Ironically this is an inquiry into what isn't.

I'm happy to engage with you on "what is," but not so much a game of hide the ball. If there is a metaphysical statement about existence that is somehow "true" irrespective of our ability to imagine it, experience it, or otherwise engage with it and its truth has utterly no impact on how we conduct or ought conduct our lives, I have difficulty understanding how we might inquire/investigate the statement. The ineffable is, perhaps, shareable in a place that isn't wholly constituted by the written word, but as this is a text based internet forum, aside from a random link or two to something else on the internet, I've got nothing.

If someone has somehow understood/groked non-self more deeply than I have and is still engaged in the business of using their inhabited bodies to do body like things, why? Or more inline with my initial question in the OP, can we empathize/relate to them in a meaningful way given that we haven't gotten it?

I'm happy to engage with you on "what is," but not so much a game of hide the ball. If there is a metaphysical statement about existence that is somehow "true" irrespective of our ability to imagine it, experience it, or otherwise engage with it and its truth has utterly no impact on how we conduct or ought conduct our lives, I have difficulty understanding how we might inquire/investigate the statement. The ineffable is, perhaps, shareable in a place that isn't wholly constituted by the written word, but as this is a text based internet forum, aside from a random link or two to something else on the internet, I've got nothing.

If someone has somehow understood/groked non-self more deeply than I have and is still engaged in the business of using their inhabited bodies to do body like things, why? Or more inline with my initial question in the OP, can we empathize/relate to them in a meaningful way given that we haven't gotten it? — Ennui Elucidator

One inquires into the nature of any fundamental reality because one is passionate about finding out, not as an entertaining "engagement" with others. It appears such an inquiry demands energy, which is dissipated, for example, when one is merely looking to while away exceeds time, or an an exercise to keep the dying brain sharp while walking towards the grave.

'What is', is. For example, this is what is. One example, out of many. To play the game of hiding the ball, ignoring the factuality of what is, and still hoping to understand something "fundamental", is indeed a clear waste of one's efforts in many ways, it seems.

So, one may say, a 'debate' about the existence or the absence of a fundamental reality is not the same as an 'inquiry' (without prejudice) into the same. While the former is superficial, frivolous, and merely "cursory", it is only in the latter where the question of inter-relational "impact" arises. The way to such an inquiry passes through the signposts of truthfulness, integrity, a sincere wish to find out, a passionate dedicated energy. Contrary to popular belief, an inquiry into what is true, isn't the cup o tea for just any TDH. Evidently it requires some qualifications.

Yes, it is silly to deny the body is not you. — Josh Alfred

Too many negatives there, or not enough.

But the way the self functions is much more than an undeniable fact. I am this body and you are that body, and so it is a matter of convenience that you look after that body and I look after this one. But this creates the self in thought. The self in thought makes itself the centre of all thought and becomes an inside that relates to the outside. Or rather it becomes the inside. I am the inside and you are now part of my outside. So now it is not a matter of convenience, but the central fact of life that this is the important body, and that one does not matter so much (to me, at least).

The non-self that is not-you has privileged access X and the non-self that is not-me has privileged access Y, but are otherwise non-self. This difference in access is... That is where I am lost. — Ennui Elucidator

We play peek-a-boo with babies to teach them that people that disappear do not cease to exist, and yet we have the same difficulty understanding that bodies that we do not feel suffer pain and hunger just as significant as this body's. That awareness is empty, means that it is always the same awareness that looks out through a philosopher's eyes, her husband's eyes or her cat's eyes; because the self is a superficial illusion produced by the limitations of the senses, the reality is that there is no 'other'.

