The Trouble With 'i'

[Telepresent]

As we all know, discussion of this stuff is massively hampered by the problem with the word 'I', and its relatives: you, me, my, etc.

And I've (ha) come to realise that this is a much more important and difficult hurdle than I've been giving it credit for.  In fact, it may be pivotal.

The big problem is that we're hearing someone say "your true nature is...", and we translate that through the matrix of our own internal "I".  But the "I" doing the translation is not the "you" being referred to.  And this is a major issue, because no matter how much one meditates, no matter how much one contemplates or journals, no matter how many articles are read or videos watched, if the "I" re-interprets things in its own terms, everything will remain concept and everything will not be true.

And the thing is that we seem to have it ass-backwards.  We conceive of this "I" somewhere behind the eyes, between the ears, which does the watching and the listening and the thinking and all the rest, which makes decisions and blah blah blah.  But where is it?  Where is it?  Where is behind the eyes?  Where is between the ears?  Point it out to yourself.  Find it, right now, in your experience.  Where actually is it?

And now, where is everything else that you experience?  It's right there.  You don't have to try, you don't have to search or look or anything - it's just there.

And yet we tell ourselves we are not that stuff, but somehow we are this thing that we can't find.

That, right there, is - I think - the crux of this "you/I" problem.  The message refers to one, but is received and interpreted through the lens of the other.

The I that I think I am is not awareness.  It is not one-ness, or god-mind, or infinite.  It's even weirder than that: it's not there at all.  I believe I am it and yet it doesn't exist!  Except - and this is crucial - as concept.  But what concept?  Why?

As best as I can fathom right now, it's a reference point.  THE reference point.  Everthing we understand is understood in relativity, and all relativity ultimately leads back to "I".  It's the lens through which the body/mind can interpret, understand, and abstract.  Can learn "this feeling means I'm hungry", "if I put my finger in fire I'll get hurt", or "if I go over there and try to take that guy's stuff, he'll hit me in the face".  Through which we understand past, present, future.  Through which we can empathise with others.  It's very necessary to the functioning of the organism.  But the crazy thing about evolution is that it doesn't favour truth, it favours fitness for survival (there's a really interesting TED talk about that - he's talking about vision mostly, but you can extrapolate the concept out to the very notion of self).

What this is leading me towards is two very interesting conclusions.  The first is that I have so far mostly been attempting to resolve ideas, concepts, and experiences through a conceptual relationship with this imagined "I", in the realm of "behind-the-eyes": it's a deeply ingrained habit which is extremely tricky to break, because all references lead to "I".  So everything that I've come to recognise, even some fascinating experiences I have had, have ultimately been interpreted back into the imagined I.  If it's not now, if it's not simply and directly experienced, it ain't the thing.

The second conclusion has to do with effort, and resistance.   I've been trying, and trying, and trying to see through the illusion of I.  And that seems so, so foolish: reality is right there.  Right there.  Don't have to try.  Where is this effort going, then?  Understanding, understanding, conceptualising and bargaining.  Trying to reconcile direct experience with conceptual self.  The silly thing is, the more effort I'm putting in, the more I'm digging into the realm of imaginary concepts.  Madness.  If anything, I now have to learn how to do, while dialling back the effort...

Everything is backwards: the interior "me" is not, while the exterior experience (which I currently still designate "not-me") is.  Effort, which I am so used to being the path to results, is pulling me further away from reality.  The I that wants cannot have, and the I that is does not want - it already is.  Madness!

Edited July 16, 2016 by Telepresent

[Travis]

@Telepresent

Yeah, it's confounding me too. I've been thinking about just setting a few days or a week aside to just practice presence.

Do nothing else but watch thoughts/feelings/emotions/notions of I and other and object just come and go,  while practicing non-attachment and non-judgment. 

What do you think about this strategy?

[Leo Gura]

@Telepresent Exactly right.

It would help you to draw a sharper distinction between awareness & thought/belief.

Ask yourself this, What exists outside of awareness? Anything? How could it be known? If it is known, awareness is employed.

All thoughts only come AFTER awareness. For there to be a thought, there must first be awareness of it.

So it is impossible to think your way out of this problem, because you're trying to use thought to reach under awareness when in fact awareness is all there is, and it's the bottom-most thing!

A thought is actually just awareness that not aware of itself!

THERE IS NOTHING BUT AWARENESS!

Everything single fucking thing is awareness!

Test this in your direct experience. Attempt to find something -- anything -- which is not awared first.

It's not possible. It's not even conceivable. Because anything you conceive will first presume awareness that renders it knowable.

And then you just gotta realize that there is nothing behind awareness. There is no YOU or I looking at awareness or being aware. Awareness is the end of the road. There is nothing outside of it. (Well, except for The Void.)

If you're stuck intellectualizing these things, try a heavy dose of do-nothing meditation or mindfulness meditation with labeling. It really helps cure intellectualizing.

It's very hard to create awareness with thinking. Much easier to do it through long do-nothing sits. That's probably what you're missing.

[Telepresent]

@Travis If you can allow the time for this without damaging your life circumstances, I expect it will be hugely useful.  I put that caveat in there as, if your life is anything like mine, we have commitments and responsibilities and so on which may bring problems if we neglect them.  It's all well and good talking about what is real and what is not, but while I still physically and psychologically rely on my work, I'd better do my work!

I've had a couple of periods in this journey where I've become really excited about something, and neglected to keep on top of my work and social/relational obligations for a week or two, and it's always come back to bite me: more stress, more upset, more running around trying to pick up pieces.  So I'd say beware of that!

