

Our reflection is apparent, obvious, substantial, graspable and before our very eyes: it is a safe place to live. We love that apparent being (or perhaps we hate it if we have self esteem issues). Either way we live in it, and imagine our lives being lived out by it.

But problem: its just a reflection. In the painting Narcissus can only see his reflection; he can't see himself. Likewise everyone is only ever looking at a reflection of ourselves: no one can actually see themselves.

And the painting shows us that we actually exist outside our reflection. The reflection is in the water; we are on the shore.

Likewise those who mistake their reflection for themselves live in the water, while those who realise that the Self they see is just an insubstantial reflection; they live in the security of the shore.

Its a trade off: grasp what is certain in the water but live an unsubstantial flickering life, or cast off sensual certainty and live in the security of freedom.

And so what of Death. For those on the shore what is there to lose? They never grasped for sensual certainty in the first place. But for those in the water they stand to lose that beautiful image that appears before them, but after a moments "reflection" they know is really just an illusion.

Errors abound when thinking about this. We may continually wonder what the relationship between the reflection and the real Narcissus. What is the link between what I think is myself and my real self. This is the old body/mind problem of Descartes. But such a question comes from not understanding that literally everything we think about ourselves is part of the reflection. There are not two things here: one on the bank and the other the shadowy reflection on the water. From Narcissus' perspective there is always only one thing: the reflection. There is only one thing. The moment we think there are two we are just dividing the mirage into parts. One, two, a million is all part of the reflection.

But then if there is only the reflection then how can we be on the shore? Such a question goes too far the other way. we didn't ask for Narcissus to throw himself in the water. The whole self doesn't need to be put in the water. The only thing in the water is the image of Narcissus. The problem for Narcissus is that this is all he can see. Yet if he thinks for a second he is not the reflection. He knows that because he is looking at the reflection. Its not the reflection actually looking at him. Well he may see someone looking at him from the water and fantasises for a second that it is another person, but a ripple of wind quickly shows him it is only a reflection and reflections don't look. Immediately he is thrown out of the water and his fantasies and back into being the one who is looking, and he is looking once again at just an empty reflection.

So bound to a habitual belief in a solid, fixed self we swing between thinking we are a solid thing on the shore separate from the reflection, and thinking that we are no different from the reflection. Both are actually false. If Narcissus just looks at the reflection--without adding anything to the situation--the fact he is not the reflection and the fact there is nothing but the reflection both meet in perfect harmony. But we like that reflection and we grasp for it and we quickly add that it is us, and then we calculate that we must be sitting on the shore being the one who looks and we join the reflection to the body and the soul and create a complete mess of ideas. But all this struggle is just part of the reflection. Anything we can grasp clearly with our senses or our mind is just reflection and we should avoid seeing it as our self. Our self is something much more, but it is ungraspable, so all we can do is just stop grasping (or rejecting) these reflections and things we want to have as our self.

On the correct view of Death (again)

So there is that common view I hear that we a born, we live and then we die and there is oblivion. But of course this is only from a certain arbitrary perspective. Someone died while I was writing this and as far as I can tell it made not the slightest difference to the world. No great void opened up.. oh another just died then... yup still no great void. The great void people speak of is just the void that we think appears when I face my own death. No one else's death makes this void happen just my own. But that suggests a special connection between myself and myself. Does this sound like nonsense yet? Another person just died. They had a special connection between themselves and themselves too and still no great void has opened up. It must be a special connection between this person John and John himself for the void to open up. Why me, why am I so special that this special John void happens to just me? I'm not., The problem is that I carry an idea of John around with me. That sort of fits (though badly most situations) but doesn't fit dying at all. So John must be discarded and that's the void we only think happens. I can discard John right now, he is only an idea after all, just a belief that there is some fixed entity coming along on the ride of Life. There isn't. John is just a photo album that I've made with friends and family and my society, but has not real connection to me. Can throw in the bin any time I like. Don't have to wait for death. Now I'm not saying the Tibetan's don't know a lot about Death but it seems in all their teachings of reincarnation they don't emphasise enough the real point that no-one is there on the journey. Its not lonely (that only happens if you think John is there on the journey (by himself waiting for the His Void to open up) - so not realising that you made John and can discard him at any time with no void happening at all). Indeed loneliness and company in Life are just Ego illusions (there are billions of people and countless beings how can we be alone or together?). It's just that no one is there on the journey of birth, life or death.

So what of consciousness. Does the extinction of that make the Great Void? We get that ever night when we sleep. Indeed Death is often referred to as the Great Sleep. Good analogy. But again that misses the point. Consciousness comes and goes all our life and then then we return to the state we had before birth. The thing that causes the issue is not the ephemeral nature of consciousness flickering the wind. Its the fact we believe that someone is experiencing consciousness. In my case John is has consciousness. Hockum. John is just a photo album I made. Oh yes he's in the album. But I can throw that album away any time I like. John does noty have consciousness. No one "has" consciousness. There is just consciousness. (How much did you pay for it if you own it? Enough Capitalism already.) and one day there won't be consciousness. Oh look another consciousness extinguished in the world just now. Yup no difference. Oh look another consciousness just got born. No difference. Nothing special about "me" in any way whatsoever.

