Something and nothing

I think that's a misunderstanding, though. The "self" or "sense of self" is the clusters of sensations, perceptions, thoughts etc we think make "me". No self doesn't mean non-existence, it means no longer identifying the sensations and thoughts and such as defining an individual "me" separate from "everything else", and recognizing that the flow of sensations, perceptions etc is a flow, not a solid permanent object.
You've said as much yourself, before, no?

-ona

I'm not sure if you have read all the "beyond technical fourth path" material. they are talking about "fourth path" as the traditional arhathship and beyond are several more paths (I think five six and seven). It's not "no-self." -- that's very basic and what you are talking about here. It's about eradicating forever the "sense of self" like that Bernadette Peters lady claims happened. No more "selfing."
Which is why I don't (so far) get it. Who says they aren't selfing?

(sorry, dinner's served, I'll have to ponder that later)

I'm not sure if you have read all the "beyond technical fourth path" material. they are talking about "fourth path" as the traditional arhathship and beyond are several more paths (I think five six and seven). It's not "no-self." -- that's very basic and what you are talking about here. It's about eradicating forever the "sense of self" like that Bernadette Peters lady claims happened. No more "selfing."
Which is why I don't (so far) get it. Who says they aren't selfing?


-michaelmonson

I have read it. This is what I meant before by sometimes things don't make any sense at a certain point in your practice, and then later they do. Or maybe they never do. For me, this doesn't quite make sense. Like I sort of half get it, but some of it goes over my head. But that doesn't mean it doesn't perfectly describe other people's experiences. "That Bernadette (Roberts!) lady" isn't even a hardcore dharmist, but an elderly Catholic, so she certainly doesn't have any stake in the same maps, charts, graphs or paths whatsoever. It seems the experience of the sense of self ceasing to arise at all happens for some people. Whether that will ever be something I experience or not I have no idea. Where I am at the moment I don't feel any particular desire to explore that territory. I may sing a different tune in 2 months, 2 years, 2 decades...or never.

That said, if the sense of self can vanish ever-so-briefly sometimes, who is to say it won't for whatever reason at some point vanish for longer periods, or even permanently? I would not have guessed when I first started meditating that it was possible to have periods of time where there is utter stillness and silence in the mind, instead of an endless stream of narrative chit-chat and anxiety. I would never have imagined I could generate an intense bliss state just by wishing it so; or sit in front of a crystal ball, chant funny words, and see an intense and bizarre vision.

So who knows?

The paradox that Mike is pointing at is important, I think: that sometimes people who are so impressed with how different things seem after 'a fundamental turnabout in consciousness'-- are not well able to present that sense of difference very skillfully. So you find people getting all wrought up about their own nonexistence, and such absurdities, and resorting to strained locutions about their new identities.

My own experience suggests that it is more how we understand ourselves-- as contingent, responsive, mutable, temporary, permeable beings with no fixed boundary between ourselves and 'the all of it'-- than our unquestionable existence that is changed. [SOMEBODY has got to be asking or answering that question, after all! As Mike says.]

Maybe part of the trouble is that we don't have a clear understanding or agreement what we mean by 'self' in the first place; no one [as far as I know] seems to claim that he or she no longer had a BODY, because they were enlightened. And that would seem to be a more usual indication of existence than the presence or absence of a 'self.'

Having backtracked and reread the earlier parts of this thread, I think what I wrote is sorta beside the point. Sorry, guys.

I followed Chris' link and noted the skillful presentation of trek-chod that he'd brought to the conversation-- from my point of view the best part of it, too. Then I realized that my having encountered that, a decade ago, probably explains my lack of interest in the AF/PCE approximations of the same practice-- which seem to me to lack the elegance, simplicity, and availability under all circumstances, of the rek-chod practice.

Having backtracked and reread the earlier parts of this thread, I think what I wrote is sorta beside the point. Sorry, guys.
I followed Chris' link and noted the skillful presentation of trek-chod that he'd brought to the conversation-- from my point of view the best part of it, too. Then I realized that my having encountered that, a decade ago, probably explains my lack of interest in the AF/PCE approximations of the same practice-- which seem to me to lack the elegance, simplicity, and availability under all circumstances, of the rek-chod practice.

-kategowen

Rek chod?