Inasmuch as ye do it unto the least of these my children, ye do unto me. — Jesus

I am he as you are he as you are me
And we are all together — The Beatles

I'm just average, common too
I'm just like him, the same as you
I'm everybody's brother and son
I ain't different than anyone
It ain't no use a-talking to me
It's just the same as talking to you — bobDylan

The thing is though, if this is just a theory I sort of understand from the outside as it were, it seems complicated, extravagant, and in the end unimportant. It is only if it explodes and replaces my whole identification as the wonderful chap that posts interesting stuff on philosophy forums and grows peas and beetroot in his garden: then it transforms, because death becomes seen as a very minor affair - this body dies, but all my other bodies continue and reproduce and die in turn, and all the world's suffering and all its joy and beauty are mine forever. One eye closes and another eye opens.

I am this body and you are that body, and so it is a matter of convenience that you look after that body and I look after this one. But this creates the self in thought. The self in thought makes itself the centre of all thought and becomes an inside that relates to the outside. Or rather it becomes the inside. I am the inside and you are now part of my outside.

Yeah. That makes sense. I am my own internal being and you are your own internal being. Got it.

What do you think about the relation of the self to material possession/property? How can anything truly be mine and not someone else's? How would you articulate that difference?

I wrote some on mutual intention, that is: when two or more people have an intention in common. Do you think that has anything to do with personal property? Just looking for well thought out ideas. I may turn to Locke for some gap fillers (here on private property and self-identity) as well.

What do you think about the relation of the self to material possession/property? — Josh Alfred

It started as a convenience, I used to carry my long spear and my flint knife to the hunt and if they were lost I would make another. The trouble started when I fenced off the garden to stop the cows trampling the cauliflowers. I ended up living in my property as if it were my body, possessed by possessions. I think it was fear; thought projected itself to the future without food, and sought security.

I said somewhere else that security negates freedom. Security is walls and locks, and bars and things tied up and hidden away. The sad case today is to see people living in houses they cannot afford to maintain, filled with things they have no use for but cannot rid themselves of, and camping in a corner of this pile of junk struggling to make enough to feed themselves. That is security as neurosis, in need of the decluttering therapist, or a bomb.

That awareness is empty, means that it is always the same awareness that looks out through a philosopher's eyes, her husband's eyes or her cat's eyes; — unenlightened

I started this response weeks ago but never finished.


For some reason I’m reminded of the veil of ignorance. It is by happenstance that we find ourselves looking through these eyes in this moment and we could have just as easily found ourselves behind any other set of eyes - so our behavior towards the outside eyes should be no more invested than our inside eyes. (Yes, the comparison falls apart and this is no Rawls.) Your comment cuts more deeply of course, but are we not equivocating a bit on “the same”? Each set of eyes has the same awareness (class membership) but there feels to be an essential difference - that the content of my stage is not the content of your stage (identity). That is the hurdle I can't seem to get past - the me that is not you.

Since your post I've encountered the idea of non-self a few more times, most recently with the quip "the suffering of others is my own suffering." It was expressed in the context of universal affirmation/love and meant to be something profound (I cannot be happy until we all are happy and so we are all deeply invested in one another) - a rebuttal, of sorts, of the notion that progress is measured by our ever expanding scope of moral/ethical concern. Again, I feel sympathetic to the idea, but don't understand how I feed myself instead of others (who are certainly more hungry than I) if all of the other non-self selfs have equal claim to my preference. In the absence of stillness (the actualization of the non-self), the truth of the non-self is debilitating.

@skyblack isn't wrong when speaking of the passions (absurdism by any other name), but it is curious that there is a suggestion that proper something driven by passion (an inherently self based thing) will somehow bring the non-self to actualization in a non-still way. Understanding of the non-self as something reserved for not now (i.e. for another "life" or "after-life" or...) has its merit for intellectual consistency (and ball hiding), but it fails to satisfy my pragmatic concerns. If understanding is the ability to do something (perhaps the correct application of a rule), what thing can be done that might demonstrate understanding of the non-self? How can the self ever act in accordance with its non-self essence?