The other thing I've come to realise is that practice does not have to involve epic sitting and nothing else.  This certainly has its place, and if you can make the time (or recognise when it might be a more valuable use of your time than, say, playing computer games or watching crappy tv) then I expect it can only be positive.  But there's also something to be said for recognising the constancy of experience: that it's always there to be noticed, no matter what.  I've certainly noticed that I can fall into a habit of focussing very deliberately when meditating/contemplating, and then as soon as I get up all that goes out the window and I'm right back in the middle of monkey-mind-ego.  Which is a bit silly really.

So I suppose I'm talking about the need for a kind of witnessing: certainly in the last couple of days as I've been feeling around this area, I've been keeping an eye focussed on this idea of effort while going about my daily routine - that if I'm feeling strong resistance or emotional effort, then that's worth stepping back and witnessing and just questioning where my psychological energy is going.  And yeah, just trying to softly observe without defining, without relating to rules or ideas or boundaries.  I'm becoming very wary of words like 'presence', 'non-attachment', 'non-judgement', as each of those brings forth an idea in my mind, and if I'm not careful I become more focussed on that idea than the reality it attempts to represent (and ultimately fails to).  But on the other hand, they're decent words for communicating that free, gentle observation, which is clearly of central importance.  I suppose so long as we keep ourselves oriented towards the doing, rather than the idea of the doing, then we're doing ok... I have no idea if that last bit makes any sense!

[Telepresent]

@Leo Gura Hi Leo.  Thanks for this reply - it's really helpful encouragement.  It's that eternal trap of trying to understand, isn't it?  Trying to turn this awareness thing into an IDEA, because I seem to think that's the only way I can grasp onto it...  And I suppose maybe that's the point - "I" can't grasp onto it. 

Ah, got lots of nothing to do!

[charlie2dogs]

17 hours ago, Telepresent said:

As we all know, discussion of this stuff is massively hampered by the problem with the word 'I', and its relatives: you, me, my, etc.

And I've (ha) come to realise that this is a much more important and difficult hurdle than I've been giving it credit for.  In fact, it may be pivotal.

The big problem is that we're hearing someone say "your true nature is...", and we translate that through the matrix of our own internal "I".  But the "I" doing the translation is not the "you" being referred to.  And this is a major issue, because no matter how much one meditates, no matter how much one contemplates or journals, no matter how many articles are read or videos watched, if the "I" re-interprets things in its own terms, everything will remain concept and everything will not be true.

And the thing is that we seem to have it ass-backwards.  We conceive of this "I" somewhere behind the eyes, between the ears, which does the watching and the listening and the thinking and all the rest, which makes decisions and blah blah blah.  But where is it?  Where is it?  Where is behind the eyes?  Where is between the ears?  Point it out to yourself.  Find it, right now, in your experience.  Where actually is it?

And now, where is everything else that you experience?  It's right there.  You don't have to try, you don't have to search or look or anything - it's just there.

And yet we tell ourselves we are not that stuff, but somehow we are this thing that we can't find.

That, right there, is - I think - the crux of this "you/I" problem.  The message refers to one, but is received and interpreted through the lens of the other.

The I that I think I am is not awareness.  It is not one-ness, or god-mind, or infinite.  It's even weirder than that: it's not there at all.  I believe I am it and yet it doesn't exist!  Except - and this is crucial - as concept.  But what concept?  Why?

As best as I can fathom right now, it's a reference point.  THE reference point.  Everthing we understand is understood in relativity, and all relativity ultimately leads back to "I".  It's the lens through which the body/mind can interpret, understand, and abstract.  Can learn "this feeling means I'm hungry", "if I put my finger in fire I'll get hurt", or "if I go over there and try to take that guy's stuff, he'll hit me in the face".  Through which we understand past, present, future.  Through which we can empathise with others.  It's very necessary to the functioning of the organism.  But the crazy thing about evolution is that it doesn't favour truth, it favours fitness for survival (there's a really interesting TED talk about that - he's talking about vision mostly, but you can extrapolate the concept out to the very notion of self).

What this is leading me towards is two very interesting conclusions.  The first is that I have so far mostly been attempting to resolve ideas, concepts, and experiences through a conceptual relationship with this imagined "I", in the realm of "behind-the-eyes": it's a deeply ingrained habit which is extremely tricky to break, because all references lead to "I".  So everything that I've come to recognise, even some fascinating experiences I have had, have ultimately been interpreted back into the imagined I.  If it's not now, if it's not simply and directly experienced, it ain't the thing.

The second conclusion has to do with effort, and resistance.   I've been trying, and trying, and trying to see through the illusion of I.  And that seems so, so foolish: reality is right there.  Right there.  Don't have to try.  Where is this effort going, then?  Understanding, understanding, conceptualising and bargaining.  Trying to reconcile direct experience with conceptual self.  The silly thing is, the more effort I'm putting in, the more I'm digging into the realm of imaginary concepts.  Madness.  If anything, I now have to learn how to do, while dialling back the effort...

Everything is backwards: the interior "me" is not, while the exterior experience (which I currently still designate "not-me") is.  Effort, which I am so used to being the path to results, is pulling me further away from reality.  The I that wants cannot have, and the I that is does not want - it already is.  Madness!

you are trying to rationalize these concepts, you are forming beliefs out of them, instead of making a simple thing complex, you need to be and function as the I and not the ficticious identity that the I created.

[Travis]

@Telepresent

Thanks! Your post was helpful. It kind of loosened me up from what goes on a lot of times in my mind, which goes something like "I have to find good methods for becoming awake and focus my energy there." But, like you're saying, all hours of the day as you go about your routine are excellent opportunities for observation and contemplation. I suppose as long as I continue daily to practice deepening my consciousness through awareness and contemplation I can't go wrong.