| | There are two benefits, in my experience, to no-self realization and experience.
1) liberation
By liberating the view that there is a real self, it stops clinging. To what? Clinging to a sense that there is a 'me', a solid subject, or more subtly a sense of being or awareness... apart from the flow of sensate phenomenality.
All sufferings come from clinging (clinging to something as 'me', something as 'mine'), and all clingings/attachments basically come down to two views: 'is', and 'is not'. If there is no self or agent, then 'is' and 'is not' of a self does not apply. For example: imagine you are deluded about the nature of wind, and you think that there is a windness behind the blowing, so you grasp onto this construct of an inherent windness and obviously when the blowing changes from what you want or see it to be, 'you' suffer. But when you truly see that there is no 'windness' of wind, that 'wind' is merely a label for an ungraspable process of blowing, then what is left is simply the blowing activities. There is no more clinging to 'windness' or relating particular activities as 'belonging to a wind'.
Relating back to 'self': there is no 'self', 'awareness', 'subject' being 'here' to be clung to. There is no me, no I, no ownership... only the aggregates that simply 'flows'. There is nothing that is inherently 'me', or 'mine'. There is no more clinging or relating things back to a self or owner which results in craving and aversion, and this is very liberating.
What's left: referenceless, ownerless, disjoint, bubble-like, insubstantial, self-releasing and self-luminous experience.
As you progress from the initial no-self realization by transforming the five skandhas to eighteen dhatus (discussed in some of my earlier posts), you will also see that fetters (craving, fear, anger, etc) begin to lose hold and disappear from your life. However the overcoming of subtler fetters be an immediate effect and the insights and experience may not sink in so deeply as to remove all the latent tendencies and habits (it also depends on whether he has former meditative practice, for RT their experience may not be as stable due to the nature of the direct path which is to result in direct insight quickly without necessarily having the meditative foundation, as they do not have years of vipassana and samadhi practice as a foundation). I consider the no-self realization as Buddha's Sotapanna, since it entails the end of 'self-view', and the further stages to Arhantship are the removal of remaining fetters.
2) happiness
Most people are not really enjoying their experience. They are always either in aversion of the moment, or in desire of something better, therefore they can never be truly happy even if they get a billion dollars. The resting of dualistic and self-referencing tendencies leaves us with simply immersing in selfless pure sensate clarity which results in great bliss. There is a sense of perfection in the here and now and a non-contingent happiness. The bliss/happiness (I am using both terms synonymously here) of pure sensate enjoyment without clinging to a separate experiencer is beyond imagination. Everything ordinary becomes intensely alive and wonderful. |