I've come across this being said several times, that one of the ways that one can observe the fundamental characteristic of no-self is becoming increasingly acquainted with the awareness that a sensation can never perceive another sensation. I still don't understand this concept terribly well however, and so any attempts towards clarification would be much appreciated.

Well, the method towards realizing this is to notice that there are just sensations and nothing but. Since all sensations are being perceived (object), who is this subject that is doing the perceiving? There are numerous sensations that may appear to be the subject (for me the last one so far has been attention itself) but since they too can be objectified and therefore perceived, they are not the subject, they are not a self that is perceiving.

If there is anything in ones experience that appears to be perceiving, that appears to be the subject, all it takes is to notice it in order to realize that it is just another sensation, impermanent, not-self.

Does this help?

P.S. this becomes evident through insight practice but can be specifically looked for if one was to be of that inclination (ie. doing insight with the aim of searching for the perceiver for the entire duration of the sit, an example of which would be Maharshi's 'Who am I?' technique)

Well you gave a very good answer which is very related to but yet not the same question that I was thinking of. I understand, at least conceptually, that all of our perceived reality is made up of sensations, all of which are impermanent and non-self; what I don't understand is how it's possible to say that a sensation doesn't observe another. If I observe one of my senses with another, then yeah I can see how that observing sense can in turn be observed and so isn't the subject-observing-object itself, but the process of one observing the other is still going on, at least as far as I can tell.

Otherwise, how would the physical sense feed their data which they gather to the mind, if mind weren't able to observe them? Maybe this question should lead me to a great realization.

I think that there is roughly a 2,000 year tradition of people sitting down to meditate in order to figure out the answer to this and related questions, why not join in? At the end of the day, the only way this stuff makes sense is to be able to see it for yourself.

Edit: re-reading my initial response to your question, it seemed as if I was saying that a subject could be found, or that it existed, but as far as I can tell, it does not. As in, there is only the object and the awareness of the object and they co-exist. So no, there is no process of one observing the other, there is just the observed.

Haha, true true, speculation has very little place here.

Well, maybe an example helps: suppose you meditate on the breath; first there is the raw breath sensation, then if you pay real close attention you should find a little sensation "imitating" the breath, then there is this point of focus which might be trying to "grab onto" the sensation of breath, without knowing what to do, and interfering with this sensation; then there is this thought saying "how annoying, the attention interfering with the object," etc, etc.

Although these thing happen in sequence, and one arises as a causal result of the previous, that doesn't mean that any of these sensations is aware of the previous. Awareness of each IS the sensation itself happening.

However, you will discover that the mind has all these weird mechanisms and gadgets to give you the impression that there is an entity which is observing each sensation (rather than the sensation happening and its awareness being the same thing, or, say, in the same "place"). Furthermore, these mechanisms mask themselves in numerous shapes and sizes, and in increasing subtlety.

That's my two cents... Was it clear?

Ehhhh, you gave it a pretty good shot but no it didn't seem terribly clear. Thanks for the beneficial intention though. This seems to be something that simply can't be explained to someone who hasn't directly experienced it already, and sort of has to be taken on faith until that direct experience occurs. Ah the limitations of the crude conceptual framework that is the semantic jumble of language.

Hi Michael For...

you write:
So from personal experience, my eye sight never tastes. My taste never smells. My touch does not see.

Various nerves receive these sensations.

The brain may perceive these nerve signals.

I don't know who the author is of the following, but it is excerpted here with web citation below:


http://viewonbuddhism.org/mind.html#1a

At some point in childhood an 'i' is formed through repetition of the above. After an 'i' is formed, 'i' becomes like making layer cake in all directions. One feeling begets another feeling, begets a recognition and discrimination...exponentially adding.

What is real, if anything, in the layer cake?



Is this helpful?

I think the other replies have been on target, but since it seems to have not yet lead to understanding, I'm going to give it a shot from a slightly different angle.



