My teacher from the thai forest tradition has a nice quote on this which I like. “Don’t poopoo the mind”
But a pointing out instruction here for you might be something like: “is it true that you are yourself when you’re self-ing?”
Who is it really who is having the experience?
There is in fact not a self nor a non-self to start with for that presumes that there is a self to relate to (emptiness of emptiness). There is no ground for reality to stand on, groundlessness...
Yada yada yada...
The tldr is that meditation can be a way for you to deeply anchor you to your emotions and that it can be a way of acting from a place that is more alive and agentic.
A deeper, rawer, and vibrant state of acting where there is so much more you can do and where the self that is effective in the world can know that peace is accessible at any point.
A confusing thing about my experience is that the truth of the no-self state is intellectually ineluctable to me and yet my perception is still filtered by selfhood. Sometimes I get a burst of spite-fueled energy that almost collapses into fatalism, and I remind myself that I chose this, that I can just go back if I don’t like it, but that I want to keep reading this chapter of my life, as it were, because it’s exciting! But even when I introspect, there’s a perspective there – someone has called it the watcher?
Yeah, this makes sense to me.
My teacher from the thai forest tradition has a nice quote on this which I like. “Don’t poopoo the mind”
But a pointing out instruction here for you might be something like: “is it true that you are yourself when you’re self-ing?”
Who is it really who is having the experience?
There is in fact not a self nor a non-self to start with for that presumes that there is a self to relate to (emptiness of emptiness). There is no ground for reality to stand on, groundlessness...
Yada yada yada...
The tldr is that meditation can be a way for you to deeply anchor you to your emotions and that it can be a way of acting from a place that is more alive and agentic.
A deeper, rawer, and vibrant state of acting where there is so much more you can do and where the self that is effective in the world can know that peace is accessible at any point.
Hopefully that made some sense?
A confusing thing about my experience is that the truth of the no-self state is intellectually ineluctable to me and yet my perception is still filtered by selfhood. Sometimes I get a burst of spite-fueled energy that almost collapses into fatalism, and I remind myself that I chose this, that I can just go back if I don’t like it, but that I want to keep reading this chapter of my life, as it were, because it’s exciting! But even when I introspect, there’s a perspective there – someone has called it the watcher?