Hi Inquiry
I agree.
I was thinking about how the word “self” is generally used on the forum, and I think it’s something like an attachment to learnt ignorance. Reality challenges this conditioning but we don’t want to let go, and this prevents us from properly meeting the unknown. Of course if we can see the danger in that …
Whenever ‘mind’ is suggested, it has to include the body too. For example, consider the QOTD about observing without the movement of mind. When we don’t make that separation between mind and body, by extension it means that the body won’t be making unnecessary movements/gestures and such a fine-tuning and optimization of the physical/body has to have happened to allow such an observation without any movement of mind. What I am getting at is, there is a process involved and that self doesn’t end with a bang as someone here puts it. Further, to ask to observe without any movement of mind hints that it’s absolutely possible to distance from the entire content of ourselves as body-mind complex, without letting a sense of separation arise. What is the feeling equivalent verbal expression of that state where there is a complete sense of relationship and belonging to the other (here, the body/mind/external object) and yet there is also that complete sense of distance from it? Love?
So what can we do? At the start of this dialogue we said that unless we can do nothing then there is nothing we can do. But we haven’t really explored what this means. A mind that is doing nothing is still an active mind, is still alive. The psyche, however, only appears to come to life through a series of reactions: a trigger word or incident sets it in motion; and what sets it off is something that is already dead and gone. Can we explore this together?
First of all, I am one hundred percent self-centred. It means I can’t do a thing to sort out this conundrum of the psyche with its vast array of complications. We said all this at the start. And we haven’t looked at what it means to do nothing. The looking has nothing to do with either you or I; it is just looking. You and I with our self-centred responses only come into this when we look with prejudices and opinions, when we use the past to meet one another.
I am one hundred percent self-centred. Are you? That’s the core question. Or are you clinging to the belief in a one percent that is free, waiting for that one percent to overpower the other ninety-nine?
Love is not a sentiment. So what is it?
Let’s address the proverbial elephant in the room here. What actually is the self? No enquiry is needed, no obstacle course set by myself to begin with needs to be undertaken. I am the hider and the hidden. If a light is shone on self, illuminating its entire landscape, what actually is there? No need to concern oneself about where the light is to come from or how such a thing is to be, just what would such a light reveal. No answer is required by any self. The question is not an enquiry, because there is nothing to enquire about here. For all the talk and all the rambling self would like to do, It’s a simple matter of on / off.
I think it’s worth looking into for sure. The trigger, that is. An incident…an insult or my wife or girlfriend doing something that triggers anger. So what do you mean that the trigger is ‘already dead and gone’? My coworker says that I look like I’m gaining too much weight and I’m very sensitive about being overweight. I get angry or upset and go outside for a smoke to calm down. Why is the trigger dead and gone? Not sure I get your meaning. The conditioning is based upon the past…the conditioning that says I shouldn’t be overweight or that i SHOULD be trim and fit. Maybe that’s what you’re getting at?
Apart from when you’re having a dialogue with other people on a forum, and need to know what meaning their words have to be able to converse?
The word ‘should’ immediately creates an image of an ideal: ideal weight, ideal behaviour, ideal conduct of one sort or another. The image is a dead reaction to an actual fact. It is dead in two senses: one, because it belongs to another world, not this world as it is now; and, two, because it has its origins in the morality of the past. A single word can bring a self-image to life; but it is always a mechanical reaction.
This is correct, however the conditioning of these ideals is mostly unconscious and it’s affecting our behavior in very detrimental ways…as well as our behavior towards others.
It isn’t that we don’t want to let it go, but that we can’t let it go because it’s so deeply conditioned. Egocentricity is a result of our evolution, and our ancestors never questioned it until a few thousand years ago. Now that our predicament forces us to question it, we can’t do anything but try not to be selfish, which is futile.
Thanks for clarifying that you are self-centered. You were saying things that indicated otherwise. We’re all self-centered, with the possible exception of a few, I suspect, but how am I to know?
You say “we haven’t looked at what it means to do nothing?”. I look at it constantly, observing my self doing what it conditionally, compulsively does. This passive observation of conditioned response is as close as a self-centered mind can get to doing nothing.
You know this because you’ve turned off the self? You’re selfless? Then what are doing in this forum? You should be on the stage speaking to a large audience. You are free! We need to hear about how you found this on/off switch…without psychedelics.
Yes well thank you for that. Now you see, you did ask can self come to an end? and on being presented with something of what is actually involved in that, you have encountered something have you not?
Do you actually need to do any of this to see the psyche you yourself are?
Yes. Are you? Also one hundred percent?
So I am my ideals. That’s all I am, this bundle of ideas and images that has accumulated over time and which kicks into action each time someone presses the right or the wrong button. I am overweight; and I am sensitive about it. Have I looked at this as a fact or only as an idea? There is little point in being sensitive to a fact. Emotional reaction is not caused by the fact but by the ideas surrounding the fact. The reactions prevent me from seeing the fact itself, which may be nothing at all to do with being overweight.
I encounter things every day. Which one are you referring to?
Yes. Completely. Or as you like to put it, “one hundred percent”.
That may be the case, but I suppose we are more interested here in cultural conditioning rather than biological. Can we see where our cultural conditioning is useful and where it is destructive and contradictory?
I don’t know what you mean by psyche and self, and so cannot answer your question. You seem to be assuming that we all use words in the same way. You do understand that we are separate entities in some ways right?