I think one of the biggest hangups is that a lot of people use no-self and not-self interchangeably. Given the degree to which people love to talk about anatta, I am sometimes amazed at how widespread this confusion is. And I think it's crucial to tease apart.

Some people's practice revolves around the absence of any fixed, consistent, I-identifying factor of the human being (and even further, for the more far-out practitioners), and some people's practice revolves around a coming to understand that the apparently integral elements of (especially mental) experience, like emotions and thoughts and desires, are not themselves as integrally bound with the human subject as the human subject tends to perceive them. I'm one of the latter; the Pali anatta means 'not-self'. The Pali is a little confusing here; I have seen what the Pali for no-self would be, and it's a similar word. But there's also natthatta, which Wikipedia glosses as 'no soul', and which the Buddha specifically repudiates in the Samyutta Nikaya. Another way I find it useful to think about it is that no-self is an assertion about the nature of the world, and not-self is a characteristic that something can have (and almost always does, as it turns out)

Nevertheless I think the distinction between not- and no-self is quite useful on the level of daily practice. If anything, it makes it easier to answer Chris's question half the time: it's really quite easy to talk about exactly what we mean by not-self, because we don't ever need to define the self. We just need to recognize that the khandhas are not it. Luckily there's more terminology that is even more concrete: he talks about 'I-making' and 'Mine-making', which again is pretty matter of fact. The question of 'but what is I?' is a lot less immediate than recognizing the process of identifying with or claiming ownership of some conditioned quality or phenomenon.

As for the former, the no-self, I am less learned. In the suttas, when he was asked about the existence of a self, the Buddha more or less refused to answer. Nevertheless the concept of no-self is also obviously pretty well established in every tradition—I just don't bother with it myself. It's one of those things, for me, which emerges as an understood truth as an effect of other action, rather than direct action or consideration. That is, that in order to come to awareness of no-self, it's more effective to cultivate wisdom and concentration and consider qualities that are directly accessible to the subject (like for instance, the weaker not-self of above), rather than actively trying to demonstrate to myself that I don't exist.

"not self" -- the fact that there is no solid lasting self to be found anywhere one looks
"self" -- the instant coming together of patterns, feelings, awarenesses, actions that will emerge within separate entities to form separate persons moment to moment.

I don't think it is a problem to acknowledge the fact that there are at any given moment relative separate people doing things, like me writing this and you reading this. Denying that fact for any reason is not what "no self" is about. "No self" is just a subtle shift in which one sees the truth of how fluid and interconnected the whole things is, how it is a moment to moment creation of the brain, created depended upon infinite little causes. This shift can bring some freedom and loosen some suffering. For me and maybe you, it also brings an awareness that there is a place of seeming emptiness where it all begins again and again.

I think the "self" also is the thing that practices, that thinks about practice and talks about practice.

Both things are true -- there is self and there is no self and it is no problem.

I find that any kind of fascination or interest or obsession with eliminating the self or the feeling of a self is just beside the point and probably ends up making a problem where non needs to exist. If one just practices open awareness moment to moment with a new, fresh mind, one can be comfortable with both having and being a separate self while also knowing it's real, transient insubstantial nature. No big deal.

Enjoy yourself. Why not?

Add: Also, to me the important thing on this is not so much to be found in Buddhist scholarship (though of course that has a place) but in what you see in practice about who and what you really are and how this helps you be more intimate with your life. It may not be easy to understand, explain, talk about, but there is a way to live in which the self-centered drive can be altered just enough to bring more ease, freedom, choice, flexibility, light.

I don't think the issue at hand here is no-self vs. not-self. I think it's more about the degree of detail one looks at the process of self-making.

In my practice over the last year or so, I've been looking a lot at body sensations, I've looked at thoughts, aversion & craving, feelings (in the western sense, not vedana) to some degree and I've seen that none of these are me, mine or myself. Now when some of these come up I can take a step back and watch them arise and pass and go on with life. I think (from what I've read in books and forums and such) that this can become more nuanced and it seems to me that this is exactly where people engaged in those practices are coming from. They talk a lot about the sense of being (which I understand as the feeling that I exist in the world as a thing or a being, whatever this I is) and how there is still a self-making process that is focused on that sense of being. I think they are trying to target this more subtle process of self-making and see through it at that level as well much in the same way that I worked (and still do) to see through the sense that I am this body or these thoughts or my views.

