The unchanging feeling of self. A normal brainstate of the human - necessarily false (not in line with the facts - change has occured/is occuring)
So we can say that we experience a feeling that is false. In this we are the same.
Like a rainbow, perhaps: a persistent appearance, a kind of optical illusion. Or a mirage. Or a process? A river is always changing, but it remains: a river.
Antonio Damasio, Self Comes to Mind
The answers are unequivocal. There is indeed a self, but it is a process, not a thing, and the process is present at all times when we are presumed to be conscious. We can consider the self process from two vantage points. One is the vantage point of an observer appreciating a dynamic object—the dynamic object constituted by certain workings of minds, certain traits of behavior, and a certain history of life. The other vantage point is that of the self as knower, the process that gives a focus to our experiences and eventually lets us reflect on those experiences.
I’m not sure about this. When one looks ‘within’ there is simply a field of awareness - or consciousness - and its contents (thoughts, feelings, sensations, memories, perceptions, reactions, etc). Consciousness and its contents.
One of the many contents are gut feelings, which come and go; including the sense of identification with certain contents, which also comes and goes. These identifications can be in conflict with each other, such as when one feels envy, and another part of oneself feels ashamed to be envious, or judges the envy, etc.
Every content has an aspect of ‘self’ about it, but the contents are all fragmented off from each other and in a process of flux - so the feeling that any one content is continuous is false.
The movement of water is continuous, but the content of the water is never the same. And if the conditions that make a river possible change - dry up - the movement of water also dries up (together with its contents).
Time for you to trust me. 
I’m reporting my experience, not claiming it is a ‘fact.’
Yes about the water content. The movement might not be continuous, rivers go dry in some seasons.
I trust you, but I’m just raising a question 
.
You see, I remember being aware of the room around me, and of waking up from a dream, when I was 2 or 3 years old.
But can I say that the awareness of the room around me now is the same as it was then? The fact of awareness (or consciousness) might be the same, but the content of ‘me’ has changed tremendously since then (as have the circumstances). Indeed, I can only access the previous content of ‘me’ through memory and comparison (which are capacities of the mind, not identities).
So is the ‘me’ continuous? - or is it memory that has its own continuity, which is then mistaken by the brain (through identification) as a continuous ‘me’?
This raises the question - which is the one you may also be asking - of whether there can be an awareness (or consciousness) without any psychological contents at all?
To push back (just for the hell of it) - a rainbow could be said to be exactly what it looks like : refracted light in the sky, or colours in the sky. (if we don’t get too hung up on our current understanding of colour perception)
In what way can we say that the self is unchanging? Other than that the process of self produces the feeling (illusion) of sameness.
The patterns that we see in the swirling river aren’t necessarily lies (the flowing water is really forming patterns) - unless we consider the patterns to be forms, or entities, somehow separate from or independant of the river (and its bed). The feeling of me being an unchanging entity would be a lie of this order.
Are you truly asking this … or do you already know, with reasonable certainty, what the answer is?
Why “(illusion)?” That’s a conclusion, right? Unless putting it in (…) suggests the jury’s still out for you?
Maybe. Maybe not. (My go-to ‘answer’ for pretty much everything right?!) Maybe the me being felt is not a form or entity or separate from anything else. How would we know?
No, for the moment, forget about looking within. Let’s first just look very simply at the world around us. What do we see? We are talking about looking, so let’s start with the eye itself, what it sees.
All I am saying is that anytime I say ‘I’, it is already in the past - it is a premature closure or artificial full-stop in what is a continuously fluctuating process.
I am whatever content projects itself into awareness (thoughts, feelings, emotions, sensations, etc) - as well as the moment of identification with those contents (which comes in only after the contents have already appeared).
The question is, am ‘I’ different from those contents? When there is the content ‘sadness’, am ‘I’ different from that sadness? Or I am that sadness? - and so this apparent sense of being different (from sadness) may be an illusion created by my lack of awareness.
I think these are genuine questions for me.
I am obviously not free from a sense of ‘me’ (which has a feeling of continuity); but there are moments when there is no identification, and the sense of me (together with the labelling of different contents as ‘mine’, ‘me’, etc) doesn’t arise.
That’s why I feel the question of whether there can be an awareness without any psychological content is a worthwhile one.
Colors, shapes, lines, textures.
Thanks for sharing your view (1) on what ‘I’ is. It makes sense to me. But (you knew that was coming!), I think there might be another perhaps realer I that lies beneath the Buddhist aggregate I you describe.