Even as I imagine what you might be thinking, I am not thinking your thoughts. The "disembodied" us finds no fusion. My mind wanders here. I reject it and find no more thoughts than when I started. When I stare at the screen and time passes, your thoughts do not impress themselves upon me. I wait for you and find nothing, but that is not who you (we) are.

skyblack isn't wrong when speaking of the passions (absurdism by any other name), but it is curious that there is a suggestion that proper something driven by passion (an inherently self based thing) will somehow bring the non-self to actualization in a non-still way. Understanding of the non-self as something reserved for not now (i.e. for another "life" or "after-life" or...) has its merit for intellectual consistency (and ball hiding), but it fails to satisfy my pragmatic concerns. If understanding is the ability to do something (perhaps the correct application of a rule), what thing can be done that might demonstrate understanding of the non-self? How can the self ever act in accordance with its non-self essence?

Even as I imagine what you might be thinking, I am not thinking your thoughts. The "disembodied" us finds no fusion. My mind wanders here. I reject it and find no more thoughts than when I started. When I stare at the screen and time passes, your thoughts do not impress themselves upon me. I wait for you and find nothing, but that is not who you (we) are. — Ennui Elucidator

:-)

As has been said many times, the 'non-self' is a conceptual idea, created by the self, as another coping crutch. Having seen the futility of the rest of the crutches ( offered by the arts, the sciences, philosophy, religion, worldly security and so on), , , and how they have miserably failed, the self is now trying to enter the field of the sublime, with the nefarious motive of controlling it and bottling it up for its own present and future use. To **eff the ineffable.

To see the numerous failings and flailings of the self in action, is insight. The motive to look, to investigate, comes from passion. Passion is energy, and just like a breeze, or a beautiful morning, has nothing to so with the Self and is definitely not "self-biased". Though popular narrative, and the change of the meaning of words over time, has conditioned you to believe, on the incorrect narrative.

Now, if someone asks, is there a self or a non-self that isn't conceptual or an idea?

How would one find out? Naturally that would take a lot of passion, work, and discipline, to find out, wouldn't it? After all we are not talking about cheap theories or merely a half ass curiosity.

When we talk about discipline, clearly we aren't talking about an enforced discipline, but as a loose example, a loving discipline as seen in an athlete training for the Olympics.

Passion is energy — skyblack

Energy is not mine or yous, its is just....well, energy.

I started this response weeks ago but never finished. — Ennui Elucidator

I appreciate the slowness, and the response.

but there feels to be an essential difference - that the content of my stage is not the content of your stage (identity). — Ennui Elucidator

Yes indeed. My illusion is this: when I am hit I feel that it hurts, but when you are hit it is merely distasteful to me. I call it an illusion, as if I can see past it, but in reality I cannot. The difference feels essential to me as it does to you, and it is indeed the essence of our separate identities. Without that difference we would actually be the same person, and that is why I call it anillusion of identity; it is our essence, and yet it is merely a matter of perspective and the limitations of our senses.

This will seem unrelated, but so it goes.

I was driving a little while ago and thinking on the way in which Buddhism imagines suffering to be the core condition of existence in ways that Judaism does not - that to live is to suffer and from the moment we emerge we have desires that we must thereafter seek to satisfy. Completeness, as such, is never our state. The contrast here is merely the impetus to contrary thinking, and so I was reminded of the child's mind as Buddha's mind - that somehow a young child can seem utterly satisfied and contented as if they are without suffering. What is interesting is that this Buddha mind is lost through successive experiences rather than enhanced - that suffering is made manifest not merely by its existence but its perseverance.

If we accept for a moment that the notion of Buddha's mind approaches the non-self, then the child's mind approaches the non-self. This is to say that development from a lump taking succor at a nipple finding the end of want to a child wishing for something it does not have is simultaneously a move towards individuation (these are my hands, this is my stuff, you are not a part of me, your stuff is not my stuff, etc.) and away from non-self. The interesting turn here is infantile amnesia - that we cannot remember what it was that happened to us prior to a certain point in our development. While it is convenient (and perhaps true) for there to be a biological/anatomical explanation for the inability to remember that young, it could very well be that the child's mind as the non-self does not attach to unindividuated memories, i.e. that the self hasn't sufficiently emerged from the non-self to either suffer or to attach experience to itself.

