If there is no self, who is happy?

[Faceless]

11 minutes ago, Jed Vassallo said:

How can you know this, without having experienced Being without Self/Ego? Only a handful of humans in human history have ever experienced this. Even Leo isn't there yet. Without direct experience of Truth, isn't it all just conjecture and theory?

It’s not an experience. 

The significance is the absence of experience. 

 

[Sempiternity]

3 minutes ago, Faceless said:

It’s not an experience. 

The significance is the absence of experience. 

 

So if Enlightenment is not experience, not Self. The goal is to be nothing, with no experience, why would one want this again? 

[B_Naz]

1 minute ago, Jed Vassallo said:

So if Enlightenment is not experience, not Self. The goal is to be nothing, with no experience, why would one want this again? 

Why do you want an experience in the first place?

[Nahm]

@Jed Vassallo It’s like a movie. Whole story happens, people involved, etc. No whos. All actors. There is no who which experiences, the Being “experience” is not an experience. It’s what you are right now without illusion, with illusion.  It’s what you’ve always been. There’s no ‘there yet’ in terms of the actual situation - there’s no me, you, Leo, to get ‘there’. Language, and all visual & audible is in appearance. So if I say ‘you can experience this yourself’....one actor is stuck on that I said “you”, so I must not ‘be realized’, another gets stuck on that I said ‘experience’, so I must then be using experience as a means to deny being an actor, another is stuck at ‘can’ since there’s no who or action....that’s the duality, the play, the movie. What else is there for infinite one to do but be another? Try sitting in a room alone for days on end. You’d want the exact same thing, cause you’re the Being. You are the Being, and none of this happened. 

It becomes really obvious and joyful. For example, why does any word have two meanings? Nonsense right?  Revealing though, very revealing. 

[Nahm]

11 minutes ago, Jed Vassallo said:

So if Enlightenment is not experience, not Self. The goal is to be nothing, with no experience, why would one want this again? 

The alternative is ignorance. Which for many, is bliss. Not really. 

[who chit]

23 minutes ago, Jed Vassallo said:

How can you know this, without having experienced Being without Self/Ego? Only a handful of humans in human history have ever experienced this. Even Leo isn't there yet. Without direct experience of Truth, isn't it all just conjecture and theory?

Inquire the questions for yourself,
The path is the path of finding what is true.

Can a thought be? What comes and goes cannot be.
In the absence of thought ,what is?  That which is.
Beingness is, what is.

[pluto]

@Jed Vassallo Lao Tzu is your man, give Tao Te Ching a read

[Sempiternity]

Thanks for the great replies everyone. Lots to chew on. 

[Azza]

2 hours ago, Jed Vassallo said:

How can you know this, without having experienced Being without Self/Ego? Only a handful of humans in human history have ever experienced this. Even Leo isn't there yet. Without direct experience of Truth, isn't it all just conjecture and theory?

Why did you assume he didn't?

[Kisame]

Here's what Shinzen Young has to say on this, from The Science of Enlightenment. A note on terminology: when he says things like "zero" and "Gone," he's referring to the no-self of enlightenment.

But there is a further subtlety about zero. In point of fact, you never actually experience zero; you never experience emptiness; you never experience the cancellation of expansion and contraction. That would seem to contradict everything I just wrote, but this is where the subtlety lies. In the actual moment of cancellation, there is no self to know the Source. Thus, there is no experience there; it is nirodha, extinction. There's nobody there to have an experience. 

However, in the very next instant, the self returns and looks back at the moment of Gone that just happened. It creates an image of this moment, and words to describe that moment, and it feels fulfillment, safety, peace, and love as the result of that moment. But that image and those words and those feelings are not zero itself, they are a sort of after-representation of zero. In fact, enlightenment is simply the ability to formulate a clear sensory representation of the formless state that immediately precedes each experience of form. Thus, enlightened wisdom is a kind of illusion, in the sense that it's composed of thought and feeling. It's just another conditioned event, not the unconditioned state itself. However, it's different from other conditioned events in that it represents something that is unconditioned. As your enlightenment deepens, you become clearer and clearer about what happens just before time, space, self, and world arise, and you come to a clearer and clearer realization that you are what happens just before time, space, self, and world arise.

It's important not to identify with wisdom mind. The actual moment of Gone is not experienced by anyone; what you experience is afterglow. You never directly experience God. You only experience the afterglow of God. That may sound like a letdown, but it's not, not at all. Each day is peppered with a holy glow.

[WaterfallMachine]

3 hours ago, Jed Vassallo said:

How can you know this, without having experienced Being without Self/Ego? Only a handful of humans in human history have ever experienced this. Even Leo isn't there yet. Without direct experience of Truth, isn't it all just conjecture and theory?