Note on Probability, Mind and Quantum World

Does some of the nature of Quantum world come from how mind relates to the world?

So flick a coin 3 times gives 8 possibilities. But mind can then search for things to combine these:

e.g. lets classify flicks with 2 heads => there are 3

With quantum Schrodinger's cat it's dead/alive only cos we are looking for the cat state. But why not look for the probability that its eyes are blue? There are infinite things in that box the mind can search for and infinite waves to collpase.

So do ideas interact with the quantum world to set up what we are looking for, and then what outcomes can get observed and recorded. The mind sets up the wave function that it then collapses as an event is recorded. Can the cat state wave function be collapsed by someone opening the box to see the colour of its inside? Afterwards they are asked whether the cat was alive or dead and they didn't notice, they can only report that the box was painted white on the inside. IS the cat alive or dead now?

Collapse is when we complete an idea (cat dead, alive), but is it anything to do with the field of possibilities... e.g. cat has blue eyes, rat in cage also dead, box was painted white inside?

With music with 8 beats to bar and 7 notes (ignoring octaves so just the relative freq) then 7^8 possible tunes per bar. But only some are an "idea". What does the mind do to make notes into a tune, while other notes are nothing.

So how many musical "ideas" is the question.

One last thing I never understood

When we are dealing with issues of false self we play the world out on a stage in our minds just as a kid does with dolls. We are so absolutely habituated to this that no one really realises the illusion and trick. The doll of false self is so tangible and graspable in our hands that we almost entirely confuse it with ourselves. However there are obvious problems that we can uncover as I hope I have done in the last 3 posts.

One problems remains that I have never understood and it is linked to the OCD I have. The problem for an OCD sufferer is that we look at the doll of false self and we wonder what it is going to do next. That doll can sometimes seem possessed like a demonic doll and we become very anxious about what it is going to do next. We can read all kinds of things into that doll and even come to live in fear of it. This causes a huge disconnect inside us as our true self becomes fearful of its own false image. And I believe this is quite common in mental illness that this gaping chasm can really grow and divide the mind and set it against itself in all encompassing anxiety and mental breakdown. But this all occurs because of the basic error of confusing our true selves with the false image that we make up in our minds.

It is obvious really. Who is actually anxious? we should ask. It can't be the image of self we have, it is the quite separate true self. But because the true self is not tangible like the doll we get very confused. Yet the evidence for true self in right there in our anxiety. Who is feeling all this anxiety? That is our true self right there at the heart of our troubles. Eckhart Tolle had an identical meditation on the night he broke free from false self. Although for him the struggle was over depression not anxiety.

So how does action work when viewed from the perspective of true self? Firstly I'll look at the wrong view.

So normally we think things through and decide what to do, or most of the time not much thought just recorded activities that we play out automatically. The first time we kiss our partner will probably take a lot of thought and deliberation but after a while it can become automatic (though it shouldn't). Now in our thoughts we erect a statue of ourselves that we can manipulate to explore our decisions. This doll is the source of the problem.

For me with OCD you can sometimes think "I wonder what happens if I make the doll do this". A classic example is if I am standing on the edge of train platform and I can wonder what would happen if I pushed the doll off. It is just a thought, but because of attachment to the doll I now think I am actually going to jump off and then quite obviously the situation feels incredibly dangerous and gets filled with fear. And then with heart racing you can't think clearly and you get very afraid of what is actually a peaceful situation and you want to run away. You look up at all the other people scrolling through their phones or happily chatting and you wonder why they are not filled with fear in this incredibly dangerous situation. These kinds of disconnect between your experience and the world around are classic indications that you are creating a problem where none exists.

Now until you realise that the doll is a false self the problem seems very real and confusing. We are attached to that doll, and quite probably deeply metaphysically connected to it: we really believe that we have a self and that is it right there. That doll could do something bad and so we are in a very real existential situation. The walls close in, the sky comes down, people seem far away and we are thrown into an artificial world filled with unreality, confusion and terrible feelings. And all because we chose to worship the false doll and forget about our true self.

Yet all the while the true-self is feeling all these feelings and experiencing the walls closing in and other people seeming like a distant world and yet it can't unhook because it is confused about this doll that it is holding onto so tightly.