It isn't so much that one must be non-self to be in the world, but the experiencing of the world as non-self does not survive the present (the moment of experience). This comes close to the metaphor of the last bit of awareness being just before sleep and the first moment of awareness being just after - that your body is able to simply exist in the world (with all experiences) and yet be attached to none of them.

I wonder if suffering doesn't actually begin until the non-self ceases to be. Differently, until the moment the illusion reduces the non-self to self, there is no self to suffer.

To **eff the ineffable. — skyblack

One of my lectures is entitled "Effing the ineffable: A Conversation about God." And yes, the double entendre is intentional.

This will seem unrelated, but so it goes.

I was driving a little while ago and thinking on the way in which Buddhism imagines suffering to be the core condition of existence in ways that Judaism does not - that to live is to suffer and from the moment we emerge we have desires that we must thereafter seek to satisfy. Completeness, as such, is never our state. The contrast here is merely the impetus to contrary thinking, and so I was reminded of the child's mind as Buddha's mind - that somehow a young child can seem utterly satisfied and contented as if they are without suffering. What is interesting is that this Buddha mind is lost through successive experiences rather than enhanced - that suffering is made manifest not merely by its existence but its perseverance.

If we accept for a moment that the notion of Buddha's mind approaches the non-self, then the child's mind approaches the non-self. This is to say that development from a lump taking succor at a nipple finding the end of want to a child wishing for something it does not have is simultaneously a move towards individuation (these are my hands, this is my stuff, you are not a part of me, your stuff is not my stuff, etc.) and away from non-self. The interesting turn here is infantile amnesia - that we cannot remember what it was that happened to us prior to a certain point in our development. While it is convenient (and perhaps true) for there to be a biological/anatomical explanation for the inability to remember that young, it could very well be that the child's mind as the non-self does not attach to unindividuated memories, i.e. that the self hasn't sufficiently emerged from the non-self to either suffer or to attach experience to itself.

It isn't so much that one must be non-self to be in the world, but the experiencing of the world as non-self does not survive the present (the moment of experience). This comes close to the metaphor of the last bit of awareness being just before sleep and the first moment of awareness being just after - that your body is able to simply exist in the world (with all experiences) and yet be attached to none of them.

I wonder if suffering doesn't actually begin until the non-self ceases to be. Differently, until the moment the illusion reduces the non-self to self, there is no self to suffer. — Ennui Elucidator

Very much related :up:

So the focus has now to shift from whether the self / non-self is real, to, what is the nature of suffering.

Is it possible to reclaim the innocency of the....let's call it the 'child -consciousness' (for convenience) ?

Since the paradise is now lost, and because it is uncharted, how does one find one's way back? Is that it?

To travel from the cloud of knowing to the cloud of unknowing?

Is one capable of coping with the valley of bewilderment?

The interesting turn here is infantile amnesia - that we cannot remember what it was that happened to us prior to a certain point in our development. — Ennui Elucidator

Perhaps because i'm in a 'good' mood, will concede that this is a very interesting point. However, a very technical one. An investigation into which requires an extremely fine and subtle awareness.

I consciously avoided to touch on this earlier for fear it may take the stream in a different direction. But i appreciate you bringing it up, as this is something i'm experimenting with.

The brain is a wonderful recording instrument. Especially in the first 2 years it is almost, as the expression goes, on steroids. So it has definitely recorded the experience of this 'child-consciousness'. There is no reason why that memory cannot be retrieved. However, :wink: it won't be, naturally, in the form of more "knowledge". Rather, the memory being beyond the frontiers of individuation, may be felt as an absence of a 'self'. In other words, it cannot be bottled.

If one is an expert musician, then he or she may take this to a higher octave, challenge themselves, and say, so whatt?? The recording is still an image, not the thing! :smile:

I.m now going to leave this one alone.