During last weeks telephone call I began to question my definition of the self .  Reading the posts from this week I continue with that struggle.  I often experience awareness that seems selfless, a state that Hayward refers to in his post with Jack’s term a “readiness to respond”.  In this state I am simply observing, listening, registering trying to understand or appreciate.  There is an absence of  judgement.  This may last a few seconds or minutes, sometimes longer in meditation.  At some point a process of assessing and judgement creeps in and feelings of like/dislike, good/bad, nice/not nice etc. emerge.  It is these kind of judgments and the resulting feelings that I tend to associate with the self.  But it seems to me these judgement and feelings are simply a sign of the self in action.  So what is the self?  It seems to be always present but not always active.  Synonyms are ego, psyche, character, identity and personality.  Can I have a personality without a “Self”.  If ego is a component of the self must it always separate me from others?  We often associate negative attributes with the self but is it possible that the self has positive attributes as Linda describes.  I don’t expect to answer all my questions but I have a new appreciation for this course that brings the “self in question”  Robert
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I agree that our default approach filters experience through this multi-layered construct we call the self in a way we take for granted. Yet there are times in meditation or when experience happens faster than our brains can process, like on a roller coaster ride, where as you say things arise and pass without an I. I like your practice of imagining a no-self interaction with others and will give it a try at the very least it will remind me of the role the self plays in my daily interactions.
I think one way of approaching this is to notice how we organize all of our experience around this thing we refer to as “I”. At least it seems to be a thing–we don’t usually question its status or validity. Certainly I can see that I take it for granted that “my” experience is “mine.” All that I see, hear, do, think is organized around “me”.
I think TT, TSK, LOK claims that experience does not have to be organized around an “I”…that is, experience can happen, but be experienced as not happening to an isolated mind/body. That is why this vision is so inviting…if that can be the case…then the concerns of the self would be less pressing, less prominent…
I guess one way this manifests for me at times, and lately, is that I try to imagine that everything that is happening is not the product of me, and the same for everyone else. When people talk to me, I try to secretly imagine that there is only sound, only listening, and not separate selves that are interacting.
In more formal meditation, of course, I do more traditional insight meditation…seeing forms, feelings, thoughts, intentions, and consciousness as arising and passing away–I can’t find any “I” when I do this, only a stream of events….
Ron
Hi Karin
I appreciate your thought and agree it is important not to try and outwit the “I” or turn it into the enemy. Still I think it is very important to question this thing we call the self as it shapes and controls so much of our lives without our being very aware of it. As TT says on the next page “Questioning the ‘I’ strengthens us to face ourselves honestly and wakes us up to our intrinsic human worth.”
Robert
Hi Robert,
there is an answer to your questions may be at page 316:
“Instead of trying to outwit the I, perhaps we can truly acknowledge the realitay of our situation: the confusion and lack of awareness that lock us into repeating patterns of acton ending in frustration and dissatisfactio…..we can open the wider world of our consciiousness by questioning any one of these labels.”
My experience is that I do not really want to question the I. There is a kind of hope, that I find something like a gap from the self…Facing ourselves honestly is described as an “unsettling esperience”. There are always deeper levels, where I can find signs of the self.
Karin