Your 2 points perhaps towards the realer I: ‘pure’ awareness (consciousness, being, existence, brahman, the tao, it has many names). Or maybe that’s wishful thinking, fairy tales for spiritual seekers.
What say you?
Are these outside or inside the body?
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If there is nothing that we can identify about the self that is unchanging (apart from the impression of always being the same me) the conclusion must be that the impression is erroneous. In the same way that there is no reason to postulate that gravity (on Earth) causes objects to float in the air - The story that rocks always fall is not on a par with the story that rocks might sometimes levitate.
When discussing the self (or gravity) what is the reason for postulating that what has never been the case may be a possibility? There may be an unchanging I somewhere (whatever that means) or floating rocks, but if we have no reason to believe that this is a possibility (other than unfalsifiable stories that have not been demonstrated and have no predictive power) - how does this further our understanding?
The fact that we have pictures of floating rocks, or the feeling of being an unchanging me, might give us reason to postulate their existence - but it is nevertheless unreasonable to believe that they actually exist. Why defend irrational propositions?
The only seemingly constant thing about the I, is that the process has a tendancy to produce the impression of being an immutable center at odds with its environment.
As we discussed on the other thread, Krishnamurti made a distinction between reality and truth - where reality (in this specific usage) means any ‘thing’ put together by thought. This means that all the contents of consciousness - suffering, fear, envy, nationalism, religious belief, the sense of ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘mine’, etc - are put together by our thinking. And truth - for Krishnamurti - can only be when the contents of this consciousness have been entirely emptied. That is why I asked whether there can be an awareness, or attention, without any psychological content (without any ‘thing’ put there by thought).
Is what is left-over in this no-thing-ness, in this attention empty of thought, what Krishnamurti called creation?
As you know, the early brahmin priests performed Vedic sacrifices to maintain cosmic and social order, and negotiate harvests and monsoon rains. The Yajna ritual used fire and ‘soma’ (a hallucinogenic ritual drink ingested by priests), with the aim of propitiating or controlling various personifications of nature (i.e. gods) through the sacrifice of animals, milk, butter, grain, etc.
However, it seems that some of these early brahmins reflected on the nature of ritual sacrifice and began to internalise it; and so we find in some pre-Upanishadic forest treatises (the Aranyakas) that there is a development away from the merely ritualistic perspective of the earlier Vedic community, towards a notion that the power that underlies the rituals has greater significance than their mere performance. The word they used for this power of the sacrifice - ‘brahman’ (meaning “great”, “greater”) - was just an adjective, not a noun.
By the time of the Upanishads, this internalisation of the sacrifice had come to mean the identification of the inner self of the brahmin with this power of the sacrifice. But what was this ‘inner self’? The innermost self of human beings was simply their breath - ‘atman’ (which literally means “breath”).
Breath is an energy, a vital movement, that we feel inwardly in our bodies, upon which we depend for life, moment by moment. In that sense, it is a perfect metaphor for the inner ‘life-energy’ that animates all living things. But it is just a metaphor for the ‘inner’, and was never intended to encapsulate the complexity of everything that occurs in nature.
More broadly, as the ancients could see, the universe also has some kind of life-energy, which explodes in stars and suns, in rains and storms, in lightening - a power that can be reified (for purposes of communication) as a noun: the great power, the immeasurable power - or ‘brahman’ - of nature, of the universe.
This universal energy is obviously also the source of our own small life-energy, the energy of our own breath (‘atman’). Indeed, the realisation that our life energy and the energy of the whole universe are in some sense the same energy is just what that famous phrase ‘atman-brahman’ is supposed to point to.
But it does not mean that the self, the ‘I’, the ‘me’, is eternal, all-powerful, or metaphysically real. If anything it means that the raw energy of the universe - which itself has no identity, no fixed continuity, no sense of ‘I’ or ‘me’ or ‘mine’ - is what is real; and that we (as apparently separate ‘I’,s ‘me’,s ‘mine’s) are fundamentally unreal. In that sense (at a fundamental level) we are nothing and also everything, but not anything more or anything less than that.
So whatever our minds project as content - such as suffering, fear, envy, nationalism, religious belief, or the sense of ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘mine’ - is fundamentally illusion, ‘maya’. It belongs to ‘reality’ (used in Krishnamurti’s sense), not to truth. That is why there must be emptiness for creation to be:
Creation is continuous. It has no beginning and no end, it’s not born out of knowledge. And death may be the meaning of creation. Not having next life a better opportunity, better house, better refrigerator. It may be a sense of tremendous creation, endlessly, without beginning and end. (Ojai, Talk 3, 1985)
Creation is something that is most holy; that’s the most sacred thing in life and if you have made a mess of your life, change it. Change it today, not tomorrow. If you are uncertain, find out why and be certain. If your thinking is not straight, think straightly, logically. Unless all that is prepared, all that is settled, you can’t enter into this world, into the world of creation. (Chennai, Talk 3, 1986)
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What I’ve been getting at is a bit different:
Why entertain the possibility that an irrational proposition might be true?
