Hi Nelson
What is missing?
Happiness.
When you say you are hoping for happiness, you may want to take a look at what is behind that want. The desire for happiness often comes with the thought that life will be better when you get it. The mind can imagine a future where you have everything you want and you are finally happy. However, this is just a thought. You can't know what will happen in the future.
Period!
The desire for happiness is a form of suffering. This is because it is based on the belief that something is missing from your life. You may believe that you need something outside of yourself to be happy. However, happiness, peace, joy, contentment are already present here/now. It’s only thought that says that it is not here, making it look like something else. Instead of chasing happiness, focus on being content with what is. This means accepting your current situation, even if it is not perfect (
it can’t be any other way). When you are content, you are not resisting what is happening. This allows you to experience peace and joy in the present moment.
Furthermore, “happiness” is more like a title to a book not what it is about. You can try to identify the underlying beliefs that are driving your desire for happiness – why is the lack of something particular makes you feel (describe as) unhappy. Once you become aware of these beliefs, you can start to question them. For example, if you believe that you need … (e.g. a new car) to be happy, ask yourself why this particular thing, why not something else.
What do you think will happen when you get a new car? Will it really make you happy? By questioning your beliefs, you can start to let go of them. This can help you to find happiness in the present moment, where it has always been. Any time a familiar pattern shows up, look and search for the one who is unhappy, who is hurt, who is angry, who is defending, etc,
If you share a bit more about the current “unhappiness” we can have a look together. Have in mind that this is not a therapy for the self, but seeing what is true and what is not. However, it also involves making friends with (sitting with) icky sensations, allowing them simply to just be, not wanting them to disappear or change.
I’m trying to see where I’m stuck. I can see that what really exists is this (colors, sensations, sounds, tastes, smells and thoughts), and also that the mind creates a story about an “I that is seeing this, resisting to this, etc”. What I’m doing now is trying to see this “I” more closely, especially, how thoughts and sensations creates this illusion.
Yes, we reached a point where it is seen that there is no self (all the “places” have been checked), but thoughts keeps saying it is there (doubt). Doubt is rooted in two major causes – expectations and doubting (second guessing) patterns (“personality”). Both are identification with emotions.
Expectations, are the biggest obstacle to seeing reality as it is. They are all the should’s and should-not’s, the wants and aversions – everything that we consider is the possible (best/top) outcome, to which everything is measured against. Here, it is believed that once the self is removed from the picture, there will be a sudden blast which will remove all suffering, make somehow things perfect – permanent bliss and happiness. Let me remind you, that it is not like the self was there and then it died. It was never there in the first place – it was an illusion. That illusion is not only related to the presence or absence of a entity, but all the activities, “personality” when it comes to “decision making” and emotions (thoughts about sensations) – all that it is identified with. Thus, the illusion needs to be seen at all levels – working with specific beliefs that are problematic. They will not just drop away on their own. Seeing that there is no separate self is NOT the end. Actually, it's just the beginning, the first step. Lots of further inquiry and emotional work is needed to fully live it.
It can take days, months or years, but it's different for everyone, depending on their conditioning. Many people stop here, with the first step, hanging onto a conceptualized idea of there being no personal self. Only a very few lucky ones' sense of self dissipates completely; and although many seekers wish for this, if it happens, it could be often quite unsettling and even frightening to lose all sense of self so suddenly. So the gradual dissolution is more gentle. But this gradual dissolution rarely happens on its own, meaning without the doing of the seeming self. Most of the times further inquiry is needed, as long as any sense of self is left. There is a big difference between seeing that there is no personal self, and the full dissolution of the sense of self. It's about unlearning.
The identification with second guessing patterns, comes from experiences that made you doubt “yourself” (the sceptic). Stories, that you are not good enough, that you have to try harder, that “others” have it much easier, that you are not any special and the good things happen only on other people (jealousy), and nothing good can happen to you (including enlightenment), become a prime narrative which shapes the lens through which everything is described. So you can see, how this can influence the inquiry. It’s not that there is an entity that is all of that, these are just thought patterns that shape the formation of new thoughts. And because they are usually accompanied by icky sensation, they have a weight. Since you are so absorbed in “my story,” you miss what is right in front of your nose: there is no owner of the story. It simply is telling itself. There is no narrator at home as you have seen. Language (thought content) is basically the relationship between concepts – how they are organised. That carries meaning on top of the meaning of the actual concepts. That is why different concepts mean different things to different people and in different situations. One very good analogy of how words and language are organised and how meaning in general is formed, is AI. GPT (Generative pre-trained transformers) are large language models that are based on the semantic relationships between words in sentences (natural language processing). GPT models are trained on a large amount of text. The training consists in predicting the next token (a token being usually a word, sub-word, or punctuation). Throughout this training, GPT models accumulate knowledge about the world, and can then generate “human-like” text by repeatedly predicting the next token.
So in this case, your model is trained on these stories. It can only be changed if the stories are examined and replaced with more authentic ones (about DE).
Can you see that?
I will see that there is just life going on, and that I am that. It will be completely obvious that there is no separate self. I will suffer no more with thoughts about “Nelson”, and maybe I will see that everything happening in the world is ok.
What is that “I am” that could potentially be “life”? What is that “I” that experiences / witnesses thoughts about suffering or contentment, have the ability to believe them?
You see all is still very much personal here – even your expectations about awakening. Life happens to you (no-self), in fact you are life. You want life to have less suffering so you as life have to go through less “unpleasant” experiences. In some way, we get the idea that we are life and we dictate what is happening, we think, we do things and we need protection but when we examine this closely we see it for what it is - just a mirage, an illusion. There is no doer and thinker, no owner of experiences. There is no “life”, “life force”, “THIS”, as a set thing that we could potentially become, it is all just (a) happening… to no one. It is an IS-ness not an AM-ness. As long as you identify with Nelson, THIS, experience, life, no-self, SELF, awareness or whatever, all will still happen to YOU.
Again:
Is life happening to a being or as being?
Is that “aliveness” any kind of object or subject? Is it even a human? Or just sensations/feeling?
Is it what you've taken as "you"?
LOOK like you are looking for the first time with no preconceived answers. Don’t try to reason with it by saying, “I already know there is no ‘I’”. You can’t make the sense of an ‘I’ go away by telling yourself that you have already seen it, “been there, done that”.
Each time the sense of ‘me’ as the ‘doer’, or 'thinker', or a 'witness' surfaces again, explore it as if you were doing it for the first time.
Where in the body does it feel like a ‘me’ exists? What kind of sensations are experienced? Where in sensations is the information that this is you? Sometimes the resurfacing of the self-illusion is connected to specific topics, for example, it is clear that you are not the ‘doer’, but it can feel like you are in control.
Please let me know, where you feel it the most
Also you can play with these:
Does the sense of self have a location?
Does the sense of self have a shape or a size?
Does the sense of self say or communicate anything?
If the answer is yes, how does the sense do this exactly?
Does the sense of self have any characteristics or attributes?
What is the sense of self ‘made of’? An image? Sound? Taste? Smell? Sensation? Thought?
What is found?
Love
Rali
“Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in.”
― Alan Alda
"The moment I am aware that I am aware I am not aware. Awareness means the observer is not"
― Jiddu Krishnamurti