It is worth noting again that a physical sense (hearing, seeing, tasting, touching, smelling) is not capable of perceiving another (I cannot smell things with my eyes). You have recollected that there is a "sense" of observing these physical senses, and I presume it is also capable of observing the subject-self ("inside"). What is that "sense," then? What is this process of one observing the other? What is the "one" and what is "the other?" Is one of the two illusory (can one of them be done away with, is one of them redundant, is one ephemeral / ambiguous and constantly changing, etc)? If one of the two is illusory, what does that mean for your perception of experience? Specifically: is this sense of a process of one which observes the other actually going on, or is it imaginary?



When the mind perceives itself ("apperception") then the one experiencing such will notice that they are the sensations, rather than the observer of those sensations. Rather than seeing "through" the eyes, one is the seeing; rather than hearing "through" the ears, one is the hearing; rather than tasting "through" the mouth, one is the tasting; rather than smelling "through" the nose, one is the smelling; rather than feeling "through" the skin, one is the feeling. That is to say: when the "sense" of observing is eliminated or in abeyance, one will perceive the physical sense feed with scintillating clarity, because one is the doing of what is happening (rather than being an observer of such a happening).

Try, if you will, to look about the room from the front of your eyes, as if your eyes are gently painting the landscape as they move, as if the seeing will simply happen regardless of whether you do anything specific at the moment. Can this monitor or mouse pad or hand or whatever be seen as it is, directly (unobserved)? Can I allow this moment to live me, perhaps just for a moment?



You may want to reconsider thinking of language as a scape-goat for delusion's wiles, as what it enables is your only way to freedom!

Trent

i am going to tack on yet another bit to the advice already provided and which is mentioned elsewhere frequently: nature

When in a human-made area (take a grocery aisle of canned goods) 'my' mind easily labels everything even without my conscious participation: cans, lights, colors, brands, flooring, ads, radio ads+muzak, cost...

Nature provides infinite 'near patterns' which are harder to unconsciously label (unless it's your training). Without constant labeling, the observer may be a bit more hollow, less able to comment. What is it's job if not to label?

And, there is a lot of alertness to the senses in nature. Observer-sense cannot label every wind sound, cricket, rustle, peck, tympanic ringing: so many rich events occurring at once. Can ear sense "do" all of this at once? I don't really know the limit of ear-sense, but it seems much greater in receptive capacity than observer-sense.

_____


Not just nature, though: anything physical (dance, fencing, trials bikes, piano, painting, singing, watching, typing...).


It is very interesting to detect when an observer-sense arrives, because it means that in the immediately preceding moment there was no observer, and you were still doing.

Hey,

Sorry it's been some time since I've been on, so I haven't seen your replies until now. Well thank you for trying your utmost, and I have to say Trent probably came the closest to getting me to understand this, but...I honestly believe I can only experience this. Trying to understand it with more content feels like my mind tying itself into more knots. So, thank you all for the intention at least, for the attempts.

Right now I'm still trying my utmost with negligible success to enter 1st Jhana whenever I meditate, which admittedly is usually only once per day, and that's almost always later at night. I'm also about 3/4 of the way through Daniel's blook, but I sort of hesitate to read too quickly or terribly much at one time because 1) I already have enough preconceptions of how things should turn out intruding every 6 seconds into my concentration practice and 2) because I don't want to get ahead of myself before I've even entered 1st Jhana and seen it to be possible. If I have to get to the point where my attention's utterly unwavering for each and every in and out breath for a period of time like an hour before I can affirm it to be possible to attain for myself...I might be at this for decades. I have to admit that I struggle with being someone other than a results-oriented person, and so it feels incredibly frustrating at times to still be stuck in this sort of novice territory, not exactly a beginner, but damn close.

Hey Man,
I had an idea. Other than you trying to understand what's written here... I'd be curious to understand you. Are you really suggesting that a sensation can percieve another sensation? Like a tingle in the neck can percieve an itch in the shoulder? I'm having trouble even imagining a scenario like this. I get how you could say that a "sense" can percieve something. Like, my eyes can percieve light. Or my brain can percieve the nuero impulses sent from my eyes via my nervous system. But, a sensation can percieve another? Is that what you're saying?

