Hello. Ive been trying a new technique I thought could be interesting to do, and I wanna know if anyone else does it, or if it has a name. Basically, I just meditate on the lack of a "self", that emptiness which is there if you try to look for it, if that makes sense.
​​​​​​​The closest thing to it I can think of is self enquiry, but its not exactly the same. On self enquiry (as I understand it) you question yourself about who you are, and you try to sort of turn attention around to "watch the watcher", or try to see that which is aware. What im describing is more like a meditation on empty space, its less of a dynamic process in which you just keep the attention on that "lack" 

Imho this type of practice can be somewhat beneficial if you do it for cases where process of self is already overloaded because when you replace it with say empty space (which is much less defined therefore easier to cycle faculties which create impression of it) it will end up rewiring brain to use sense of self less. And the issue with self it that in course of living mind tend to create too much triggers for faculty of sense of self - which is totally not needed and even if there was no issue with dukkha it leads to reduced performance of mind.

That said sense of self is just one expression in mind which we can notice but the whole thing with dukkha is that this issue with too many triggers happens for many different faculties - one can argue most are just different parts and aspects of sense of self but imho that is technically not correct. Though it makes some sense to not overcomplicate already complex things by adding unnecesary details.

Anyways, the issue is technical and causes dukkha - therefore imho it makes more practical sense to be aware of the dukkha and target any part of mind where it arises (and preferably BEFORE it starts being dukkha - there are sensatons which indicate that it continues there will be dukkha) and like you say experience there something like space instead.

Though I guess its exactly what you ultimately meant. Sense of self after all is often understood as this kinda central thing which at times causes dukkha and in some sense even when it doesn't cause dukkha it isn't even registered as sense of self!

Anyways, personally I don't use sense of self when its not needed. There is actually a reason that I know to actually use it but I maybe won't go in to detail as to what it is because its actually exceedingly hard to not use sense of self so much it could by itself create an issue. Its more like it might feel sense of self is gone but its actually there and is gone just-in-time - which is for all intents and purposes enough.

Hey mau,

as I see it "lack of self" is just another appearance in consciousness. One could look at it all the time & not cut through Delusion.
To cut the gordian knot what helps a lot is seeing both the "lack of self" or even "the sense of self" (doesn't matter really) AND at the same time seeing what makes the ten thousand things perceptible.

From that perspective, the sense of self is not different from the lack of self & is not different from a beautiful flower & is not different from a heap of dung.
All are appearances that are welcomed when they arise & not clung to when they vanish.

​​​​​​​helpful? 

Alls I gotta say is I applaud you on your username, good sir or madame.

Todo, what do you think by "what makes the ten thousand things perceptible"? Do you meam something like the way in which we perceive? 

Yes,
it's what happens in sentient beings automatically, effortlessly, immediately.
Remember, in the morning when you wake-up, there's a "whole world" immediately there. You have nothing to do.
Nothing esoteric! Although utterly mysterious! 

What is Delusion written with capital D?


From your posts I get strong impression you recently read too much dharma books. It is not good for your mental health you know...

Also when people refer to sense of self it in almost all cases just means dukkha that it supposedly causes.
Supposedly because most of its is self inflicted to fit the story.

Ni,
"From your posts I get strong impression you recently read too much dharma books. It is not good for your mental health you know..."

Are you trying to be kind, compassionate & helpful, here?
​​​​​​​just wondering?

I just do not think filling your head with that stuff until it all just seem to overflow is beneficial for your comprehension of it. My recommendation to myself always was to read less and less often and give my mind time to chew through material instead just brainwashing myself.

Of course you can and even should do what you want.
Just don't get upset if someone give you indication you sound strange. Cause to me you do and I think your posts sound at times like exactly what happens when I myself overindulged in this stuff and I didn't find it good for my own comprehension of mental state - and why this comment.

Either way would you prefer for no one ever mention that what comes out of your mouth or keyboard or can be observed your actions look strange to them?

Ni,
thank you for taking the time to respond. 

just to make it a little more helpful, can you explain what part sounds "strange" to you & in what way(s)?
what, in your experience, was the mental damage (s)? I am genuinely interested because it's not just recently that I've been reading "dharma" books, it's been something like FOURTY years.

thanks a lot,
​​​​​​​much appreciated. 