We count on conjecture and theory from lack of direct experience all the time. We’ve never been born back in history, yet we believe in those people who talk about World War II. Most of us have never been to Mount Everest, but we believe the famous people who say they have. Most of us aren’t scientists working with the Hadron Collider, but we believe them as the experts.

So much of everything we believe is just from other people. This is what removing the ego is. Letting go of what isn’t directly experienced and believing what is really there. And in there, there’s nothingness. Only from nothingness do we know what something is, and so we have a framework to compare our beliefs to something entirely without assumptions.

[Spinoza]

i dont think that happiness is the default state, happiness is also egoic and illusionary (i'm talking about the  definition of happiness that we mean in daily life)

when there is happiness there is a meaning behind that, in the absolute there is no meaning (just an opinion)

[who chit]

Don't make what is simple complicated.  Ego and thought are the same. Absence of thought is absence of ego.
What is left is Beingness. Beingness is Joyfulness.

This is what is true.

Edited June 8, 2018 by who chit

[Dodo]

3 hours ago, Spinoza said:

i dont think that happiness is the default state, happiness is also egoic and illusionary (i'm talking about the  definition of happiness that we mean in daily life)

when there is happiness there is a meaning behind that, in the absolute there is no meaning (just an opinion)

Yes, makes more sense for the natural state to be neutral.

[Dodo]

1 hour ago, who chit said:

Don't make what is simple complicated.  Ego and thought are the same. Absence of thought is absence of ego.
What is left is Beingness. Beingness is Joyfulness.

This is what is true.

The thing is, after no thought, there is still someone experiencing life. It's just that this person has a quiet mind. I don't get why it's so popular to state that Enlightenment means no self, if it actually means no thought. 

My self is not a thought in the first place, it is awareness.  If there is no self, that for me means there is no awareness. And awareness is fundamental.

[who chit]

So you have a self that is awareness..And if that self ceased to be, awareness would cease to be...

This  translates as "I have this identity called self that is awareness..If he ceased to be,awareness would cease to be.."

Is this true, or did someone say you have a self,somewhere,and that it is awareness?
Have you looked for him?  Just to be sure they weren't lieing?
Or,do you trust them and just take their word for it?
 

Edited June 8, 2018 by who chit

[Dodo]

9 minutes ago, who chit said:

So you have a self that is awareness..And if that self ceased to be, awareness would cease to be...

This  translates as "I have this identity called self that is awareness..If he ceased to be,awareness would cease to be.."

Is this true, or did someone say you have a self,somewhere,and that it is awareness?
Have you looked for him?  Just to be sure they weren't lieing?
Or,do you trust them and just take their word for it?
 

My experience is telling me that I am awareness. I'm saying that awareness cannot cease to be, so a state of no self is impossible.

If there is experience that is not within awareness, then it is not known and then it's like it never happened. 

Like the question: "Does a falling tree make a sound if there is noone around to hear it".

What I'm saying is that the self is not an object, but it is the field in which experience happens. The empty space in which experience happens, without which there can be no experience, let alone happiness. 

Just like you cannot add water to a cup, if the space is not there to allow it.

[who chit]

Ok.

[Dodo]

28 minutes ago, who chit said:

So you have a self that is awareness..And if that self ceased to be, awareness would cease to be...

This  translates as "I have this identity called self that is awareness..If he ceased to be,awareness would cease to be.."

Is this true, or did someone say you have a self,somewhere,and that it is awareness?
Have you looked for him?  Just to be sure they weren't lieing?
Or,do you trust them and just take their word for it?
 

What peoole call no self is the experience within awareness in which there is no identification with any object. 

Their true and only identity then is revealed - awareness. It means before there were two Yous - Me, the object and my awareness, and after the object me dissolves, which is a thought object, there is only one self, not two, the meaning of Nonduality.

That self happens to be empty, so you can interpret it as being 0 selves, but imo that is a mistake.

Edited June 8, 2018 by Dodo

[Preetom]

@Dodo

From the few short glimpses I've had from meditation/self inquiry, what I found from my experience is that 'happiness' is sort of a misleading word when it comes to this Waking up business. I have no idea why these juicy words and sales pitches are used in teachings by gurus...probably to attract the mass crowd like bees are attracted by honey or like muslims are promised with 72 virgin whores for their devotion etc.

In those silent few minutes of dissolving reality, everytime I found myself not caring about anything let alone a thing called happiness. It's always like an uninterrupted, shockingly lightweight state of being and trying to use words to describe/formulate it, is an utter dishonor towards that realization. There is not even a tendency to 'figure out' conceptual stuff like is there a self or what is the name of this state or is it the absolute? Its just cessation of all grasping and clinging and trying to figure out.

I don't know if Enlightened people live in this state all the time. And also I'm pretty noob. So my experiences could be only some states or meditative high and not an actual Awakening. 

But the funny thing is, during those few silent minutes, all this cherry picking ceases to exist. 

Edited June 8, 2018 by Preetom