I've been reading a lot about what different people have to say about the meaning of life, making meaning out of life, what is consciousness etc. I keep seeing a theme, whether it is coming from a spiritual, philosophical or often even scientific perspective.
This is the idea, or hinting of that what we see as ourselves is not actually a real thing, but an impossible self referencing loop. For instance, when you try to find yourself in your body, you find the mind bouncing around from one feeling to another; at first thinking "this is me!"
Invariably it isn't you, because that sensation utterly vanished (how could that be me? it's gone, but I am still here!), you move onto the next sensation. Ultimately you end up somewhere in your head, perhaps between the eyes somewhere; a bit lower toward the back of the head.
"Ah, this is me."
And then if you concentrate long enough, you notice that this too goes away, but you can clearly still sense that you are there. What is going on here!?
The reason that you can't find yourself and hold it stable is because there is no stable you to be found. You see, this is what I mean by "the self is a process, not a stable permanent thing".
This is a trick that the mind plays. It's a difficult thing to get your head around, but for the sake of simplicity, think of the entire universe as being everything in your immediate experience. sights, smells, thoughts, physical sensations, mental perceptions etc.
Now imagine that there is an attribute to reality that we call mind. The mind aggregates all of the things that exist which we call experience. Each element arising out of nowhere and vanishing just as quickly. The mind continually integrates each new arising of phenomena into the selfing process, while discarding that which has passed away as being irrelevant (no longer me).
This is where suffering and misery arise. We believe in this permanent unchanging self as being a thing, instead of a rapidly changing process. We believe this even with powerful evidence to the contrary.
I used to look at all of this stuff as sort of an intellectual, philosophical playing with words with no practical use. It turns out that this is actually what the old wise ones were talking about when they spoke of awakening/enlightenment. It was never meant to be simply some religious ritual, but rather a shift in perception that leads to a very real freedom from mental struggle.
You see, simply by seeing through the cosmic joke, you are freed from the lie that imprisons you. The idea is extremely simple and seems too trivial to matter, but it is the formula to awakening:
All things are changing, the self is just an aggregation of these changing phenomena, no lasting satisfaction can be derived from anything that invariably goes away.
What happens once these things are deeply known, (not just intellectually, but experientially) is that the mind immediately lets go because it realizes that there isn't anything to hold onto.
It's a very simple thing to understand, but takes work to integrate. That is quite literally the entire reason that meditation exists. I've gotten small tastes of this letting go, and I can assure you that it is super real. But I can also tell you that the selfing process is a real son of a bitch, and does not want to give up its power.