Well, I wouldn't assume if I were you that I've fully thought this through ;) Just as food for thought though, think of the very common occurrence of Synesthesia. They see smells don't they, they hear feelings? In my case, I can't remember anymore what my original train of thought might have been in saying my original statement, since it's already been, what, a couple months ago. I think though, that I meant that Buddhism usually qualifies Mind as being a sixth sense of sorts, and so you might say that something you see is perceived and interpreted by Mind, and the same for any other sense. Hence a sense perceiving another sense. My mental interpretation of what my breath is, my mental vision of the rhythm of it, comes after the actual feeling of the breath and is more subtly distinct (at least to me), but nevertheless the two are separate and come as the result of Mind perceiving another sense. My reasoning might be faulty, but now you might have a better idea of how I think.

As for this reply:



Well yeah, I suppose I agree, but I'm not really able to see exactly what direction you were trying to point me in. I mean from a Buddhist's point of view everything I perceive doesn't exist in an ultimately real sense, since whatever sense or perception I bring up still has the quality of being transient...so I suppose I'm saying to you that both of them are ultimately illusory...which is either comforting or depressing, depending on how advanced you are in your insight meditation. I'm going to even go so far as to say that the whole question doesn't matter, since it's a question of semantics. This reminds me somehow of Daniel's chapter on "the powers", how he says that at a certain point, the things which you're experiencing can both be said to be real and unreal. I think in a much less spectacular way this idea applies to what we're talking about (oh no, Inception just popped into my head XD). I guess ultimately my logic boils down to that, until I attain Enlightenment, whether I'm awake or asleep or whichever Bardo I happen to be traveling through, I'm basically in a kind of dream.

Hello Michael,



Your reasoning seems to be logically correct. The Mind referenced is the 'you' (an inborn, imaginary 'you,' a feeling being / presence) that the methods discussed on this web-forum seek to eliminate. It is because you are experiencing life with this Mind/self in place that this teaching does not yet ring true for you. That is to say, you are experiencing life through an illusion (layered atop the world that does exist), and discourses stating that 'sensations are never perceived by others' is an allusion to the experience of life free from illusion. And so, the utility of such a discourse is that it reveals to one-- perhaps only conceptually at first-- that which is to be attained to / verified via experience.



The questions supplied were not necessarily pointing a specific direction, but rather, a general direction. They are worth thinking through because the answers to those questions should (at the very least) lead one to intermediary insights, which may then lead to the insights which extinguish your confusion on the matter being discussed.

You have made several mentions of the "buddhist's point of view" now. If I may inquire, what is your motivation for stating this as you have, rather than, say: "my opinion is (...)"? Could it be that you value the opinion of such an "authority" (as you perceive it) more than you value your own opinion? If so, do you recognize the far-reaching consequences of such a submission?

So if the sense and the perception (I am assuming by "perception" you are meaning the same thing as "Mind," above) is ultimately illusory, why are you on this internet-forum talking to "illusion(s)"? What value do you find in corresponding with the inhabitants of your kind-of dream? Why are you reading the materials you do, or meditate as you do? Why do you take out the trash, or shower, or eat food?

Trent

But, as mentioned above, this crossing the wires of the senses is called synaesthesia, which 'in its simplest form it is best described as a “union of the senses” whereby two or more of the five senses that are normally experienced separately are involuntarily and automatically joined together.'

I have a mild form of it. I interpret movement in the visual field as sound. It's rather nice to sit and listen to the tiny feet of insects crawling along the ground, or observe the symphonic expressions of a face in conversation. Night buses are cool.

Explaining this to someone once, they insisted that it was "all in my head", which I found quite funny. Where else would it be?

I find it hard to imagine how someone could not experience things in this way. It must be... very quiet.


Anyway, ignoring that, I think to trick to this, and of course it is a trick, is to see that a unified observer is not apparent, as perhaps previously assumed, when you understand that the thing that's doing the vision isn't the thing that's doing the smelling, and so any apparent (self) unified experience sits on top of this wholly constructed experience, and not beneath it (as the presumed observer). And seeing the surface of experience clearly in this way, just might let you see what is 'beneath' it after all (no-self).

But remember, it's just experience we are taking about here, and our presumptions about it.

Hah that is very cool =P. I heard an account of a dad and son who both had a kind of language synesthesia.. like when reading words, they would see colors around the words too. They had a conversation discussing what colors various words are, like "hmm no 'fork' is more orange than green.. you think it's green?" they agreed on some of them too =P.