A good, reasonable, rational question! A few ideas:
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The possibility might not actually be irrational, the rational root might be hidden from view. Perhaps not in the sense of formal logic, rather in the way Bohm’s implicate order is hidden from view?
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Ratiocination might not be the right tool to get at the truth/falseness of this kind of proposition.
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Feeling (intuition) feels like it trumps logic. Perhaps it sometimes does?
For me, “the self is unchanging” means it is not of change, not of time, of space, of causality, usw. I don’t envision some solid block of static Self filling the universe (though it’s a cool idea for an sf novel).
Mea culpa: I grabbed your talk of awareness with psychological content and ran with it. Thanks for clarifying what you were getting at.
Yes! We are everything and nothing. Rack ‘em!
Yes again. And always good to remember, to be reminded of.
You know my view: Everything (every thing) is a story. But some stories are less fictional than others. Some might even point at that which is not a story, if such a thing exists. Sinking into myself and finding-feeling the Ur-Self is an act of storymaking. But the story might be ‘based on truth.’ It certainly feels that way!
Though I grew up Catholic, I’ve never thought of myself as a person of faith. But when it comes to the Self, I might just have a smidgen of faith. Not enough to believe in the existence of Self, but enough to be somewhat open to it.
Theoretical Physicists have rational reasons (demonstrated reasons in apparent reality) for positing unknowns beyond the seemingly fundamental laws. Positing things for no reason is the problem (ie. invisible, undetectable teapots possibly existing in orbit around unknown planets). If you have no rational reasons to posit that something is illogical, what basis is there to do so?
Just because we have not seen something clearly does not suggest that further vagueness will clarify the matter in any way. In our case - the human process of the self; we have the possibility of first clarifying the shared, explicate phenomenon. It would be a waste of time to jump immediately into immaginative speculation about what might be beyond our ability to apprehend (beyond the immediate facts)
How so? Other than that we may continue to believe in stuff that is demonstrably false. (even when confronted with undeniable evidence - see “Young Earthers” or optical illusions)
Yes, but if I might say - without sounding dismissive 
- if we can put this business of stories and fictions to one side for a moment… what do we really mean by
?
Don’t we mean simply exploring the nature of the mind - its states of awareness, attention, its capacity for thought, feeling, etc?
Then we might see that the projection of an Ur-Self is indeed an act of story-telling by the mind, a movement of our thinking - that is, a reality (a ‘thing’) created by our thinking. Right?
The story of the Self (like the story of God) brings with it its own train of feelings and associations, which may make it feel ‘real’. But is it truly real?
From the unreal lead me to the real!*
For Krishnamurti, it is the ending of the self - a genuine psychological death - which opens up the possibility of truth, of creation.
From death lead me to immortality!*
That is why I feel it is worth asking whether there can be a state of attention in which there is no psychological content - i.e. no self - at all.
(*from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad).
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You ask, what to see. But is this “what” really important? If one looks, has an open eye, one is aware of the looking, in seeing all the things around, all the things one is in relation with. Our human problem is not the “what”, but the psychological reaction taking place. The usual reaction of people is actually, whenever they notice something, to ask how it is to be understood. Should it be considered as this or as that, useful or not, good or bad, fact or idea, etc. . And on such determinations the action is directed. From these determinations a chain of reactions takes its beginning. And there is conflict. Inwardly, because the correctness of the determination must be proven in the action, outwardly, because one equally has to deal with other people who see things differently.
There, the field is addressed, in which the emergence of the idea of a separate I or self must be located, as well as the continuity of this feeling with regard to its reality.
But it is cheap to simply claim that this idea is generated by thinking, as it is usually done dogmatically by invoking Krishnamurti, to reduce this idea to the subjectivity of the past. The persistent ego feeling then remains next to a “better” knowledge of its illusionarity and it is a matter of believing and committing oneself to which side one chooses. So, if thinking generates this conception, then the process of continuous generation of the conception and the feeling must be understood from the movement of the psychological reaction in the forming the relationship to reality and the way man is conscious of this form.
But I am afraid there is little interest in such investigation.
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