So, I think I'd be right in saying that the insights sought here are products of close inspection and raised resolution of phenomena.
Is there a reverse process, which would reveal an even greater sense of ego or self - a large scale or more captivating super self ?
A bit like using a telescope instead of a microscope - wondering if the world of physics and meditation are analogous ?

Only slightly joking, but sure: pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth.

Interesting question. I had thought about writing a fable about a group of creatures, enlightened from birth, who wanted to develop an (illusory) sense of free will, and discovered a technique that would allow them to construct one - in four stages, of course, culminating in the glorious endpoint where they saw themselves as a completely discrete, separate entity free to make decisions and act in the world.

I don't think such a thing is possible - once you see through an illusion, I don't think your brain can be tricked into not seeing it. A reverse process would be generating more and more delusion.

There's another way to think about your question, though, from a True Self perspective instead of a No Self perspective, where you see the whole universe as the larger self, no different from you. This is just another way of looking at enlightenment - what really counts is that everything is a unified whole, so you can get at that unification from the other direction as well - "nothing is you/God/Tao" vs. "everything is you/God/Tao."

You may want to look into Transcendentalism, Cosmic Consciousness, and the True Self / No Self section of MCTB.

HI JC

Well I think that fable has already been written in some respect in spiritual cosmologies and mythologies of The Fall. Some would hold that the creation of the ego is what drives life and human creativity, it has purpose.

I heard a great thought experiment on the subject of meaning recently, which goes like this. There's an open book on a lawn. From a mile away you can't see it. From two hundred yards it looks like a white dot. From a hundred yards it's a white square that could be, say, a hankerchief. From twenty yards you can see it's a book but you can't tell if the black squiggles have any meaning. At one yard now you're in the meaning zone, you can read the story. At one inch eveything becomes blurred again, the meaning is lost. At 1/100 inch the fine structure of the paper starts to become apparent. At 1/100,000 inch things start to get atomic. At 1/1,000,000 of an inch things start to get really weird and quantum.

Take the book story to be analogous to the narrative self, and we (for sake of argument given present readers) live in the one yard zone.

Can you zoom out as well as in ? We can certainly visualise ourselves as one ego among many, or a part of a greater system (realm of sociology). And when we see ourselves as part of a complex system we can end up with chaos (in the mathematical sense) in which individual meaning becomes lost or indetirminate.

Are you asking, "Is there scale to perception?"

I zoom in AND out in vipassana. Don’t we all? Scale is a very interesting phenomenon, I think. Rather mindblowing.

Kind of, more like is there scale to mindfulness ?

Doesn’t that depend on what you are mindful of?

Or maybe... I had to experiment with dosis when I started taking ADHD medication, and when the dosis was too high, it felt as if my thoughts/sensations/perceptions were glued together in layers, as if the whole reality was in double (or multiple) exposure. Something like that?

My version is that mindfulness has a limited spectrum (it's not purely binary, but close), but not scale.

Stickman, yes, that fable would definitely be a Fall-type story. I think it's Fall-acious to say "the creation of the ego is what drives life and human creativity, it has purpose" - that's definitely the devil speaking, as it were, or the self's defenses flaring up. It's just not true.

As far as zooming in or zooming out, I think you can go in either direction, and the end result is the same - ditching the artificial split between the illusory self and the world.

I see "zooming in" as corresponding to no-self practices and "zooming out" as corresponding to true-self practices, and they both take you to the same place (which is right here and now, of course - where else could it be?)

I don't know.

Hm, what do you mean ?

Which is a pertinent question because the answer will come at one scale (words) but your attention might be on another level.

?

Ponder.

By using concentration, visualizations, etc, you can focus, zoom and build any kind of construct based on sensations (including ego of super self ones).

Concentration is a very, very powerful thing.

That said, there are limits to what you can do with concentration if you are not advanced in insight and morality.
Also, it does require "mommentum" (the more you do it, the better, but if you stop, you get back to zero or near zero).

There are another tools for the mind to focus in different ways to feel sensations in a different way (fasting or diets, retreats, substances, etc).

