Thanks for the helpful comments!
To clarify about experiences I have had that may have something to do with anatta. By now I have been able to pretty reliably generate an experience of seeing my thoughts, intentions, etc. as relatively more distinctly "out there" and perceived as objects that I can notice rising and falling away, rather than as the default method of knowing these things, which I would describe thusly: vehicles
through which I perceive the world, which tend to have an immersive quality that sweeps me away or into which I get caught up, and whose beginnings and endings I don't carefully notice. This experience I identify as Mind and Body. But this is distinct from the experience I recounted above, which had more to it. In fact, the experience I refer to was described very well by a poster in the thread Florian linked to: "sensations start to float and the perception of centrality starts to disintegrate." The "floating" is what I identified as "lightness" and the "centrality" component is what I was trying to get at by describing the experience of a coherent internal whole, as opposed to a "loosely organized mental ecosystem."
In retrospect, I realize that I had an experience a couple of months ago that perhaps is even more profoundly an anatta kind of thing. It happened a few months ago, when I was experiencing heavy and frequent A&P kind of phenomena, doing my own flavor of contemplative practices but not doing Buddhist practice per se. During this time period, I was just sitting in my living room looking into my kitchen, when suddenly for a few seconds my experience shifted abruptly. Visually, the world looked different in a way I can't quite describe. My memory of it is as if it were a snapshot frozen in time, like a painting or a still life. It had this paradoxical quality that it felt as if there was an experience of this mental moment there, but literally no one there experiencing it. I almost don't want to phrase it that way because it sounds like a hackneyed linguistic expression of not-self, but yet it seems most appropriate to phrase it that way because it is the most literal way I can convey it. At the time I kind of just went with it as there was all sorts of other intense stuff going on at the time and so it didn't stand out as particularly of note. In retrospect perhaps it was more important than I gave it credit for. There is something unsettling about the paradoxical nature of my memory of the experience (regarding the experience-without-experiencer aspect), in the same way that there is something unsettling about staring into the apparent paradox of an Escher painting. It doesn't seem to make sense but that's how I remember experiencing it all the same.
It seems like I should be able to leverage this into a conceptual insight regarding my understanding of anatta but I just can't quite make sense of it-- it's like trying to pick up a block of ice with greasy hands. Any advice on how to make future use of this experience would be much appreciated.
The thing is, both experiences (particularly the second one) had the flavor of spontaneous happenings, as opposed to something like a concentration state that I can intentionally cultivate. I would like to get to the point where I can begin cultivating these sorts of anatta-esque experiences intentionally rather than chance into them, in order to really push my practice forward.
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Regarding my conceptual understanding of anatta. Perhaps it is useful to distinguish between different sorts of entities we might call "self".
1. "historical self" or "conceptual self". This is one's sense of personal identity-- name, personality, occupation, physical body, memories, life experiences, social affiliations, etc. This seems like the "self" Florian debunked in his last post, talking about the cells of the body being replaced and so on. Intellectually, it is straightforward to me that this "self" is a mental construct, even if I don't always experience it that way. Nonetheless, it seems to me that the proper target of anatta considerations is not the "conceptual self" per se, but the related and more mysteriously subtle...
2. "phenomenological self". This is the immediate, in-the-present moment experience of an internal mental "whole" or "center" around which and in relation to which other mental events are construed. It is the "doer" and "perceiver", the thing that claims experiential ownership and responsibility for mental events, etc. This is a tougher nut for me to crack-- I have the vague notion that it's really rather more subtle than I've laid out here, and in general blunt descriptions on the level of "the doer" or "the perceiver" seem unsatisfactory to me in some way-- but I think I am beginning to make some headway here conceptually and perhaps experientially too. But what I still can't begin to work around is...
3. "field of experience". This is the mental arena itself, the playing field on which mental events play out and by which they are unified into a coherent whole. In my imperfect metaphor, this is the "canvas" on which the mental "paint" is placed. Of course, it is true that the boundaries that delineate two physical canvases is a human construct, rather than a boundary respected by nature. But this does not seem to be the case for the mental analogue. It seems that indeed, nature itself respects the boundaries between different fields of experience. This is the boundary by means of which all of "my" experiences occur together in the same field of experience, to the complete and utter exclusion of "your" experiences. This is what makes experience private and subjective rather than public and objective. True, we can *affect* the contents of each others' field of experience by interacting. But we cannot transcend that boundary; you can never experience my experiences directly, just as I can never experience yours. This is not an arbitrary mental division, but rather a (the?) fundamental division in the nature of things themselves. In turn, it seems like the "field of experience" could be considered a kind of perfectly respectable, non-illusory "self". For instance, it would make sense to talk about "my" (as opposed to "your") experience of redness, even if I were completely free of the experience of a "conceptual" and "phenomenological" self.
In the thread Florian linked to, a poster named David described it this way:
The paradoxical part of there being no actual self I can point a finger at, for me, is that there is also a certain sense in which this field of experience is "personal" - an intuitive sense in which solipsism can't seriously be considered. There is no doubt there are other beings in the world and that these memories, for instance, relate to what might be labeled "David "and no one else. Yet there's no "David" I can shake stick at! Maybe someone else can help me understand that.
I am still somewhat nebulous on the subtler aspects of how anatta relates to (2), but what I'm not clear on at all is precisely how the teaching/idea/experience of anatta relates to (3).
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As regards practice, I have some nebulous intuition that there is something deep behind the following quotes from Florian's thread that I could leverage into a special emphasis in future practice, in order to more directly target and cultivate anatta:
Well, it's hard to anything for certain at that juncture, if that's what I think it is. But yes, these qualities ARE definitely the way forward, and they tend to have a twofold nature at first, one fleeting and one growing deeper. This second one is what leads to the answer. Specifically, some of that openness and immediacy is not an object, i.e. not a quality remembered or observed, but somehow the gestalt or context within which the process gradually becomes self-aware directly without division. As one moves further in refining this sort of awareness, one finds parts of the whole dynamic structure becoming witnessed which before where actually constituent of the very act of attention. First gross and then increasingly more subtle aspects of bare experience become obvious and yet not separate from what is essentially sheer cognizance or wakefulness. Hope this also sounds right.
Just to interject here, I know this may seem off the wall, given that the discipline I'm referencing doesn't have any orientation towards achieving higher degrees of awareness, but Neurolinguistic Programming concepts can be helpful in thinking about this stuff. The basic idea is that we tend to encode things in terms of our basic senses (visually, aurally, or kinesthetically), and also in terms of where we place these things positionally in our sensory field - this can be somewhat idiosyncratic, but tends to be consistent in the same individual. So let's say you are considering a possible future event - you might perceive an image representing the event "in front of you", another one that is in the more distant future as an image farther away and slightly higher up than the first image, and events in the past might be represented as "behind you." This is a level of representing cognitions that is not yet at the level of language in most cases, but not at the level of primary intuitions or formations. Why do we represent our own intuitions to ourselves? So that we can represent them to others in language.
The point is that by becoming aware of our own internal representation schemes, we can better understand these rather obscure impressions of "space between the perceiver, perceived, and observer" and the like and get at the fundamental nonlinguistic intuitions that underlie them. David