Hi there! Welcome.
I do something opposite, by looking FOR a sensation that seems like a "self". 
You will have to decide if it has a name,
here are some links to explore to decide.

https://www.mctb.org/mctb2/table-of-contents/part-iv-insight/30-the-progress-of-insight/3-the-three-characteristics/

google this ---> site:www.dharmaoverground.org Three Characteristics

I lack lacking a "self",     That's why I do the opposite and try to find a sensation that seems to be selfy
silly selfy, what is a self thing anyway?
To me it is a sensation that also has a feeling of-
Me/Mine
Solid/Permanent
Controllable/Satisfying
(whatever this feeling thing is.    )
I have not personally had much luck with exploring "non sensations" so far.
I definitely have put time/effort in the past and some people I know have had good luck with a focus on ... (dot dot dot)

Good luck
~D

Todo,
The way I see it we assign labels/terms for experiences - and I mean it even despite the fact that most folks here practices/trains this faculty, hopefully diligently if they do cause the purpose of this practice breaks something I am going to talk soon - and these labels act as kind of pointers and buffers and have various attributes assigned to them. One of these is "completeness" as in how much given term describes phenomena. If its less than certain threshold there might be additional activity to try to clarify thing. We evolved to create temporary terms for everything and these point to other terms with also attributes of completeness but here it should be called something like "degree of matching" - we might have term which completely describes some aspect of phenomena but for phenomena we point to through the term it, this term, can only match it partially.

So the issue I refer to is that by reading lots and lots of dharma books you create lots of these "terms" in your mind which might depending on how much thought you give to investigate them (thing them through) versus just assuming they are complete e.g. by being part of bigger complete set. If they are complete then they are the best pick to describe phenomena (BTW. it is also situation specific - we tend to pick e.g. dharma terms to describe things when what we do where we do it is dharma related) - hence will be picked up more readily. Now the degree of matching might not be perfect but one can always use more terms to cover all bases and overall arrive at something that seems to describe phenomena closer to fully.

Now this is how it always work and I here do nothing else. The issue I point to s that flooding your mind with too much dharma books as I called it causes mind to be less thorough in analyzing each term by itself and assume completeness as part of assumption that the whole set is completely describing phenomena. In this case when using these terms it might even by itself cause tendency to always use more such terms whenever they are used because too little of them feel not so much incomplete (certainly not as you see holes in coverage) but simply because you expect more stimuli from these terms to exist in context of using/hearing them.

Then if you get the stimuli, especially since terms trigger other terms you might get impression you just described something very thoroughly using these dharma terms.

Reality though... not as clear as it might seem from appearances you experience. Most obvious issue is "does the receiver of this message has all these terms?" (or perhaps correct terminology to use is "symbols")
Other issue is how well your use of these terms capture what you meant - and what you actually meant anyways? The issue here is by using broad interconnected terms you can with them KINDA describe something and which might be genuinely hint of solution but it can all be buried underneath multiple hoops mind would need to take for multiple terms to synthesize an answer - and given each term is in this case broad and "getting it" depends on getting other terms the whole thing is extremely imprecise.

In fact another issue there - with such broad and interconnected terms you are pretty much guaranteed to get certain type of activity in the brain which by itself breaks certain activity (in this case self - and more precisely too much activation of parts of it which have the issue of being too much activated too often - namely dukkha) which in turn in communication acts more like advertisement of dharma texts than any particular knowledge. Then again to even understand or rather feel that aspect person needs to have this patterns of activity themselves and it can only happen like that when more or less having read the texts and having at least rough familiarity with these terms.

If that is not the case there will be a "don't know" response in the brain can also cause overload in the brain which can shift activity from terms... BUT then again if that happens and even if that effect I described in previous paragraph happens depends on how both this "don't recognize/know" activity happens and how the person referred to term when getting familiar with them - if there is and was this image of agency/doer/self with strong emphasis on the same thing as referred to as "self" then all these triggers might only cause more dukkha. So by itself this mechanism might not be that helpful.

Outside use in communication in regards to tendency of mind to figure things out the issue is: having too much terms to describe stuff causes activation for these terms and is more likely to cause you when feeling some specifics are not described to cause person to go and read more dharma texts - and of course importance of any questions will diminish over time and even if you go back to dharma text, read it and it does provide some explanation or answers for your questions by that time it will be more subconscious and questions like these will have pointers to more dharma terms and since the first answer was "go read more dharma" to dharma texts in general - making possible answers not very precise.

-------------------------
Ufff... I am pretty sure I was precise in what I wanted to communicate but at the same time I am aware following it will be very hard. Sorry for that

Regarding my comment its not good for mental health - I define it as ability to siff through any indications of completeness of knowledge and verify these. Hard to do when constantly flooding your mind with self-referencing terminology that for all intents and purposes doesn't need to be complete to appear complete for as long as its mass is to great to manage to figure that out. It is kinda like models for how black holes evaporate - the greater the mass the radiation and therefore evaporation and mass reduction is slower. If you add to it reinforcing that stuff it can become "stable". And this might not even be an issue in itself and I don't think you see (or feel) it as an issue but rather source of nice and fuzzy sensations which started to assemble in to more complete lens through which phenomena are observed more clearly - which I won't even say cannot be true. Might as well in some sense be very true.

