Recently I’ve been wrestling with the concept of Self and making little headway. I’m hoping that by writing this out I’ll generate some insights – but apologies in advance if there’s rambling along the way. I’m not sure quite where this is headed yet.
I’ll start with an experience I had recently. Years ago I used to suffer from sleep paralysis regularly. I say “suffer” because, back then, I didn’t understand SP, or realise it could be used to generate lucid dreams. I wasn’t frightened – just found it deeply uncomfortable.
Cut forward several years and I became interested in LDs and learnt about the connection between SP and LDs. For a while it was great. SP still hit me spontaneously and I could also purposely induce it and, from there, slip into LDs. Gradually, though, SP became harder and harder to produce – and eventually impossible.
This process started with an increase in false awakenings during LDs. I’d be in the midst of an LD and undergo a false awakening which would end my lucidity. It felt like my mind was literally kicking me out of LDs, as though it/I disapproved of them on some level.
For a while I could almost induce SP; I’d start to experience vibrations and auditory phenomena, but they’d peter out to nothing. For years now I haven’t been able to get even to that stage, either intentionally or unintentionally. I still have semi-lucid dreams on occasion, but they occur randomly, not through any agency on my part. I’ve wondered occasionally why this change should have come about but never gave it too much thought. While I welcome LDs, and while they’ve helped to shape my interpretation of reality, they’ve never been my end goal, so I wasn’t too concerned.
Cut to a fortnight ago. For the first time in a long time I’m on the verge of a spontaneous SP and I use all my old tricks to encourage it along. But the vibrations fade to nothing and I suddenly realise that it’s my fault. There’s an unpleasant sensation associated with the SP this time, which I think can best be described as something like descent. In the past, SP may have been accompanied by an initial feeling of physical heaviness, but there was also a sense of mental lightness – like a part of me was lifting up or being vibrated outwards. This time the feeling of mental heaviness was oppressive.
I’ve never undergone full anaesthesia before, but I think the sensation I was experiencing must be similar, though more unpleasantly drawn out. It was like being unwillingly dragged towards oblivion and a loss of self-awareness. Quite unlike gently drifting into sleep/dreams - or being hurled into them, which is how SP>>LD usually feels to me.
Anyway – even as I was trying to encourage the SP I was simultaneously fighting it because of the dragging sensation, which effectively killed the SP.
So now I’ve been more intensively contemplating this experience, along with the general decline of SP in my life, and it occurs to me that it might all be connected to some of the problems I’ve been wrestling with regarding what Self is.
I know that in this sub /u/mindseal has previously defined mind as a threefold capacity to know, will and experience, which I wouldn’t dispute.
But for me there’s a gap, in that I can’t express how a concept of self in the form of consistent (or inconsistent) personality or character fits into this model.
I suppose what I’m driving at is - in order for the mind to will anything, there has to be an impulse or desire “behind” that will. To attempt a metaphor, if will is a gun, there still has to be a someone who decides what to point it at and when to shoot.
So who is that? How “real” am I/that person? Am I just a habit, like the laws of physics, or am I more intrinsic and essential? How enduring am “I”? How inconstant?
These questions strike me as vital if a person pursues subjective idealism with a view to effecting change. I’ve experienced dreams where this entire lifetime of experiences has been wiped from my memory. I find those dreams disconcerting – but I’d argue that even in those dreams I retain core properties which persist even in the absence of memories of this lifetime. My moral code, my sense of humour, my emotional reactions and – sorry, things are about to get fluffy but I lack words to adequately describe this - a sort of observing self-aware knowingness which seems to sit permanently at the back of my mind. I also feel like these qualities have been with me in this lifetime for as far back as I can remember.
I’m not saying that I haven’t been altered at all by this life, but I think that those properties have, by and large, been central to my existence - to what I will, to how I interpret experience - and they have not changed substantially. Sometimes, as an intellectual exercise, I’ve sat down, played devil’s advocate with myself, and tried to change them, with no success.
But how does any of this connect to the decline of SP/LD in my life? I think the connection lies in my attachment to my concept of my self/my personality, to the me behind the scenes who Knows, Wills and Experiences – and a fear of losing that self.
This may seem counterintuitive. If anything, you are surely more likely to lose sight of yourself in non-lucid dreams. Except that non-lucid dreams perhaps present less of a challenge to a physicalist mindset. And I’ve recently realised that I may be erroneously attaching my concept of Self/personality to the waking world and its qualities. In other words, I've been mentally attaching my personality to the physicalist experience, even though I wouldn’t actually describe myself as a physicalist.