I don't think the issue at hand here is no-self vs. not-self. I think it's more about the degree of detail one looks at the process of self-making.
In my practice over the last year or so, I've been looking a lot at body sensations, I've looked at thoughts, aversion & craving, feelings (in the western sense, not vedana) to some degree and I've seen that none of these are me, mine or myself. Now when some of these come up I can take a step back and watch them arise and pass and go on with life. I think (from what I've read in books and forums and such) that this can become more nuanced and it seems to me that this is exactly where people engaged in those practices are coming from. They talk a lot about the sense of being (which I understand as the feeling that I exist in the world as a thing or a being, whatever this I is) and how there is still a self-making process that is focused on that sense of being. I think they are trying to target this more subtle process of self-making and see through it at that level as well much in the same way that I worked (and still do) to see through the sense that I am this body or these thoughts or my views.


-eran

I think I'd agree with that, eran. I think that's what some people are looking at - a deeper and more nuanced attention to this arising of phenomena that we tend to label "self."

@Mike, re: "I think the "self" also is the thing that practices, that thinks about practice and talks about practice"

Yes and no. For the purposes of getting around in the world and having conversation, it's just plain normal and simple to say "I am meditating, I am thinking about my practice and I am talking about my practice." But from the perspective of the practice of looking at how the sense of "self" arises from sensations, perceptions, etc. "I" am not meditating or thinking or talking. Thoughts arise by themselves. I don't make them arise. Sitting is just what's happening. Talking is just what's happening. This is where people say "there's no one doing anything" and it makes sense at a certain level. When one is attentive to that sense of "self" in a close enough way, there isn't really anyone doing anything at all. There's just stuff happening by itself, just this stream of experience arising and passing away.

It's on the one hand not a practical way to talk about normal day to day life, because it is difficult to express in words without sounding like a zombie idiot, but at the level of practice one can experience this sense that there is no one doing anything. Stuff's just happening by itself, like a flow of consciousness and experience and perception. And then there's the activity of the mind that creates the story of Me Doing Stuff on top of what's already happening, creating a sense of self that is then invested with far more importance than it needs to have.

But seeing through that illusion of there being a Me that is running the show is actually not nihilistic, but liberating. It's like taking off the mask and costume that you were wearing and giving up a role you were trying to play in the theater of life, and just allowing life to be and each moment to express itself through you freely.

I'm writing off the top of my head here, so not sure this will make sense. I'm sure many a good wise sage has probably expressed it much better than my feeble attempt.

I think Eran has found a main vein
Maybe there's a gross set of phenomena that help to generate the feeling of a self and maybe there are finer, deeper phenomena that contribute to the same feeling, or a finer, more diffuse feeling. Maybe these are all part of the same process.
There seems to be two, if not more, ways to approach this:
1. Investigate it all, right down to the "microscopic" level if you have to, taking vipassana to its limits in an attempt to "grok" the processes that seem to generate the sense of a permanent, enduring self so that you can see how the processes are constructed, hoping to eliminate them by breaking them into smaller, more fundamental or atomic pieces
2. Accept that there is an arising sense the there is a permanent, enduring self, knowing that this is just a chimera and part of the ongoing stream of experience that we cannot avoid, knowing that this, too, is another empty and conditioned part of relative experience
Yeah? No? Maybe?

-cmarti

I love both approaches.

Yeah? No? Maybe?

-cmarti

When I feel I've reached the limit of the vipassana approach, I'll consider the other option. For now, I'm soldiering on. At the same time, though, there is also acceptance that whatever still arises does arise and that sometimes I still get caught up in stuff. So I'd say both.

I must admit here that for some of this discussion, I just may not be quite awake, you know? I'm snoozing a bit.

I see "things just happening" as Ona just wrote about -- that seems real and clear. However, I have NEVER seen the stuff that is just happening as "just happening by itself ... just a stream of experience arising and passing away." I hear that a lot and I just don't get it. Maybe I will someday, but not yet.

For me, right now at least -- it looks to me like a bunch of stuff happened that eventually caused a Mike Monson thing to be born. This Mike Monson thing then started getting effected by more stuff happening and then began to make more stuff happen and all kinds of new causes and effects occured. Needs, thirsts, desires, instincts came into being that help to create all kinds of patterns of behavior.

