“Thoughts create a story that things should be different than what they are—or some other version of reality that doesn’t exist right here. And this identification to a non-existent scenario creates resistance to what is. And this is the root of all suffering.
All suffering and the sense of dissatisfaction comes from expecting a version of reality to exist other than the one that’s happening right now—and the belief that there’s ‘someone in here’ that can make things otherwise.”
— Frank Yang
Hey friends,
What the heck do all those nondual communicators mean when they say there is “no self”?
That is the topic for today’s video. Hopefully it will illuminate this point.
Here are some words I wrote on this a few weeks ago:
All words are finite constructs.
Therefore, all words miss the mark.
When people say ‘me’ they usually refer to a persistent ‘I’-thought concretized in the area we usually call ‘head’ or ‘brain.’
There is a sense of a discrete entity, a ‘small separate self’ who persists across time and is autonomous. This can feel like a ‘puppeteer’ or ‘homunculus’ in the brain-area, ‘pulling levers,’ living inside the body and controlling it.
Yet can you locate this small, separate, definable entity ‘in the mind’ who persists across time?
If you look closely and honestly, I suspect you cannot.
More accurately, what ‘you’ really are is more like the whole universe flowering forth as ever-shifting, ever-present, infinite-dimensional you-ing / you-ness.
Upon inspection, ‘self-ing’ is more like an activity that ‘pops’ in and out of experience. In deep dreamless sleep, there is no self-ing. Often throughout the day, for most of us, there are moments without any self-ing. Moments where you’re simply walking, or cooking, or creating, without any self-referential thought-activity going on.
When self-ing does appear, it is ever-fresh. Like all experience, it never repeats. The self-ing that appears in one moment is not the same in the next moment. The dynamism is total. Every moment is a simultaneous appearing and vanishing of a boundless ‘field’ of ever-swirling sensation.
Reading this freshly now, it seems like a pretty useful message.
Self-ing or self-ness feels more like an activity or unpindownable quality of immediate experience, rather than a permanent, objective, discrete entity called a ‘self.’
However, I do think nondual communicators often take this ‘no-self realization’ too far when they insist that this means there is absolutely no you, or no choice, or no soul, or no afterlife, etc. Who the heck really knows? We certainly experience ourselves as being here and choosing — and who’s to say if our unique flavor-fragrance-spark or ‘soul’ continues to ‘manifest’ in some way ‘beyond this human lifetime’? Nothing about no-self realization (better described as selfing-as-unpindownable-dance realization) has given me a sense of epistemological certainty about these metaphysical questions. Who knows what is possible? Everything is completely strange and many-dimensional. God eats paradox pizza for breakfast.
So, anywho, I will say that discovering the non-fixed nature of self-ing can be super liberating! We often make ‘me’ such a heavy thing when really, it can be light as a feather, popping in and out of existence like a funny little ghost. Our ‘self’ can be seen more so as a continual flowering of ever-shifting music, an ever-drifting non-separate flavorful fragrance. You are the cascading waterfall. Play with this! It can lighten things up! What is ‘you’? Who is the one who suffers? Where is ‘she’? Can you locate her?
One other way I like to view the self is simply as the body: as the physical body—and as the non-separate totality of all the many layers of the psycho-somatic-energetic-cosmic body. This can make the ‘self’ more tangible and practical and undeniable. Yet even then, we may take note that our physical body disappears each night during sleep, or even simply when we close our eyes. And every layer of our body, even the physical layer, is ever-morphing—new in each moment, never experienced the same way twice. So even there, we can notice selfing-as-activity; selfing-as-flowering; selfing-as-dynamic-flow. What and where is the ‘self’? I don’t quite know!
May our explorations of no-self lighten our load! May they help us end war and set the children free! May they help us discover interbeing so as to bring forth a world rooted in playful love and honor. May we give our grandchildren the peaceful Earth they deserve. Amen.
“You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.”
— David Foster Wallace
Words from today’s video:
“A great deal of the foundational root of our resistance is the thought of ‘I’ — the thought that there is a separate autonomous me who can enforce my will upon the universe to create something better than this here now.”
“When we look closely at the selfing activity, we discover that it comes and goes. It’s not a permanent entity that persists across time. Your self does not exist in deep dreamless sleep. And there are many moments throughout the day where there is no selfing — there is just the bare, naked flow state of whatever activity is taking place. That alone is one of the most primordial clues that the separate self is not what we’ve taken it to be.”
“The now is always an infinite field of pure erupting sensation cascading through itself. It’s truly a remarkable, astonishing, mysterious, boundless display of light and color and texture. And these words don’t say what it is. We don’t know what light and color and texture are. So it’s a pure, radiant dancingness — a free fall through pure mystery, pure miraculousness.”
“Everything is what it is. All sensations are allowed. All displays are allowed. All kaleidoscopic activity of this freshness is allowed.”
“We’ve identified as this little puppeteer in the head — the thinker of thoughts and the doer of actions. But when you look for that puppeteer, you don’t find it. You only find a flurry of self-referential sensations and thoughts that pop in and out of existence like everything else.”
“You begin to see that no thought is ever true in a deep sense. Thought is far too low fidelity to encapsulate this ever-shifting nowness. And when you’re ready, you cease to take the ‘I’ thought itself seriously. That bubble of ‘I’ begins to pop. And you increasingly experience this freshness as a wholeness that is not happening to me, not for me, not even as me.”
“This investigation leads to a release into unknowing where you no longer know what you are. You no longer know what life is. There is no longer any distinction between you and life. There is just this miraculous, all-encompassing infinite field of ever-shifting freshness, wholeness, vividness, and juiciness. It is orchestrating itself with devastating symphonic beauty as a never-before-seen living hyper-tapestry each moment.”
“It can sound a little intimidating to be no thing. But it’s actually an incredible relief to not have to be anything at all. To be pure silence. To be pure spaciousness. Weightlessness that is waving and dancing as all of this luminous, astounding display. And you can still love everything you love — you just savor it more, with less resistance, more freedom, more ease.”
Lastly, I want to note that each being is free to find their own natural ‘center of gravity’ amid the endless modes and possibilities of life. It’s okay to be human. It’s okay to feel like you. It’s also okay to feel like you’ve dissolved and there is simply this unpindownable waterfall of cascading beingness. None of it is any ‘more’ real or true than the rest of it, in a deep sense. It is ALL this pure miraculous mystery. So let it flow, and enjoy it.
One Love,Jordan
Related:
If you’re called deeper, consider Simple Freedom and our Brotherhood.
Books by Jordan:
* God’s Love
* Simple Freedom
* The War for the Soul of Mankind
* Both, Neither, Far Beyond Either
If you read or have read any of my books, reviews on Amazon are deeply appreciated.
Plentiful blessings to you and yours!
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