So – if I lucid dream, and if I turn the laws of physics/nature as they appear in the waking world on their head, it’s an indication that this world isn’t real/doesn’t have an immutable existence separate to me.
Well… we all know that. That’s why we’re here, right? But it’s quite one thing to know this and another altogether to really live it.
So what if lucid dreams really force me up against subjective idealism and I feel, by extension, that the Self I identify with is similarly mutable and substanceless? What if, by pursuing this path, I lose my self? I’m not saying I won’t exist – I am emphatically not one of those “there is no self” types. But perhaps I will become changed beyond recognition, just as I hope to change the world beyond recognition.
This is the roadblock I’ve been hitting and, now that I’ve typed it out in black and white, I think it’s wrong-headed. Evidently I like my personality as is (which, hey, is a bonus nice realisation) and I’m not keen on drastic alteration of my self. But I’ve been erroneously linking my self to the "outer" world instead of linking it to… my self.
And I think that the dragging/oblivion feeling I experienced in that aborted SP was a manifestation of that fear, just as the decline in SP/LDing in my life is probably a result of that fear. And I also suspect my regular dreams have been less rich, less far reaching for the same reason – I’ve unconsciously been keeping this grip on a world which, by and large, I detest.
So. Evidently I’ve identified a fear in myself of mental drifting and losing sight of the me who I feel that I am. And to counteract that I’ve been anchoring myself to this substandard existence. What I should have been doing was making my self my anchor – because then the world experience is less important and can flow/change more readily.
And perhaps in the end it doesn’t matter how mutable or permanent your personality/self can be, but how mutable you want it to be.
We need to make a distinction between the self and self-image. The self is the agency that engages in this or another commitment. It's what does the work. It's what holds on, or alternatively, lets go. It's what obsesses, and alternatively, stops obsessing. It's what is responsible in an ultimate and beyond-conventinal sense for the shape the experience is taking.
The self is not things like "tall", "honest", "blue-eyed" and whatnot. These kinds of specific patterns and attachments to them have nothing to do with the self as such. The self is also that which doesn't have to entangle itself in that way.
The important point is this: how to retain responsibility while also gaining flexibility.
The problem with a conventional view of the self is that it's tied up in the body and the specifics of a very narrow personality, and as a result of this tie the perceived capabilities are very limited. So for example, if I am a fleshy body, and this body has well-understood parameters, then of course I cannot exceed those parameters. So a very common reaction to this is to denounce the self. But the problem here is that the self is also the origin point of responsibility and empowerment and freedom. It's that which could do something about the problems one faces in life. So, if I have a habit to hit my thumb while I am hammering a nail, I am also that which can end this habit. So if I denounce myself in order to put some distance between something (not me, right?) and my habits, I also weaken the sense of agency and power I have over those habits.
Basically how we talk about this is important. The self is not the problem and what you're talking about here is not exactly right, because you're not going to dissolve yourself. You'll dissolve your own attachment to a fixed image of what you believe(d) you are (or were). That's what you'll dissolve. And once you're done, there you will be, still remaining, still yourself, but minus that fixation, and as you said you'll have even more options then and not fewer. Far from ending yourself, you'll in effect expand your ability to be and act. You'll dissolve not so much yourself as your chains.
What's hard for people to realize is that it's not the fleshy body that acts. Holding the body as the origin point and as the causal center of one's experience (brain causing mind), that's physicalism.
Some people identify with certain patterns and habits so strongly that once those habits and patterns go missing, the person believes they've died. But if you're having any experience at all, and noticing that a certain pattern is temporarily missing is an experience, it means you're alive, right? :) So obviously, very obviously, the so-called "ego death" is very much you being alive and not dying.
It's also important to note that it is only from the POV of positively knowing what your usual patterns are, that you can notice those same patterns as "missing." So anyone who experienced their "ego missing" clearly knew what it was that they'd ordinarily expect to find and weren't finding just then. It's only if you know what your car keys look like that you can experience those same keys as possibly missing. If anyone experiences their ego missing, of course on a subtle level that ego is very much not missing at all. If you think you've lost your sense of self, how do you know you've lost it if you don't know what your sense of self is? Or how can you both know what your sense of self is and also lose it at the same time? This is why I seriously dislike all the self-denouncing and ego-bashing talk.
I've had many many experiences like this, where some or even all the aspects that I customarily hold as "myself" in a conventional sense have gone missing from my experience. At that time, I knew full well that I haven't died at all, but only a false image of me has been temporarily suppressed thanks to episodic concentration. Once episodic concentration wears out, baseline concentration takes over again and it's back to the baseline habitual pattern. So I've had moments where I have intensely focused on certain ideas, like stopping time, or finding my true core, or letting go of anything that can be let go, etc. This focus is mental effort and once the effort wears out, the effortless habitual pattern is back, and here I am like this again.