What I will say is that I never found terms from dharma to be anywhere near precise as what they should be and the whole mass as I called it to be unable to by itself provide answer that do not refer to itself - and especially perspectives I find much more fundamental and much simpler as in not requiring so much terms to describe itself. These can be harder to get if there exist complete knowledge.

Is it this an issue though? ...well, I put my opinion out - and which is mostly based on realization of the value to consume dharma content in smaller chunks letting mind to chew on them and arrive at references not needing to use dharma terminology at all.

That said I myself might not quote books but I do refer to my own dharma and do it in what must at times feel way too much without referring to anything else and for similar reason - belief its enough complete everything can be described by it overly focusing how it all feels when taken as one big whole but kinda ignoring the fact that as a message targeted at people its very incomplete should part of the knowledge be missing. Here I can and especially in the past I would try to fill blanks by being verbose but this would cause different issues... maybe too long to explain, pun intended. And still certain perspectives and skills in these perspectives being required to really get it.

Anyways, imho optimum is for communication to use commonly used terms alongside more fancy terms aiming at each type of terminology to be self-sufficient and neither going too much in to details nor general vibes of thing, or at least not overdo either.

This post... cannot put my finger on it but I would say I definitely overdid something.
In some sense similar issue as with your filled with dharma references - it can be decoded but might require multiple passes over the text and effort to understand each sentence. I don't think its that bad if I do it myself so I should not complain if someone else does it regardless if the exact direction/style they use is different.
But then again I am not complaining and I didn't try to offend you - I just indicate your posts sound maybe "imbalanced" would be the word. Me writing imbalanced posts but perhaps in different direction only means I am more able to notice it - though if my assessment is valid or not depends on who your posts are aimed to and their ability to decode them in single pass.

Either way I hope you have a blast contemplating reality no matter what terms you use and hope you strive to understand it today little better than yesterday - because in the end this is the only important thing and as Buddha suggested this is the way to cut through knots of delusion and liberate us from the clutches of dukkha

just for fun I asked an AI to summerize your postt. here are the results-

​​​​​​​Summary of the Text:The text discusses the potential downsides of consuming excessive amounts of Dharma content and relying heavily on Dharma terminology. The author argues that this can lead to several issues:1. Incomplete Understanding and Overreliance on Terminology:

• Reading numerous Dharma books can create many terms in your mind, but without thorough analysis, these terms may be assumed to be complete, leading to an overreliance on them.
• This can result in communication that is imprecise and difficult to understand for those unfamiliar with the specific terminology.

2. Superficiality and Lack of Depth:

• Using broad, interconnected Dharma terms can create a sense of understanding without truly grasping the underlying concepts.
• This superficial understanding can lead to an emphasis on "vibes" rather than genuine knowledge.

3. Increased Dukkha (Suffering):

• Overactivation of certain brain regions associated with the self can lead to increased dukkha.
• Reliance on Dharma terminology can trigger these regions, exacerbating the problem.

4. Impeding True Understanding:

• The abundance of terms can distract from exploring more fundamental perspectives that require fewer terms to describe.
• This can limit the ability to achieve a deeper understanding of reality.

5. Communication Barriers:

• Using specialized Dharma terminology can create communication barriers for those unfamiliar with it.
• This can hinder the effective transmission of knowledge and understanding.

Recommendations:

• Consume Dharma content in smaller chunks, allowing time for reflection and internalization.
• Strive to understand concepts without relying solely on Dharma terminology.
• Use commonly understood terms alongside specialized terms to ensure clarity and accessibility.
• Focus on the core goal of understanding reality and reducing dukkha, rather than getting caught up in terminology.

Overall, the author encourages a balanced approach to Dharma study and communication, emphasizing the importance of genuine understanding over the accumulation of terms and superficial knowledge.

Nice!
Couldn't say it better myself.

Which gives me the idea to check my old posts through AI. In separate chat to keep things consistent.

BTW. Which AI was it and in which version?
Normal free chatGPT 3.5 or something more fancy?

Funner than 1 ai, a fruit salad of MANY
Ya input stuff and two ai's square off and respond, then you vote which is better. 
https://arena.lmsys.org/
So many wasted hours await you. I warn you not to....cause I care. 
​​​​​​​~D