The diamond heart of liberation is the realisation of no self. Belief in self is the central lie and cause of all human psychological pain, frustration and conflict. All spiritual practice ultimately must lead to this. The illusion of self is that which filters and blocks the  awareness, that we the organism are bound by, directly connected to, influence by and intimately a part of everything else. Self is directly opposed to this, it is the opposite of oneness it is fragmentation and separation. Enlightened beings know this but many convey the message in a ‘gentle’, ‘piteous’ manner, not realising or maybe forgetting that from their liberated perspective just how insidious, entrenched and heinously adaptable the thought pattern ‘self’ is.

     I think the problem. Is just that I think…problem. Thought is give far too much status by the organism. Though is picked up by our receiver the brain, we don’t have control over thought. Thoughts are just continuing to broadcast in like a radio reciever..The problem is that we believe thought to be true when it is just thought none of it is true. It’s like believing that a photo of an orange is in fact the orange. Thoughts are real in that they exist but the thought of something is just a thought a passing package of information it is not the thing, it is not true. For instance once you see the thought of fear, anxiety may still arise triggered by another thought or a situation that the mind usually associates with this kind of reaction, but you see it for what it is, it no longer has a self to refer to or lodge in. This realisation is the direct, effortless looking, it is not believing, conceptualising, idealising, thinking labeling or analysing, just looking and seeing with all of this out aside.

 You have to take no prisoners in this first step of seeing the lie of self-deception. The thought ‘self' is so incredibly resilient to all challenges, it is adaptable, and chameleon like it can take on any disguise and would prefer attack, denial and conflict rather than be ignored. It has prevailed for all this time after all. That’s why the gentle new age approach, as well as that of Eckhart Tolle has failed (as much as I love him), there is no room for sentimentality or pity, this thing is the plague and it will be the end of us all. The host needs to be aware of the infection.

I was watching Michael Moore’s film on capitalism the other night, he is right the core principles of capitalism would be cool without the ingredient of human greed and self-serving selfishness in other words without ‘self’. But there is no point in bringing it down without that fundamental structural transformation of the humans psyche. Self will still continue to wreak havoc on the planet but just in another form.

                                                                                     

HOLIDAY

What if we took a holiday, not to some distant place or not to even change our spatial circumstance, but we had a holiday from our conditioned mind? How would that be? After all that really is the ultimate purpose of any holiday. To distract ones-'self' from the everyday, to escape the relentless wired in mind patterns of who you think you are or have to be, to something fresh and new, something exotic in the true sense of the word.  We want to go where we have never been before, to experience something as if seeing it for the first time, almost in a childlike manner. Liberation from the continuous stream of thinking, the noise  in the head, the thing that demands the most attention like a whinging harpie. You’ve had enough of all that negative thinking, the problematic circumstances that constantly arise in your life, day in day out with the minds ability to always picture the worst scenario or outcome of even the most seemingly benign situation. You need a holiday, you deserve a holiday.

Allow the present moment to be, do not resist what is and focus in on what is real now, not in memory or thought but now. Be aware of the inner life, what does it all referr to, are you answerable to an inner commander?

You can see the dysfunction of the external world as a reflection of the internal limits of thought, especially as it manifests in you  the organism. You are nature as its finest, creative, work of art but you have become corrupted by all this negativity. How did it get so bad?

There is something that has taken over, a false king has seized the throne and your true nature has become a enslaved by its constant and rapacious needs.  SELF.

THINKING....THINKING

 Of course there is thinking and it matters for practical purposes etc it’s just that the thinking is not produced or rather assumed to be produced by a central author, there is no thinker. There is only thinking. Your brain processes thoughts but it does not create thoughts from nothing. If you have control over your thinking, you must be able to stop thinking. Realising that the self is a fiction does not change anything it just dissolves the illusion of an ‘I’ a central controller/manager. The organism can function quite well and a whole lot better without ‘you’. You as the organism still has the same knowledge, memory, desires, likes and dislikes etc, it’s just that you realise you are not a tiny isolated entity, all alone in the universe fighting against the threat of otherness to annihilate ‘you’. All fear of death is fear of destruction of ‘self’ because deep down we all realise that the body has a finite timespan as form, we accept ageing and the dissolution of things, but we are not sure about self, so we invent reincarnation of the personal soul.

