Hi everyone,

I meditate more or less regularly (daily, about 45 min per session) since about 5 years. I've also been to three week long retreats.
My concentration is pretty good - imho not as deep as the Jhanas but still way way better than an untrained mind.

When it comes to insight and enlightenment I know about the practice to try to find "what is knowing the sensation (sight, sound, body sensation etc.) - e.g. Shinzen Young  and Joseph Goldstein talk about that practice.
Then when I look insight my mind I find the conscious experiences of the different sense organs and thoughts and feelings but indeed I can’t point to a (precise) entity that is having these experiences.  OK so far so good.
But still "I" do have these experiences. And I still feel joy and suffering. Now what?
Not being able to point to a "thing" that is having the experience does not change anything in me, and I do not feel any more enlightend by that insight. Does it for you? Allegedly
enlightenment results (or at least it’s one crucial constituent of the path that leads to enlightenment) from the insight that there is no self in me. So the
recognition that I can’t point to that alleged self should bring about some significant
sort of shift in my inner world, shouldn’t it?

And how informative is it that I am not being able to identify what perceives the conscious states?
The eyes can’t see themselves but seeing does take place. You could therefore conclude that there are no eyes - just seeing - but as we all know that would not be the right conclusion. It’s just that the seeing eyes do have limitation on what they can focus on (i.e. they can’t look back on themselves)

That’s a question that is really bugging me and I have not heard much discussion on in dhamma talks.
Could anyone help me to clarify my understanding on that topic.

Thank you very much!
--Frank

That's a trick of language.


Notice the thought arising, "'I' have these experiences." Notice how the word "I" tricks you into thinking that it must correspond to a solid entity.


I've never found that approach to be helpful. Rather than seeing that you can't point to an alleged self, I've found it more productive to examine the way the mind constructs the belief that a solid and permanent self is there.

Hey Frank, welcome!


Not all practices work for everyone. These forms of self-inquiry always sounded like nonsensical bullshit to me, although I know that they work wonders for others. So if it makes no sense for you to ask your self this kind of questions, maybe you should be practicing something else for insight! 

Very interesting perspective, thanks for sharing!  

I personally am quite surprised that self-concepts are of so much use to other people in their meditation practice, as they were never much use to me.

Very early in my own practice I have come to the same conclusion you describe here, and after that I have failed to find any use in talk of self and no-self. I simply do not know what it means to see through "the self", as there is really no particular sensation arising in my field of experience that I am convinced is "myself".

However, there are sensations that figure prominently, that seem to be "louder" than others. For me these sensations typically happen around chakra points (e.g. centre of the head, base of the neck, the dan-tien, and so on). Now the thing is that, when carefully scrutinized, these sensations turn out not to be anything particularly special: it's a tense muscle, or the back of the throat, or the pulsing of a blood vessel. There seems to be no reason why these sensations should be promoted to such prominence within the field of experience. And yet they are.

At various moments in my practice, various sensations which used to be emphasized in this way stopped being so any longer. This was accompanied by great relief, increased clarity, spaciousness, and peace of mind. So I speculate that when people talk about "self", they are referring to this weird "emphasis" that these sensations take on, and when they talk about "seeing through the self", they mean to see directly how these sensations are in equal standing with the rest of 'em.

***

One more thing that was useful to me and may be useful to you is to do the following experiment: go to an open space outside, and take in your entire field of experience. Now look at something you noticed, far away in the distance. It may appear to you that you were previously "not looking" at this thing in the distance, but after you focused your sight on it, you were "now actually looking" at the distant thing.

However, this is evidently not true. Clearly you were aware of it being there, in the distance. So it was always creating an imprint in your field of experience. So it was actually being attended to, in some way. However it may feel like it was previously "outside" your attention, and only now it is "inside" your attention. But fact of the matter is that it was always "inside" in the first place.

