I'm at the point in my practice where it's become very hard to distinguish sensations that imply a separate, permanent Self from sensations that are merely expressions of personality or temporal self. There are no strong leads like there were before, where I could stop and notice what struck me more as a personality lingering in sensations (despite no expressions of it), and which I realised was actually Self, or where Self would crop up whenever I, following Daniel Ingram's advice from
this post, would try to do something other than what was always going to happen (though actually I don't think he'd put it quite like that), I'd catch a glimpse of Self and try to see the 3 C's in the sensations that made it up. It almost feels like it did after I got SE, except on a subtler level, where there's no particular aspects of reality that feel especially in need of seeing through, but just everything is suspicious now, like every sensation clearly had some 'me' in it then, though in a transparent way.
The last progress of insight cycle I did (took me about an hour), I focused on rooting-out Self in a more inclusive perspective I'd noticed it in, though it had become tricky and there was a touch of what Daniel describes as sneaking up on it. But now even obvious sensations of Self aren't found in that perspective... or maybe they are there but my standard for what constitutes Self is too low, or I'm unconsciously avoiding its real hiding places. I'm thinking it's not so much a feeling of unfamiliarity - or feeling like an imposter in someone else's body - that I'm going for, but more the sterile, boring feeling of observing some everyday object. But then when you throw in personality - and I like being me - it gets murky and confusing.
Why I feel there's more still to do: I still experience some aversion when entering deep states of concentration - there's still a part of me that panics and demands control and movement to assert its 'Self'. But outside of that situation, nothing feels terribly like it's This when it should be That or whatever. I've been thinking of myself as pre-3rd path, though I seem to be getting the Pure Land jhanas (moving up through the "bottleneck", as Kenneth Folk describes it, after 8th jhana and poking one's head up through the sunroof is all recognizable in my experience), and I've had what felt like a sudden mental shut down after 8th jhana once where in a split second I the whole state of my concentration changed totally, from the 8th jhana pressure at the back of my head and 3rd eye area, to being centered and much stronger, as if I'd been unaware of the transition between the two... don't want to make any claims on anything though beyond SE (100+ fruitions over the past few weeks are hard to miss, or dismiss).
This post is probably procrastination more than anything, but I do feel genuinely at a loss as to where to look next, so if anyone could help me through this, I'd be very grateful.