Stuff happens now because of something the Mike Monson thing did or said or felt or thought previously. Sure, the stuff is empty of a solid self, but it isn't just happening on it's own, it's from me (and you you you and them and it), part, of me, helps to create me and other entities exisitences all the time. It's empty and yet very very full. It dies completely each moment and is born completely each moment. Eventually the thing that acts that looks like a Mike Monson will fade away as a separate entitiy and then the causes and effects from that thing will slowly die out and become weaker but something will always exist from me by me because of me. Something. Nothing.

I have sensations. I watch them. They come in patterns. They are based on other stuff, sensations, objects -- causes.

So is that weird? It's certainly what I see happening right now, at the level of insight that I have right now.

"... it looks to me like a bunch of stuff happened that eventually caused a Mike Monson thing to be born. This Mike Monson thing then started getting effected by more stuff happening and then began to make more stuff happen and all kinds of new causes and effects occured. Needs, thirsts, desires, instincts came into being that help to create all kinds of patterns of behavior."

This seems to posit an ongoing, continuously existing Mike Monson. If you keep looking for that you just won't find it, I'm afraid. It's a story that is pieced together after the fact to explain to your conscious mind how "you" manage your life, or at minimum how your life is an ongoing story with a hero or a victim -- you.

Sorry, no such luck

-cmarti

Interesting.
I completely disagree with what you said I just posited. You might be right but I don't relate to it at all. Could be in the way I expressed this, maybe. What I said isn't based upon "looking for" anything.
But, let me see if I can get something clear -- you don't see that there are sensations, objects, actions done by separate entities that are caused/influenced/the result of previous actions? It's all separate, random, COMPLETELY unrelated stuff?

Oh, and by "Mike Monson thing" I mean this body/mind right hear doing stuff, eating, pooping, peeing, having kids, taking care of those kids, driving, sleeping, working, and on and on. This thing right here. The thing that has a brain that makes up all kinds of stories about Mike Monson and you and you and you. The thing that has a brain and memories and trauma and DNA.

So, to me, there is this "Mike Monson" thing that is a bare body in the world, that is also a mind and a force upon the world, that makes up stories about itself, that is completely temporary yet completely not.

@mike - I don't think that's weird at all. I think it's more a "macro" versus "micro" level of observation, but in time I've found the micro-level impacts the macro-level in terms of how I perceive day to day experience.

What I experience is that on the macro level we are a lot less central to all that than we like to think. It's not "me me me". It's just life unfolding. I'm along for the ride. Sure things arise from causes and conditions. But are you God, up there pushing the buttons and deciding which cause is going to trigger which condition?

Say you toss a coin out the window. It might hit someone on the head, triggering a heart attack and kill them. It might fall in front of a beggar who was desperate for a coin to buy some food and is now satisfied. It might fall in front of a dog who eats it and dies. It might fall in front of a child who is so surprised and delighted they never forget that magical moment when a coin came from the sky just when they were wishing for it. Were you in charge of that outcome?

What if you swerve to avoid running over a frog in the road. You might give your passenger whiplash and get sued. You might fail to miss the frog, killing it anyway. You might lose control of the car and have an accident. You might neatly miss the frog and feel good about it. Is it all on you exactly how that plays out?

Say you kill the frog. What if that then leads to a profound conversation about life and death with your passenger which leads to an insight about life that blows your mind? What if it leads to a moment of regret that reminds you of your aunt you haven't spoken to in 10 years and then you call her and manage to have a lovely talk right before she dies, making her very happy and she leaves you all her money? What if it makes you aware of how much you love your child/pet/friends?

You see how complex it gets?

That's one level at which I don't feel like I'm in charge, I guess. Does that make sense? I'm probably on a mad tangent at this point.

Mike, I probably misunderstood you, but I am asserting that there is no agency, no manager, no you in charge. It seems that way until we look closely, and then that illusion falls away.

-cmarti

There is no me in charge but there is a Mike Monson thing doing stuff on earth that is caused by other stuff not random.

I don't see "in charge" as an issue. "in charge" connotes a solid self that I certainly don't see anywhere. but, at the same time, I certainly see patterns and interconnectness and causes and effects in infinite glory everywhere all the time. I really see it.



It's not an agency or manager, But, it is a movement of stuff all together.

There is no me in charge but there is a Mike Monson thing doing stuff on earth that is caused by other stuff not random.


-michaelmonson

Is that just cheating by referring to yourself in the third person? (teasing!)