We made that doll. It is like a Chucky from the film Child's Play. And in UK that is associated with a very real horrific murder of a boy. It's an anxiety that exists even in the real adult world that these dolls can cause bad things to happen. The boys who killed the child some still believe were influenced by that film and by that doll. And yet there is truth to this. We do erect a doll inside our heads, it is the thing we think is "Me". Its a funny thing that we make the films and do the things that reflect our actual mental landscape. I wonder if aliens with a different mental make up build dolls themselves and give them to kids? For most people their doll is the "good guy." But ironically this is even more dangerous than having a doll we think is the "bad guy." The OCD suffer who has started to doubt what their doll is going to do is actually the safest person in the world. True they are filled with anxiety and hardly functioning but the last thing they are going to do is actually bad.

Meanwhile all the evil in the world is done by people fixated upon a doll that they think is the "good guy." I saw the film "Promising Young Woman" the other day and it is very truthful. All the guys believe they are the good guys. But what is actually happening is that they believe their mental constructed doll is the good guy and so they must be. What they don't realise is that the mentally constructed doll is a false self and bears no resemblance to their real self. This is exactly how bad things happen. Evil people hold on to a false image of themselves which means they don't see what their real self is doing. Its very ironic in the world of Ego and false selves that the people who think they are best are actually worst and vice versa. And this is why.

Now the real answer is not to hold onto this doll. So far I have argued for putting that doll in the bin. And certainly this is the right thing to do when we have been clinging to it for so long. It is old, worn out and at best needing some repairs and some new paint.

But if we look at where the doll comes from and why we erect it we can see what its real use was. We are given this doll as a child. We are given a name, our parents and relatives "own us" and make a big fuss over us. They fill us with all the expectations and beliefs they have of us and we are given a fully made doll. Chances are it is ridiculously unrealistic. We can never be as good as that doll but we attach to it cos its all we have and come to think it is our true self. We never ask who is clinging to it of course!

So disconnect happens. We realise we are not that doll for any number of reasons. It might be too perfect, it might simply not fit well and we discover we are different from that doll, it might cause mental disconnects like depression or anxiety like my OCD. At some point if we are lucky a gap will form between the doll and the one who is grasping it and if we are really, really, really, really lucky we will enlighten and throw the doll down. When you look at the 4 million lines of Buddhist scripture you can appreciate just what a momentous event the throwing of the doll down really is. Now in many cases we just pick up a new one so problem not solved. But some people throw it down for good like Eckhart Tolle and Shakyamuni Buddha they never pick up another. They describe complete lasting peace and an end to suffering. What I like about Buddha was him saying at this event that the "spiritual path was at an end; there was nothing else to do." Imagine having that moment of finality in your life where the grain of sand in your eye that has been troubling you for so long has finally been wiped out. The doll is cast down, the reflection in the mirror no longer confused in any way with oneself, and the self is free to just be.

Now in reality we do need a doll. If I plan a trip to the shops I will imagine myself going into the shops to help plan the things I need, where to find them and perhaps juggle the route I take to get everything. Solving the classic Travelling Salesman Problem and using a mental doll to do it. The problem occurs when I don't then dismantle this doll. We imagine that doll going into the jewellery store and buying expensive watches and necklaces, we imagine it getting a tattoo, we imagine it meeting with friends and being the centre of attention, we imagine it driving a fast car and we fantasise about all the things we could do and we start to love that doll more than our self. Some people now like it so much they struggle to become that doll and the problems all start. Another way this can happen is that they see someone who they like, a role model, and we then struggle to become that person. Its the same effect. Although this external one is actually good at one level because it means we have put down our own doll and this is quite an achievement already. In religions the first and most important step is accepting an icon as one's goal. Christians seek to be like Jesus. Buddhists to be like Buddha. I like Hinduism--it really understands this process--a temple in India erected a David Beckham statue at one point to attract the attentions of the youth. Seeking to be successful footballer is not a bad start in life, hopefully that process can evolve into being a better person and finally into being free from any idols or false images. Obviously where we can have a good doll, we can have a bad doll like with OCD and live in fear of it too. And like all bad things this gives us an excellent illustration of the flaws with following and attaching to dolls.

So finally the correct view of action from the perspective of true self. What is it like to behave authentically in the moment without reference to a fake self. I guess the first thing is we behave without fear of contradicting our false self. We will have a strong fixed view wrapped up in that doll of what we are and what other people expect of us and we behave according to that rather than what we know we should do. Suppose we feel for the suffering of animals but our doll is tough and hard and not weak and sensitive. We may well reject these finer feeling cos the doll tells us so and eat meat when we would be better exploring vegetarianism. This is actually personal experience. I wonder if a lot of criminality is like this. If our doll can silence our feeling for the suffering of animals then what else can it silence! When we behave like an "idiot" is this not actually our doll taking over and making us block headed and insensitive? According to the fixed view we have of our self embodied in this mental doll, we are like something and so we behave according to this something. We standardise our behaviour according to an image we have of what we should be like. This may be useful. Our society may have strict rules and this doll gives us the model behaviour. But again the real problem is attachment. Just cos we conform to the ideal doll we have does not make us ourselves good. It just means we are good at copying. One Buddhist master called this behaviour the "beautiful robot." We are just good actors. Again I stress this can be very useful. Sometimes we do fall short, we get angry for instance and being able to act that we are not angry is very useful. The doll of correct behaviour is our friend here. But the problem happens when we don't acknowledge that we really did get angry and the good behaviour was just a false doll. We were faking it. If we start to believe in the fake self then we set up all the problems and we start to disconnect from our true self. Leaving our true self behind closes the door on the peace and satisfaction that comes with being authentic and true. Other people don't really benefit from knowing a fake person either. So in reality the place of dolls is rather nuanced and a mine field really. But to start with putting then all in the bin is the way to go. Better to make a fool of our self authentically and have no doll on which to hang the fall out than to carry the fake self with us.

