Bismuth:
Aren't people practicing meditation because they suffer and want/need to get better?
This is a very common reason. But some people meditate because they want to experience enlightenment because they want to "see things as they really are". Others do it because they think enlightenment will make them better than other people and they do it for egotistical reasons. In some traditions (for example Spiritualism) people meditate for psychic development including the ability to communicate with spirits.
Bismuth:
When someone spend many hours a day for few years and go to retreats it must be motivated by something strong. Isn't it strong persistent suffering they want to get rid of?
Buddhism talks about solid sense of self which I recognize and it can certainly lead to suffering.
Is there anything like "liquid sense of self" though? It is a kind of sense of self that moment to moment changes a little, slow enough to still appear as if I was doing everything and fast enough to after few moments sense of self felt like very similar but different self. I do not experience any suffering while using it and feel pretty normal with normal experience of reality.
I am Stream Enterer and other than entering the stream I can also do fruitions (change solid sense of self in-place which immediately stops suffering makes it easier to make it "flow") and experience no sense of self by makin the stream quite a bit faster and find it good for when I am alone becase sense of self feels like something needed for interaction with other people and when being alone having sense of self makes me want to have other people around and with no sense of self I am like whatever.
I have heard this before - someone saying their sense of self is needed is for interacting with other people. I think it was Henry wijaya but I don't remember which thread.
Bismuth:
I do not however feel the need to complely remove sense of self from myself and to never experience it ever again because it does not even feel like an issue to me...
So I wonder if there is maybe some issue that I do not have that others do have and they after experiencing no sense of self find it so important to somehow lock themselves in this kind of experience permanently and do it as soon as possible and without any remainder so that they decide to go through all these break neck many hours a day practices and go to retreats. I find myself to be rather prone to sense of self suffering ad this forced me to practice to get 1st path but maybe some peope are even more sensitive to it to the point that tactics which work for me do not work for them? Does that even make any sense?
A fluid sense of self is "normal" if you are paying attention.
https://www.dhammatalks.org/ebook_index.html#selvesnotselfhttps://www.dhammatalks.org/Archive/Writings/Ebooks/SelvesAndNot-self_181215.pdfSelves & Not-self: THE BUDDHIST TEACHING ON ANATTĀ
Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu
...
We have many different perceptions of self. Each sense of self is strategic, a means to an end. Each comes with a boundary, inside of which is “self” and outside of which is “not-self.” And so our sense of what’s self and what’s not-self keeps changing all of the time depending on our desires and what we see will lead to true happiness.
Take an example from your childhood. Suppose you have a younger sister, and someone down the street is threatening her. You want to protect her. At that moment she is very much your sister. She belongs to you, so you will do whatever you can to protect her. Then suppose that, when you’ve brought her home safely, she begins to play with your toy car and won’t give it back to you. Now she’s no longer your sister. She’s the Other. Your sense of your self, and of what is yours and not yours, has shifted. The boundary line between self and not-self has changed.
You’ve been doing this sort of thing—changing the boundaries of what’s self and not-self—all of the time. Think back on your life—or even for just a day—to see the many times your sense of self has changed from one role to another.
After full awakening, you don't consider self or not-self to be any kind of issue to pay attention to. Some people want to experience full awakening, others are satisfied with with less.
...
Still, if possible, the Buddha does encourage you to try to go beyond the level of non-return and gain full awakening. This is where he brings in another teaching, another perception. In Pāli, the phrase is, “Sabbe dhammā anattā,” which means, “All phenomena are not-self [§33].” This applies both to fabricated phenomena and unfabricated phenomena. And it’s important to note here that this perception is part of the path, not the goal. In other words, it’s not the conclusion you come to when you arrive at awakening; it’s a perception you use to get beyond your last attachments.
As the above passage states, what keeps a non-returner from gaining total awakening is a type of passion and delight: passion for the deathless and delight in the deathless. “Passion-and-delight” is another term for clinging. Even when the mind lets go of its clinging and passion for the aggregates, there still is something it may cling to: the experience of the deathless that follows after letting go of the aggregates. The mind can regard its experience of the deathless as a phenomenon, as an object of the mind. Where there is an object, there is a subject—the knowing self, the sense of “I am” [§34]—and this provides a foothold for passion and delight to arise: You instinctively want to control whatever you like, and so you try to control the experience of the deathless, even though the idea of “control” here is superfluous—the deathless isn’t going to change on you—and counterproductive: The self created around this desire for control actually gets in the way of total freedom. To counter this tendency toward control, the Buddha here has you apply the perception that all phenomena are notself, even to the experience of the deathless. This is what gets rid of the “I” in “I am.”
There’s another passage relevant to this point where the Buddha says that when you see all phenomena arising and passing away—and this includes everything, including the path and your clinging to the deathless— when you watch everything arising, arising, arising, all the time, the idea of non-existence doesn’t occur to the mind. When you see these things passing away, passing away, passing away, the idea of existence doesn’t occur to the mind. At that point, the ideas of existence and non-existence are irrelevant to your experience. All you see is stress arising, stress passing away [§35].
This has several ramifications. If ideas of existence and non-existence don’t occur to you, then the question of whether the self exists or doesn’t exist wouldn’t occur to you, either. This gets rid of the “am” in “I am.” This also does away with your fear of going out of existence if things are let go, because the mind isn’t thinking in those terms.
At the same time, you’re reaching the higher stage of transcendent right view, with a higher and more refined level of duty. As you remember with the four noble truths, each of the truths has a duty, but in this case—when you see everything arising and passing away simply as stress—all the duties are reduced to one: You comprehend things to the point of dispassion. This means that you let go, let go, let go even of concentration, even of discernment, even of the act of clinging to the deathless. In the words of Ajaan Mun, all four noble truths are turned into one. They all carry the same duty, which is to let go of everything.
This allows the mind to experience nibbāna not as a phenomenon, but as a total experience. At this point, you’ve found total happiness, which no longer needs any protection, no longer needs to be maintained. There’s no longer any issue of control or non-control. There’s no need for the strategy of self to create this happiness, and no need for a sense of self to consume or experience it. Where you don’t draw a line to define self, there’s no line to define not-self. Where there’s no clinging, there’s no need for the strategy of not-self. So strategies of self or not-self are all put aside. Even the strategy of dispassion itself gets put aside. At this point, the mind no longer has need for any strategies at all because it has found a happiness that’s truly solid. It’s not a phenomenon, it’s a happiness. The Buddha calls it a special form of consciousness that doesn’t need to be experienced through the six senses, or what he calls “the all” [§36]. It’s directly experienced as total freedom. And at the moment of awakening, there’s no experience of the six senses.
However, after the moment of awakening, when the mind returns to the experience of the senses, this sense of freedom stays.
I experience similar tensions as those you described, and most likely sometimes sound terribly narrowminded. I know that I now and then fall into the trap of getting defensive about the practice and/or about Buddhism or parts of it, as if that would do any good.
