| | That used to be a big puzzler for me as well. I couldn't imagine how that would work.
Put bluntly, the sense that I'm standing before a huge panel of sensory input devices, watching my life through them, is gone. "I" am no longer standing before "my" life, rather, this is life, it is happening here, now. The senses do not make little plaster casts of objects out there, to be transported into my awareness and re-constructed in there somehow. The process of perception is not separate from what is perceived, nor does it bridge some sort of gap between a perceiver and perceived.
Put poetically: The perception of the chair is already part of the chair, not a picture in the mind, or a part of the mind. (Duncan Barford, only he had roses instead of chairs).
There is no new supernatural disembodied distributed awareness you somehow tap into, with self-aware chairs and so on. (That would be kind of cool, but it's not how it is). It's more like the opposite: with the self dropping out of the picture, nothing can claim awareness for its own, there's no special bit of experience that can own all the other bits by being awareness or by being aware of them, or pretending to be awareness, or all the other hackneyed stuff going on before, where awareness was mistaken to be a thing, to be had or owned or experienced or applied to other things.
It's actually pretty well put in the suttas, the phrase, "this is not me, this is not mine, this is not myself".
I'm afraid this wasn't very helpful, because the urge to imagine how this could be tend to be pretty stong - but if it was helpful, so much the better.
Cheers, Florian |