This could be viewed as be crazy and live without consequences. This is also fake self. This is going too far and throwing everything away. We must not throw ourselves away! A true self does what is right as they see it. They do not follow the instructions of a doll and they do not fake it. But this obviously comes with an element of bravery. We must take responsibility for what we do, but not in the sense that a doll will be judged but just in terms of the results of what we do. If I burn my house down in an attempt to be free, I will be sleeping under the stars tomorrow. My choice. There is no fixed false self to blame and heap suffering upon, but my family will be cold.  

So finally the issue of freedom. The OCD false self lives in fear of the freedom of that doll. It is true that I could throw myself on the train tracks. Another example is shouting out in a ballet or classical music performance. On one hand we think big deal this is not a dangerous situation why get anxious. But you have an unpredictable doll inside you that may suddenly shout out and you will feel mad and the anxiety can be as bad as any situation. So it is true you have freedom and you could shout out. Anyone can. But study it closely as I do in the next paragraph. Firstly acknowledge that it is hard to think clearly when anxiety is with you. Neurologists name a thing called the Amygdala Hijack which is the source of the flight or fight mechanism. When we trigger it it shuts our brain down to focus on some dangerous thing like a hungry wolf approaching. Obviously this is quite inappropriate in a classical music concert but the brain doesn't know this, we have tricked it with false beliefs and it means we actually have less mental capacity to deal with it. Meditation is probably the only tool that can really help. Meditation strengthens our mind's ability to stay concentrated and shake off distractions like Amygdala Hijack. It is key in fact to enlightening cos to really throw the doll down we need to be clear enough to separate ourselves from that doll of false self and ego.

Now suppose we did shout out and have everyone looking at us and thinking we are mad. The soloist stops and gives us an angry, hurt or fearful glare. Completely mortifying. But you know what. The world would go on. Perhaps the soloist develops an anxiety condition themselves and can't concentrate on stage for years, that is bad. But we had World War 1 and 2 where our leaders sent 80 million people to their deaths. The world carried on. Some people even tried to make out the deaths of all those people was a good thing. In perspective whatever we do, the world will be fine. There is a middle path. We have some influence on the world, but don't get carried away. People like Dalai Lama and Bono probably grieve to some extent how little difference they have made given their status and statue. Jesus, Buddha and Mohammad have not ended suffering. Indeed Jesus and Mohammad's name has even been used to kill people. Even the sons of god can't really change that much.

The reason we think we can is our false self. Like Superman our false self seems to have unlimited power. I can believe that shouting out in a concert can make the world stop spinning. Its the exact same illusion all these meditations began with. Am I really that important in a world of so many people? My doll certainly is, but that doll is fake and has nothing to do with my real self. I can throw that doll away and I don't die. And I can die and that doll will flicker around in my consciousness unchanging until my brain ceases to function. It won't die by itself. And me thinking it will die and confusing that with my own death is the whole problem of death.

So if we examine what is really happening when we have anxiety about the freedom we have its not quite what we think. (I wonder whether Sartre's philosophy just got caught up in false self. There is no nausea or existential crisis when there is no fixed self to worry about!). When we bin that doll, where can the anxiety settle? There is no fixed self for us to watch in anxiety and wonder what it is going to do. There is no fixed self or doll to protect, whose actions will tarnish its reputation. There is just our true self, authentic and just living and doing its best. It may make mistakes, it may end up being hated by the world--these things happen--but also that is just life. There is no fixed self here to be tarnished or damaged or whose reputation we carry with us like a lead weight. Indeed we are dragging nothing with us, there is no ship being pulled along with us though life. We are weightless and there is only today.

As the famous Zen stanzas go:

The body is a stand
The mind is a mirror shining bright
Be sure to keep them clean
So that dust does not alight.

To which the young Hui Neng who was to become the 6th Patriarch wrote:

There is no stand
There is no mirror shining bright
What is there to clean?
Where can the dust alight?

He understood what is called the Emptiness of self. For the first stanza the self is a fixed doll to which the writer is attached believing that he must work to keep them and himself clean. To Hui Neng there is no fixed doll, and more importantly even if there is some fixed self collecting dust*, it has no connection to his true self which is free and looking on.

