Also, i'd point out that the cycle of behavior nick mentioned isnt unique to you. There are a few other examples of people, myself for one, perhaps a guy named "simon" and a different "adam" who have gone through a similar thing with dishonesty and excitement and obnoxiousness and insincerity and bloated ego, followed up by general misery. sounds a lot like a&p followed by dark night, right? My personal theory is that this is what happens when younger people (I'm about to turn 19, started when i was just 17, i think you're 19) try and make it through the cycle of insight without a singular clear teacher, school, or method, lots of bouncing around from technique to technique, lots of shifting identities which are taken to be very real, all compounded by the anonymity of the internet, taking other people as just objects in one's world. This is just immaturity imo, here is something katy said to me in one of my threads, if you want to read it, the cycle from half-trolling to remorse is clear... especially if you look at the millions of absurd threads I started around that time as context. : )
http://www.dharmaoverground.org/web/guest/discussion/-/message_boards/message/1913637Adam - first, this I could never have purely wanted anatta/af/extirpation when it was younger. I had a head for "What next? Where to?", excitement for creating its existence. It was natural self-enrichment (versus the sometimes pejorative "self-absorption") after years of identity-building by a household/community.
This is imo the real motivation that started my practice. What identity next? I couldn't start dressing up and following around a heavy metal band because it was too cliche, I chose instead to find a "final solution" and try to become enlightened. This is a classic sign of what Erik Erikson called the identity crisis, when one has trouble finding "ego" during adolescence. Trying to go no-selfing when you don't have a clear self can cause issues.
Am I still just doing this out of identity crisis? It's definitely a factor, I have matured via lots of confusion and suffering and I have been slowly developing a taste for freedom. It's finally started to pay off as I've begun dropping off pieces of suffering. What is the proper course of action then? I don't really know but I thought this might help you, maybe the best thing would be to forget about no-self and enlightenment and just do concentration, thinking of it as a stress reducer.
I caused lots of problems for myself, I dropped lots of extra-curricular things in school including a sport I was planning to play in college which had been really important to me before and my grades suffered... Everyone has their own story of high school, and there are worse identities to take on, but immaturity + insight practice/AF practice can be rough. At the same time this doesn't really seem to be a sound excuse, I was fully aware of what I was doing, you were fully aware of what you were doing, it just seems that other people don't matter but everything related to you is still very very real.