Altering the baseline concentration is the key, but to do that, far from letting go of oneself one needs to have an immensely stable and secure sense of self, so secure, that you don't even think you depend on something like "a universe" or an external anything. Then acting from that immense space of personal security it becomes possible to let go some patterns that would have been deemed life-preserving in the past.
Basically security is a need that has to be fulfilled. For a conventional being taking care of their so-called "physical" body is what fulfills the need for personal security. Something else has to fill that role first, and then it becomes possible to no longer revolve everything one does around the body, and also at that time, the body can be reconfigured to abide new rules and new patterns, because the relationship changes from "this thing called 'body' is me" to "this is an experience I am having but I am not this experience." In order to say that "I am not this experience" I have to exist first. Otherwise who is saying so?
Originally commented by u/mindseal on 2018-04-11 08:40:37 (dx5jhu1)
So by self, I'm meaning what I perceive as my current point of control. It is the self that I identify with. It is the self that is made up of a personality, of human attributes, etc. Of course what I truly am, is not this self. I am the entire scene, I am the canvas upon which experience is drawn on. I agree that the dissolving is a dissolving into your "true self", by removing identification with the "smaller self" and identifying with the entire self. I am not fundamentally losing myself, but I am losing the thing that is writing this right now.
Letting go of oneself, if done correctly, will lead to an immensely stable and secure sense of self that is completely independent of any experience that one is currently having. Instead of identifying with the content of the experience, you will identify with the context of the experience. When you are the context of the experience, you are not dependent on anything. All experience can pass by and you will not be affected, because you are the context of that experience, you are the house in which the experience sits in. The experience depends on you, instead of the conventional way of you depending on the experience. To cultivate a supremely powerful self, one must cease identifying with any and all experiences and instead identify with that which holds the experience. One should not allow experiences to dictate their path to success. So many people make that mistake, they allow their experiences to dictate their results, instead of dictating the results and allowing the appropriate experiences to occur. My path consists of rejecting all experiences, I'm not interested in what my experiences show me. In order to reject everything, I must let go of all of it.
Edit: I still haven't worked out how it is you plan on getting to where you want to be. Are you focusing on cultivating your desired end state by gradually building up momentum to bigger things? In a previous discussion you said it could take you multiple life times and I said I planned on getting my cake in this life time. Our means to ends are polar opposites but they end up at the same end state it would seem.
Originally commented by u/Green-Moon on 2018-04-12 23:33:57 (dx8p5th)
With this explanation I have to agree.
The problem is, people rarely explain it as well as you just did, and as a shorthand (without that elaboration of yours) most of the anti-self talk ends up being mostly disempowering and wrongheaded.
So I agree with the essence of what you're saying but I am paying attention to what is skilful and what isn't.
The problem is that the self refers to two different things:
Personality, including but not limited to the bodily shape which is a specific recognizable pattern of a little 4 limbed, one-headed creature.
The fact of personal responsibility, and will.
How can one contemplate dumping or distancing from the #1, while not only keeping, but strengthening the #2? That's the pickle. Because "the self" is a shorthand for both of those, I think the anti-self talk ends up throwing away the baby along with the bathwater.
I prefer to tell people that they aren't who they believe they are, instead of saying they don't exist, or telling them to commit spiritual suicide, or something like that. A lot of the anti-self talk sounds like an admonition for spiritual suicide. I don't want to promote any notion of spiritual suicide. I don't even want to go near it. I want to promote personal freedom and expansiveness that transcends convention, at least at a secret level.
At the level of convention I promote cooperation and balancing of responsibilities (as opposed to lumping all the responsibility on any single person for everything). Of course this sub is not about anything related to convention, but I figure I'll mention it briefly. So inside the convention we each have to do our part, and share the responsibility together. But outside convention, where this esoteric stuff fits in, there is you as God, basically, and you as God should take 100% of responsibility for everything. But again, that's outside convention. We cannot run a reasonable society or government based on this idea, lol. That's why it's esoteric and is for some individuals who so-to-say have the "karma" (intent, beyond conventional aspirations) for it.