*quick caveat on crazy wisdom. So the inauthentic mind still attached to dolls may think: Oh good I have no connection to this doll. It doesn't matter if it gets covered in dust. In the metaphor this means it doesn't matter what I do, let me do crazy things and heap the consequences on the doll it doesn't matter. Let me sleep outside tonight naked in the street, let that doll feel cold and let it get in the local papers and probably end up seeing a psychiatrist for evaluation. Who cares. In one sense correct. But when we throw the doll out we mustn't also throw ourselves out! A key thing we should develop is compassion. Once we are free we should find compassion. What we once felt just for our doll and perhaps the dolls of friends and family we now feel for everyone cos we realise that real people are not dolls in our minds but live alongside us in the same world equally. Lying in the street naked having thrown our doll in the bin we will feel cold, we will risk damaging our reputation and we can risk further injury. Do we really benefit from these? Would we do this to anyone else? Obviously not, no one benefits from this. The only time we would do this is if we wished to harm someone. But where is the harm going once we realise that people are not fixed dolls who can take punishment? And where is the harm coming from when we realise there is no fixed doll here to record a grievance and administer retaliation. And even if we found such punishment fun where is the fixed doll to register that pleasure even. Once the dolls are in the bin our behaviour becomes simple and compassionate. We certainly could go and sleep naked in the street to prove a point, but who are we proving the point to? There is no fixed self anywhere to record it on. People will remember what happened, but the point is that there is no fixed doll for it to stick to in any fundamental way. So we just do what we think is right. Given a nice warm bed, and friends and family we will probably do that. That said Eckhart Tolle and Buddha both stopped after enlightenment. Buddha sat under a series of trees for 6 weeks abiding in the peace of freedom and Tolle did a similar thing and started to just sleep rough on park benches. The bliss of freedom is all we need and we tend to abandon the arbitrary world of comforts that we wrap our false selves up in. But we don't do anything harmful or crazy to prove a point. That behaviour is typical of people still attached to fixed inner dolls that they wish to adorn with achievements and personal gains. Those who have abandoned their inner doll already have peace, and there realise is no-one anyway there to gain or lose any attainments.

Judaism

 Now one religion that potentially contradicts this view of religion as removing attachment to the false idol of self is Judaism.

Judaism has two interpretations. A Jew is anyone who follows the law of Moses. Or a Jew is someone who is descended from Abraham. Clearly they are not compatible interpretations. Which is correct?

 God said that The Jews were the chosen people, the people of God. Did He mean those who follow His Law are chosen or did he mean the descendants of Abraham are chosen.

In the interpretation of Religion recently put forward in this blog God meant that anyone who follows His Law is chosen. God says in Exodus 20:6 he is "shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments." No mention of their birth, mercy comes to those that keep the commandments. Jesus indeed overcomes a prejudice he has against Gentiles to realise that God speaks to all people. It seems at the time of Jesus the Jews did believe that they were chosen based on birth rather than actions, beliefs and practice. Jesus overturns this as he does many aspects of Jewish belief at the time.

So it seems that Jews do hold to the idea that they are chosen by virtue of who they are. Alarm bells. They have erected a false idol called "The Jew". How incredibly ironic given everything that Moses did to stop people worshipping false idols. So in the mind of a Jew today there is a statue and that statue is Jewish. And they attach to that statue as though it was themselves. They are actually in league with the devil. How very ironic.

It seems then that while the "Jews" complain a lot about imprisonment from Babylonians to Egyptians to Nazis the real prison that they cannot escape from is attachment to the idea they are Jewish. I used to work with a Jew once and the very first thing he said when we met was "hello I'm Dan and unfortunately I'm a Jew." No one I ever met from anywhere in the world ever gave me their tribe alongside their name. I think he really believed he was a Jew. It was part of the statue of false identity that he carried within himself. It may well be that the last people on Earth to enlighten will be those who identity with being Jewish. It is such a gold idol in their hearts that they will never be able to let it go. It seems Moses failed. Being Jewish IS the golden calf. It never got destroyed.

Now there must be Jews who reject this. Who see their Jewishness existing just in the Law of God. There is nothing else but the Law of God. How crazy to think God cares for blood lines. Yet the Pentateuch contains continual reference to this belief. The lineage from Abraham is central to God's Will. It is so powerful that even God obeys it! When Rebekah tricks Isaac into blessing him instead of Esau, God apparently obeys this treachery and the lineage follows Jacob. Does this actually sound right that the creator of the universe should obey a treacherous lie? This isn't even bloodline in fact.