In fact, everything happening right now in your field of experience, and I mean *everything* is already an internal impression of something, it is being processed (however partially) by your senses, in some way, and appearing (however faintly) in your own experience. So everything that you see, hear, touch, etc is already inside it. That which is truly outside your experience is not seen, heard, or felt in any way.

So all that you experience is "in one single bag", so to speak.

So what are the sensations that make it seem like part of the bag is being attended to, while part of the bag is "outside"?

That's a great point Frank. My response comes down to a couple things.

Firstly, IMHO it isn't just about 'is there a self?' but also 'what effect does belief in self have?'. Maybe rephrase the question so you approach it in terms of dukkha. Personally I find some weird kind of tension associated with the mind trying to always pin this sense of 'self' on stuff that really does fine without a self pinned onto it. If self were true, why would the mind trying to assert it be stressful? And what is the value of asserting it if we're better off without doing that?

Secondly, impermanence. The idea of self as subject requires that this subject be some lasting thing. The same thing that feels this is the same thing that sees that, etc. The self now being the same self as there was a few minutes ago, however much what it owns/observes/does might have changed. But vipassana really calls that into question. It seems more like there's just a cloud of 'seeing' and 'feeling' etc all arising and passing, with the mind trying to make some impression of a lasting subject behind it all.

Thirdly, dependent origination. (This is just my theoretical understanding based on Ven Thanissaro and Nanavira Thera.) Our sensate reality is held together by patterns of cause and effect, and when we see this, we see that it's actually structurally not feasible/necessary at all for there to be a self in there. 

Finally, maybe switch the burden of proof. If you can't find a self, what reason do you have to believe in one? Instead of believing in self and trying to disprove it, what happens if you switch that around? Or discount the idea of 'is there a self or not?' entirely and just ask 'what is here?'.

Thank you all for your Answers!
I will try the practices that you suggested.
 
I guess onemain difference between the spirit of my suggestion/question and most answers
is, that your answers are more pragmatic (i.e. . the goal of the exercise is to
make experience more pleasant) while I was asking for metaphysically/ontologically
true statements according to Buddhist philosophy.

When it comes to the burden of proof with regards to the existence of the self, I would suggest that one should first go with ones
immediate intuition. And my fist intuition tells me: when experience happens
there has to be someone/something who/which experiences it – and that
experiencer is what I would identify as myself.
Only when there are profound reasons that force one to doubt this intuition then one should
try to trump intuition by reason.
And that is what my question/suggestion was about – namely that the alleged reason (that you
can’t precisely point to yourself in your conscious experience) seems not
powerful enough in light of the considered analogy of the eyes not being able
to see themselves. 

To me the noself (anatta) concept in Buddhism seemed so indispensable to its underlying
philosophy that I felt an urge to really come to terms with it and internalize
it in my mind.
But maybeyou are right that I should not fixate too much on that topic and try to find
other ways on the path that suits me better.

Thanks again for engaging in that conversation.
--Frank 

AFAIK it's not that there isn't a self, its that the self doesn't exist as we misconceive it to exist. Its a conglomeration of parts and the parts are all changing and shifting. This is what the no-self thing means, it means there isn't a single solid permanent thing we can identify as our "self". We do have a self of sorts, but its not a single thing. And its certainly not our self-concept.

Its important because whenever youre in a state of suffering, you can be sure that in that moment there is a strong sense of a single solid self that is under pressure in some way. The momentary insight, the first glimpse into the fact that the self doesnt exist as a solid thing might not seem like much, but I think the reason its touted as important is because it then opens up the option to attempt to practice seeing this at all moments. Then when youve accomplished seeing this in all moments, self-based suffering won't arise anymore!

Anyway, if there was a true realisation of "no self whatsoever", I can see how that would vastly reduce suffering, because so much of suffering comes from thoughts about the self and trying to protect it in various ways (eg rejection, status, our relationship to pleasure and pain, etc).


"And how informative is it that I am not being able to identify what perceives the conscious states?"

Well sounds like a good place to start - I can't find it either - not convinced of what it implies yet though..