I'm lessening my identification with the body without abandoning my responsibility for the body. So like the painting is not the painter, but the painter is still responsible for what's in the painting. I am not this body, but I am responsible for how this body manifests. That's the relationship I cultivate now. This body is an image I am producing and this image is not me, but since I am in fact producing it, I better produce something that suits my interests. Of course the so-called "world" is also an image I am producing, but less consciously. Although the body also has many subconscious processes that govern its apparent function, but my own world-shaping processes are less conscious and are more hidden than even the subconscious ones that govern the mental fabrication that we know as "the human body."
So I revisit this topic in contemplation over and over, repeatedly, for many years. The result is that I am gradually changing how I think and relate to this experience. As a result, when I experience a blackout (as one example), I feel like the blackout is not happening to me. It's like watching a movie about a blackout. In the past I would have identified with that experience of a blackout and would have instantly thought, "I am blacking out!" Now I instantly think, "So this is an experience of a blackout, and I am not blacking out. On the contrary, I am very conscious and alert, and I am looking at this blackout experience as though it were a coin in the palm of my hand, able to scrutinize it freely." This is evidence that what I am doing is having a desired effect. I'm moving in the right direction. Of course I do not let my experience tell me how things are, so I don't mean "evidence" in the sense that it's guiding my thinking. I am basically designing my experience and I don't treat any experience as informative. All experiences are merely suggestive and that's why I can shape them. That's why it's OK for me to change how I experience blackouts (as one example) and the meanings I assign with regard to such experiences.
Originally commented by u/mindseal on 2018-04-13 00:10:53 (dx8rclm)
I think all the ego death stuff is just born out of misinterpretation and uncertainty about one truly wants. They're listening to other people who they view as being more experienced than them and they don't ever really forge a personalized, independent path for themselves.
There's also the fact that weirdway/oneirosophy/subjective idealism is a deviation from usual spiritual paths. Most people who are spiritually inclined and motivated to pursue the path are not thinking beyond enlightenment. So they stop at "self eradication" and think that's it. There's the classic saying "before enlightenment, chop wood, after enlightenment, chop wood". There's nothing necessarily wrong with this if they want to do it like that, but it's why a lot of people think self eradication is the ultimate and final goal. They're not thinking omnipotence or deification, they're thinking passivity and stillness. Many don't realize that omnipotence is a legitimate option after enlightenment, and for the normal practitioner whose aiming to reach enlightenment and cease suffering, then that's probably for the best anyway as it might lead to distraction if they doesn't fully understand what it entails.
Sounds very similar to what I'm doing. The key is ceasing to identify with any object or content within experience and identifying with the context of it all. Would you say your everyday, conscious experience has been permanently altered?
Originally commented by u/Green-Moon on 2018-04-14 12:10:33 (dxc1sqd)
Well, oneirosophy has deleted the word "subjective" from their sidebar, from what I can recall. It was committed to being subjective only so long as I was still there.
I very much prefer how I have explained things here to anything else, but I won't go so far as to say only I have expressed similar ideas. And there are many publicly available instructions "out there" that if not postulating outright omnipotence certainly point in that direction, in the direction of personal empowerment. Just about anything with active magick is in that direction. Any mystics that have asserted themselves as God (there were more than a few), or have asserted the reader of their ideas as God, have been pointing in that direction.
So for me, I really do like how I have formulated things and I use what I talk about myself, and I am happy. I have shared it in the hopes others can stimulate themselves to make for themselves something which they too can be happy with. I just use whatever I talk about. But for others what I talk about can be raw material that could be processed into something they might want to use. I've made this known to make people's lives better, but I also realize what I talk about is not for everyone, hence the "low key" approach.
Yes. I am not the same as I used to be and the world is also not the same either. Nothing is the same anymore.
I like the new way much better. I am certain I got the principles right and now I am just getting more comfortable and hammering out some details. I see a life of independence in the future. Gone will be the days of me begging others for anything, or the days of me lookout out at this big appearance and fearing it will overwhelm me like a tsunami. I mean, I still have some residual fears like that, but I feel they're steadily and consistently receding and the way I construe meanings and relate to my experience is changing in durable ways, slowly.
Originally commented by u/mindseal on 2018-04-17 00:12:18 (dxgbdrl)
Definitely. Both magick and meditation/spiritual practice can be highly intertwined, the option is always there.
It's always neat to have these types of communities where we can talk about specifics on the same wavelength. Spirituality is a massive field and there's so many subsections and interpretations to be explored, specialized communities are particularly useful in going deeper down the rabbit hole.
I've got all the tools that I need and now I'm in the process of actualizing it. It's just about staying disciplined at this point. I'm also looking forward to the days of proper independence, it should be good.
Originally commented by u/Green-Moon on 2018-04-18 01:11:52 (dxih8su)