Another story which really captures this I remember but do not have time to check now. I believe it is Rebekah but could be later. She is sent away until the time when she should marry Isaac. In this time Abraham comes to sleep with her without knowing who she is. When he discovers that she has been unfaithful he demands that she is stoned to death. But she produces his staff that he left behind and he suddenly realises that it is him who broke her virginity. He calls off the stoning and all is forgiven. Now this is a perfect illustration of false self. This is quintessentially the whole problem. Abraham is attached to a false sense of self as much as any ordinary person. There is nothing spiritual about him here. When faced with his own actions he treats them differently from whether they were done by someone else. How is that possible if you see the world correctly. This is the very essence of criminality. A criminal never sees the wrong in what they do, they only the wrong is what other people do. And when that wrong turns out to be by them then they ignore it. This is the essence of evil. But it is displayed by the father of faith! How ignorant can the Pentateuch be. Now it would take considerably more expertise than I have to show whether Jesus disagreed with any of the Torah. It seems that Jesus' view was that the Torah was the Word of God and that the Church had misunderstood it. Yet when I read the early books I find so much that contradicts any wisdom to be found almost anywhere else.

p.s. people often criticise Abraham for his willingness to sacrifice his son. But that makes sense when you consider that he was selfless enough to give up his own son when commanded by God. Something Christians recognise when God himself did the same with Jesus. So this story is actually very much in keeping with the Religious view. Although if he was really committed to selfless action then offering himself up as a sacrifice is an even better test than his son. What if God had ordered Abraham to sacrifice himself: how much greater a father of faith! Ordinary soldiers do this all the time. And in Indian mythology this happens all the time too. Even the rabbit in the moon achieved this level of faith. So there are elements of truth here but for a lot of these books I find I have to struggle to get anything from them.

Religion is the removal of attachment to Self.

Hasn't that been said a million times in different ways. Jesus gave up his own life so that we might live. There has never been a greater demonstration of selfless action. As argued in the previous blog the problem lies in having an image of oneself that we then attach to as if it was our self. From this we are able to see our self as different and more important than others. From this comes all evil and suffering both against our self and others. When that attachment is gone, or we see the image as unreal and worthless (the result is the same) -- this is also call the Ego -- then we see our self and others equally and free from any "metaphysical" difference.

To recap with a scenario. We see the problem in execution by shooting. Suppose there is a single gun that is to be used to execute a row of people in which we kneel. To the gunman if they don't know anyone they are just shooting a row of people. But if they know someone in the row, suppose it is a relative, then suddenly that same situation is very different as they decide that someone is more important than the rest. This cannot be the actual truth. Most people have someone who thinks they are important so we could invite people who think anyone in the row is important. And obviously most people think they are the most important. As the gunman shoots people down the line, we can assume each person thinks its most important when the gunman gets to them, and various people in the audience have their own views who is most important. Now the gunmen get to us, that is you or me. This is the real moment that matters to us. Our own death. But actually how is this possible? We just showed that who is important depends completely upon your perspective. Its not a real thing that is true for everyone. Somehow we have this private pact with ourselves that we are most important. And yet its not that private, secret or special cos everyone is exactly the same. When the gunman shoots us it is no different from when they shoot anyone else. No matter what we do we cannot actually justify our own death as being special.

So that shows its a nonsense belief but how does it come about? The source of the problem--as argued in the previous post--is that we have an image of ourselves, labelled with our name and memories and how we and other people value us. It is this image that we really think is ourselves most of the time. And this image is pretty permanent and inflexible. As children we develop some idea who we are and that gets chiselled in time into a pretty permanent statue. Why do powerful people like to see statues of themselves? It is just the physical version of their own, in fact all of our, mind processes in creating fixed identities. When we date a partner or speak to people it is this image that we rely upon. And if it matches the image that a date is searching for then the key fits the lock. (Obviously as a relationship matures these images get replaced with more real experiences of actual people.) And these images are just that, reflections, they are not real. The whole problem of death is that as we die we drag this inflexible statue of ourselves into the death situation and it doesn't fit. That statue was never made to change or die, why do we make films with immortal stars! But because we are attached to that image, and confused it with ourselves, when we die we are profoundly confused and struggle. All kinds of difficulty arise. People often see death as lonely. Not surprising! Our statue is being thrown in the bin, abandoned, no longer respected, no longer valued or relevant. Think how Saddam Hussein felt as his statue was torn down. This is what death does to our ego. It is shocking if we confuse that statue with our self. Of course Saddam Hussein was nothing like his statue, and the toppling of that statue should have meant nothing to him, except that we suspect he believed his own propaganda and long ago lost touch with his actual self. When people say that after death there is oblivion, it's because they are thinking about what remains once their statue is in the bin. If they recognised their real self they would not think in such fixed terms. 

Now there are a few metaphors in Buddhism that have troubled me. Buddha says that his teachings are like a raft. Once we have crossed the sea we leave the raft at the shore. He also says in the Diamond Sutra that while countless being have been saved in reality no one had been saved. And in the Heart Sutra there is no attainment or path to enlightenment. The Enlightened have gained nothing, and nothing has changed.