The realisation that there is no such thing as the entity I referred to as Phil, is an incredible liberation. Things go on as before, there is even a sense of self, it’s just that you don’t even own that sense of self, as paradoxical as it seems. Its really just a subtle shift in perspective. You realise that everything is vastly interconnected, not that my mind could ever comprehend those relationships, but you sense it all the same. True creativity is where you access that gap in the thinking to perceive through immediate awareness, sometimes called insight. Thinking will only give you knowledge base recall, there is no such thing as true, creative thinking. Imagination is just a form of thinking where you form pictures in your head of future projections and possibilities, based on what you know from the past. You imagine how something might be, even though there is no such thing as future beyond a thought in the mind and that thought about future can only exist in the present moment anyway. This is ok for practical planning and making appointments but it is not a creative act as such, life can only be alive and creative in the present.

Self Thought

The ‘self’ is a thought, a thought that has lodged in the mind and sustains it’s self by belief and identity. The belief is that there must be a controller of this organism, there must be a thinker of these thoughts, a generator of thought, there must be a decision maker of this action and this intent, there must be a free will. How could you play a guitar for instance without the particular, management of the precise actions required of given by a singular controller?

What if you recognised that thoughts were not under ‘your’ control and they just came in, not so much randomly but within a pattern that corresponded to the organisms relationship with the environment, the past experience and accumulation of stored thought. Do you as the organism have the ability to disregard or not believe or not give significance to a thought as it arises in the mind. If so, what is the discerning entity that’s makes this decision, if a thought is worthy of taking notice of or not? Is it intelligence?

Watching Self

As I focus in on and attempt to isolate this entity that is known as 'self' the more revealing it becomes of how 'self' manifests in, and the degree of infuence it has in one’s life situation. There seems to be this  pattern of 'self' that is entrenched in the mind that runs on automatic. I sense that  self feels under constant threat from the world as it arises in my day to day circumstance. The phone rings with a wrong number, I immediately think it might be someone trying to annoy me, get at me or undermine my sense of peace and comfort. I become aware of this after the fact and in the light of another’s observation. Not a totally unrational thought but unnecessary and unhelpful in the scheme of things. At first I even deny this is the case, "paranoia is not the reaction of a liberated person" I think. So even as the self is revealed in action it comes back in to deny further that insight. The insidious nature of this mind pattern makes me realise how much of a challenge is put forward to see this thing.

I have been experimenting with calling ‘self’ something  else in an attempt to give my observation of it another perspective. I refer to it as the ‘I’-thought/mind, to bind it into a kind of group of words that describe the best way I know, of what it appears to be.

 The  ‘I’-thought/mind is uncomfortable, the ‘I’-thought/mind is fearful, the ‘I’-thought/mind is protective of it’s self.  The ‘I’-thought/mind has it’s limits.

The ‘I’-thought/mind is offended, something is challenging  ‘I’-thought/mind. I-thought/mind is on a roll, everything inside and out is supporting its reality. The world supports I-thought/mind. Ownership and authorship are attributes, of the I-thought/mind.   Looking into it deeply the ‘I’ appears only at best as a dimensionless point in a vast endless expanse, but ‘I’-thought/mind has given ‘I’ substance and sustenance.

When the light or attention or awareness of intense looking is shone on ‘I’-thought/mind there appears to be a little space around it, it does not impose quite so closely on the organism. One feels a little lighter, less burdened by the heavy ‘self’. As Eckhart Tolle would say. I know that is not good enough.

Intro

I have started this blog to post some sort of record of the journey I have taken into the enquiry of ‘self’. This is a very personal journey because that’s all it can be and if it is of interest to anyone else, well so be it. The whole purpose of such a blog is to set up a situation where I can be as honest and straight as possible in what I write, with little of the sense of the threat of self- imposed censorship born from the fear of what others will think of my efforts, content, veracity of my ideas or my writing style. This is a very important point as it is the most brutal manifestation of self in my life situation, the  fear of what others may think of me. The posts at this stage will of course be what Jed McKenna would call “truth talk in the dream state” but as a  University tutor once told to me “you have know you are in prison to get out of prison”.