Yeah, I saw a video of a woman that saw sound. They sat her in front of a jazz band and she looked...insanely satisfied.

But I remember now that when I have thought about this carefully, it's not so much movement for me, as anything that could be interpreted as having a frequency, and indeed the 'sound' is naturally related to that frequency as a certain pitch, or so I imagine. (And whilst you don't get frequency without periodicity there is, perhaps strangely, something periodic about a constant movement that gives the feel of a frequency. I don't know but it may have something to do with the interference of a perceptual sampling rate with such a constant movement that provides it with a 'beat', if you can imagine that.) This then makes me think of the relationship between sound and feeling. I'm not hearing the sound with my ears, obviously, but perhaps feeling them all the same.

Here's something you can try. Rub you thumb and finger together very very slowly next to your ear. There's quite a lot of noise as the surfaces slip past each other in small jumps. Now continue to do that and move your hand away from you so you know you can't be hearing it any more. Perhaps you agree that you have access to the same amount of information as before? And perhaps even that the now distant rubbing feeling has the feel of a sound, but one that you couldn't be hearing?

Anyway, more interesting for me, (than the thought experiment that 'one sense can't sense another', something I hadn't heard before), is the fact that all our senses are senses of touch (you don't look out of your eyes, the light comes into them, the airwaves tickle your ear drums, the finger and thumb vibrate one another, creating felt sound waves) .

Consider this, that all our senses are senses of touch, and see what it does to your ideas of subject and object.

Well, as for your first paragraph, I see what you were referring to now and I agree.

To explain what I meant in the second statement is a little more difficult. I say Buddhist's point of view as distinguished from my point of view because I haven't experienced really anything of substance from the teachings yet, and though I call myself a Buddhist and study the teachings and meditate and the whole nine yards, I won't personally see myself as being truly an adherent of the teachings until I come to start to exemplify them, meaning until I attain to, well, attainments instead of mere suppositions.

Another, maybe related reason why I say, "from the Buddhist's point of view" is because, while I say I'm Buddhist, there are of course a few things I've found that I don't agree with particularly, having more to do with the dogmatic side of things. Please don't ask me for examples, because I'm drawing a blank on specifics right now . In this way I tend to be somewhat literal minded, and so I hesitate to say I'm fully anything ideologically-speaking unless I can't find anything dubious within it (as a side note, I think I've come across relatively few truly iron-clad ideas). Being Buddhist for me involves years of testing out what I think and just kind of accepting that for quite a long time I'm not going to be absolutely sure about quite a few things. I've chosen Buddhism because I agree with all of the major ideas, because it's appealing, because I'm drawn to it for some reasons I can't explain for myself, but those are all intellectual ideas, not the real stuff of Buddhism, the real experiential knowledge. Everybody else in the world can tell me that the Jhanas and Enlightenment are possible, but really it all hinges on naked faith for me and other people like me, until I see for myself if what I've heard is possible is, or it isn't. I'm not sure I understand what you mean by, "the far-reaching consequences of such a submission."

My answer to your last question is that I might've been unclear again or you might've taken what I said too literally, but that by "dream" I don't mean REM Sleep or the Matrix. I instead meant to communicate more along the lines that saying definitively what is and isn't real, or even what's meant by saying "real" is somewhat of a slippery subject. Things have conventional reality, in that that car WILL kill me if it hits me head on, but due to the ever changing nature of reality you can also say that everything's void, except, of course, for the 4 Noble Truths. So does it exist or doesn't it? If I remember the teachings correctly, the answer's both and neither. So no, you're not an illusion or a phantasm or the beast from 20,000 fathoms, but instead you and I and everyone and everything can either be said to exist or not exist or both, predicated on what perspective we choose to take.

Something I take issue with, on a related note, is the idea that certain ways of looking at questions or that certain ways of answering are incorrect or correct, especially when it comes to questions like this topic. However I see it, isn't that my reality, and so, for my purposes, what exists? Isn't each subjective perspective inherently correct to the perceiver? It feels vaguely similar to Czech professor getting a degree in English, moving over here, and then telling the native-speaking populace that they're all screwing up their language, when the native-speaker IS the ultimate judge of what is correct.