Now these are troubling statements to anyone attached to ego or their image of self. But now I realise how to understand them without this problem.

Consider the raft. Indeed we go from raft to raft as our practice develops. Finding teaching, practice and experience that suit our development as we go. But perhaps unlike other religions we don't attach to these teachings. What was good for us, may not be good for someone else. It could even be bad for them! Expedience is the key to teachings, and a good teacher in general applies the right teaching to suit their student individually. But suppose we finally cross the sea of Samsara, the analogy has been no use to me. We just get out of that raft on the "other shore" and so what? Well the "so what" is that the ultimate raft, that has travelled with us from the start is actually our self image! When we get to the furthest shore of the sea of Samara (worldly suffering) we actually leave that statue, or image of our self behind on the shore. That has been the raft or boat that has been anchored to us and dragged us around the seas for all this time, causing all the struggle and suffering. Once we put that raft down we are no longer being tossed around on the sea! So we don't think about a new self walking up the shore, that is just a new image of us. We just think about putting the image of our self down. And letting it go as we move away. There is no vehicle for us now, we are free. It was attachment to the vehicle of Self that was the problem! Buddha actually says more than Self he says "Fixed Self". The image of our self--our internal reflection of what we know, remember and think about our self--is not real and doesn't change very much. It is ideal and actually not very useful. It is fixed and this gives us some "security." I have made it in Life, I am a big and successful man, we think. We die that moment we think this cos we start living as a statue not as a real living breathing person any more. You are really only as good as your last good deed, the statue is false. It is true there is a karma store of good deeds, but we can wipe it all out in one move if we start to erect the statue "Here stands a good person." Such a mental statue will draw demons from myriad worlds to taunt and humiliate us and pull us down.

So how can Buddha save countless beings and yet no beings were saved? So it is correct that Buddha's teachings have drawn countless beings towards the correct view and path by which they have gained liberation and enlightenment. But as we have seen Enlightenment is really the putting down of their internal fixed statues. There is a junk yard of countless statues. If Buddha said countless beings have really been saved he would be talking about the junk yard. Obviously none of these discarded statues have been saved, they were not even real people, just mental images of people. The saved beings now live without fixed statues or attachment to such things. They are free. If Buddha himself thought he had saved people he would be thinking of people's false images, but being Enlightened himself he knows that the true self is infinite and quite unlike these engraved statue.

So how can we follow a path to Enlightenment that doesn't even exist? And when we Enlighten there is no attainment or change. When the unenlightened mind thinks about itself and other people it thinks of fixed ideal statues. It is completely attached to its own statue in particular, and perhaps the statues of friends and family too. I've not mentioned it but there is a dark side to this also, because while it can be attached, it can also be repelled. That attachment can he hateful and loathing of the statues of other people. But the result is the same we anchor into statues that we drag around with us. I say "drag" because while the world is constantly flowing and changing the statue is relatively fixed and so it never fits into the real situation and is awkward and troublesome. Being attached to an image of our self we don't ever really fit into any situation. Things feel wrong. But when we Enlighten there is a sudden switch to rejecting statues themselves. That is not liking or disliking the statue or self-image we have formed, but suddenly realising that the self-image is an imposter all together. Why carry this worthless piece of junk around when we have our actual self: living and breathing right here, right now, free, easy and always with us without any problem and all the time. Our real self changes with the situation, it is not burdened with being good or bad, liked or not liked: there is no fixed statue here that lasts even a split second upon which to hang anything. The moment we go to hang any characteristic the moment is gone. We are always moving forward, but effortlessly like the water in a river slowly flowing and going wherever it goes it doesn't even need to know where or how. It just flows. So when we Enlighten we slough off the path, the anchors, the vessel or ship that has kept us at sea for so long. In a sense all these things do exist, but they end up in the junk yard. It is stepping away from that vehicle of self-image that we confuse with our true self and which we think wrongly is journeying to some destination of Enlightenment that is the actual problem. Some people indeed can have sudden enlightenment at any moment. They suddenly realise the imposter of fake self and reject it. Once we reject it we are already in touch with true self. It is enough to just move far enough away from the tangible fake self so that we can see it to have entered True Self. Anything you think is you, anything that makes you special or unspecial is just that fake self. It is for the bin. Buddha said all things are non-self, but I wonder if the most important part of this is rejecting the tangible false obvious self that we hold on to in place of our freedom. The tangible self is quite vast though it includes the self that our parents gave us, the one our friends believe in, the one we have built socially: it is all those tangible things we have accumulated and believe make us. All this distracts us from the true self that is actually doing this grasping for something solid. Realise that this grasping is for something fake, that weighs us down, and see it go in the bin as worthless.