My guess is that what you are looking for is very similar to AF practices (and I consider that a kind of concentration).

Another thing, some ego practices involve some kind of augmented reality, powers, etc (like flying, changing reality at will, etc).
For those, a lot of imagination is required.

About "revealing", I don't know about that. That assumes that there is a "fixed" ego or superself to be revealed, or something there.
There isn't something unified or static there.
There are some patterns that are always trying to compensate or aliviate different kinds of pains, but my opinion is that those are better treated by insight meditation.

Some examples of true-self type "zooming out" practices:

* service - helps you get outside of your own needs and desires

* being in nature, astronomy - helps you get a sense of perspective for how big the world is and how little you are

* psychedelics, shamanism - can have similar effects as to zooming out

Well, not so much AF I think, which seems to be some sort of direct pointing practioce, basically.

Yeah you can construct in the imagination, which is a branch off from what I'm trying to ponder, and you remind me of a question which is does the imaginative life have it's own imaginative life ? ie., can the dreamed self also dream it's own self - recursive nested selves, one giving rise to the next. Haven't experienced that, but other people have different imgainative lives.

What I was really trying to get at, though, was the agencyless result of spiritual awakenings, in which people claim no self while operating as if they have one. Or even claim everything is meaningless even as they use meaningful language. Can I take this to be the result of zooming into the meaning making apparatus, like sticking your nose next to a TV until all you see is pixels (or even the space between the pixels), but the TV still does it's thing and people can watch it ?
Simply, can you move away from the TV until it loses it's meaning from the other direction ?

I wonder if this may be a new thing to come - cyborg matrixy hive mind of the future where every brain is wired together and agglomerates together into a massive ego in which indivudual selves are but pixels.

Some would say that we are already wired together as one but don't see it, or are already emedded in a networked natural system of communication, or aren't sensitive to our natural psy powers.

Maybe JC is right and getting the bigger picture by being inclusive of surroundings, rather than examination of the individual attributes of body mind, constitutes zooming out.

It could also be that the statement that there is no fixed ego isn't a final statement about reality, but rather a statement about perspective, and sometimes people (like Gotama) burn their bridges so they stay at a particular perspective.

What does it mean to operate "as if you had a self"?

Reminds me of a story about Wittgenstein - someone said something to the effect that people used to think the sun went around the earth because it looks like the sun goes around the earth. And he asked, "What would it look like if it looked like the earth went around the sun?"

It isn't possible to have a self, so there's no way to operate "as if you had one." People operate how they operate, without any self. That's a statement about reality that can be directly perceived - that's the whole point of the 3Cs.

Hm. Cool. That’s food for thoughts, or contemplation.

I had a lot of moments of "being in perfect peace" after a lot of AF. Like being at peace, harmony and comfortable in any place.
After strong concentration, 4th Jhana is very, very "open" and inclusive.

About spiritual awakenings, my take it's not so much about "zooming out".
It's more about solidity (your body begins to seem transparent), separation (things in your visual field are not seen as so separated).
Also continuity (all what you do is not seen as so "coherent" or with purpose).

My current opinion of how it works is here:

Enlightment based on sensations

I don't agree with JC that you can't operate "as if you had a self".
Duality processes are consistent (running all the time) before 1st path and, at least for me, the illusion of the self was very real (if I consider myself after 1st path .
I operated based on that illusion (did a lot of things based on that).

Another opinion:

After some time doing the same, what you are doing is moved to the unconscious.
For example, after playing the same song in the piano for some time, you can play it by "muscle memory" or in a way that is not conscious.

So, effort and alertness (when practicing concentration) at some point are moved to the "unconscious".
At some point they become what I call "consistent", by consistent I mean that they pervade all reality, without gaps.
For the conscious mind, after some time, there is no effort, no alertness, no gaps.
So effort and alertness become very similar to the duality processes.

Anyway, my opinions about all this are very pragmatic (and this site is very dogmatic).
Most of what I consider "useful" for me, will not be useful for anyone.
Too many problems with diagnosis, knowing what is what, communication, etc.

So I'll stop now .

It would be writing anything that starts with "reminds me of a story...."