There is no point trying to discover what our true self is, to start sculpting a new statue: by now we should be sick of fixed tangible statues that take our place. We want to live right now as we truly are, and look at the Self now as hopeless and worthless substitute. We discard this shell on the beach. And so it is quite right, leaving all images of our self behind, no longer confusing our true self with some limited small fixed mental image, indeed nothing does really change. Its the same world and life, our bodies, lives and minds are the same but gradually we start to see those thoughts, words and actions that we did based upon a fixed idea of our self and replace them with thoughts, words and actions based upon rejecting a foreign fixed sense of self. For instance we are more open to other people cos as the gun goes down the firing line we see each death the same. We realise that each life being extinguished is the same and when the gun gets to us it means nothing more special than when it shot the person before or after in the line. This does not make life any less special, but it evens it out. We value others more and our self less so that we see them the same. We access other lives with the same freedom and interest that we access our own. The world is now vast as we access all parts equally instead of haunting just the small world around this precious solid statue that we used to worship. We see things clearly, space is open and not distorted around a huge gravitational mass of our imploded self reflected self-image. Death, suffering and bad times are now no longer things that happen to other people and which we shy away from in fear. They happen all the time, and when they happen to us it is no different from when it happens to others. Good times are also everywhere to see, and sometime they happen to others and sometime our self: it doesn't matter. And so we are free, the anchor is broken and we exist everywhere without care or worry.

Its a broad statement but aren't all religious people seeking this exact same thing?

Is Death the problem OR am I the problem?

So we can discuss death. We can discuss what it is, how we should approach it, whether there is life after death and all sorts of things. But in doing this are we really approaching the problem of death?

So what is most noticeable about death? It is that all things die, including ourselves.

But there is something else most notable about death. It only really matters when it happens to us. We watch the news every day and find out that people have died and we have response, but the world goes on. Sometimes people very close to us die and it seems that our life cannot go on. But it does. We get over it eventually. But there is that person whose death is utterly catastrophic: when we die. Life does not go on after that. It is game over.

And yet this must be a lie because this is true for everyone. All those people in the news who die day after day, their death is utterly catastrophic for them but not for me. And likewise my death is utterly catastrophic for me but not them. How is this possible? How is my death so important to just me and no one else?

Well it must be because of self-consciousness. When I die, this also ends the self-reflection so I cannot see myself anymore. My death is actually the same as anyone else's death, what makes it unique to me is that I am turned in on myself to create a self-consciousness and an observer of myself. When I die what is unique to that death is the loss of that self-reflection. I lose my reflected self not my real self.

Imagine 2 mirrors reflecting each other. Each mirror can see itself reflected in the other mirror. To the outsider we break a mirror and it is just a broken mirror, but to this pair of self-reflecting mirrors they lose the world of reflections "inside" themselves. So it is with the self. But that world of reflections is not real: all there is is just 2 mirrors. This is how "my" death becomes a special problem for "me". But it is not a "real" problem. If SRG says one thing its that we cannot have a reflection of our actual self. The real self/mirror is a condition of the reflected self/mirror. It cannot be the same as it.   

Now another way to look at this is to ask how does "my life" or "my death" become filled with "me"? We know there are billions of people in the world, yet this one somehow is special, it is "me." How does this "meness" come about. If we look at the "facts" we see a world of bodies and minds and people getting old and dying and people getting born and the world going around in a giant circle but there is nothing special about a particular person: every one is special. If the Western World has stumbled upon anything its this gradual realisation that everyone is important equally. So again how do I become myself, and how is this more important that others? The answer is called "attachment" in Buddhism. The world is like a river, with bodies and minds flowing through time from birth to death and maybe beyond (it doesn't matter). The key thing we do is cast an anchor into this process so that we get dragged along with one of these bodies and minds. As life progresses and the body quite naturally ages this anchor appears to drag us ever closer to death. But if we stop and look the other way: what is being dragged along through our life? Our body and identity may be at one end of the anchor, but what is at the other? The answer is nothing. The anchor is there, but nothing is being anchored. There is no ship being dragged along. Nothing is being dragged through life with us, there is just the body and mind and its identity and the anchor and nothing else. If we dismantle the anchor then we just have a world and a life unfolding quite naturally and nothing is heading towards deaths or getting old or anything. Nothing is actually happening!

This is an identical realisation as above, where the "self" is just a reflection in a mirror but has no existence of itself. The mirror finds that reflection very precious as it believes it is "itself" but it is just a reflection it is not real. The "actual" mirror is the one doing the reflecting and it is like any other mirror. The anchor is what ties the mirror to its reflection, but there is nothing but a reflection doing the anchoring.

So actually death is the same for everyone and is as normal as hearing about a death on the news. What makes it a problem is the anchor that we have to a particular body or bodies and the belief that there is something casting that anchor.  When we realise that the death of our body does not drag anything down, cos there was nothing there anyway to drag down we are free of death. Yet our death still happens quite normally as if it were someone else's death.