Questions after realizing selflessness.

Dileep Vasist, modified 7 Years ago at 5/31/17 1:30 AM
Created 7 Years ago at 5/31/17 1:18 AM

Questions after realizing selflessness.

Posts: 20 Join Date: 5/13/17 Recent Posts
Hello,

Recently, I stumbled upon an experience where I began to realize that there is no Self and reality just exists. The sense organs of the body is just a portal to realizing the Reality. After this experience, I have few questions bugging in my mind.

1)Who/What is realizing the reality? Is reality realizing the reality?

2) If there is no Self or I, then why does aversion and craving exist towards Suffering and Pleasure respectively?

3) If there is aversion/craving, then what,who is having it?
Explanation:- If my arm is being cut off, there is aversion to the sensation of pain and fear. Why does this exist? Who/What is experiencing this?

4)Also, even after this experience, why does the feeling of 'I' pop up again and again?
neko, modified 7 Years ago at 5/31/17 2:31 AM
Created 7 Years ago at 5/31/17 2:30 AM

RE: Questions after realizing selflessness.

Posts: 763 Join Date: 11/26/14 Recent Posts
Hello Dileep, welcome emoticon

You ask two types of questions.

Type 1:
If there is no Self or I, then why does aversion and craving exist towards Suffering and Pleasure respectively?

If my arm is being cut off, there is aversion to the sensation of pain and fear. Why does this exist? Who/What is experiencing this?

Why does the feeling of 'I' pop up again and again?


Avoiding pain and seeking pleasure, and the feeling of there being a separate self that wants / needs to be protected are advantageous from the evolutionary / selective point of view. Animals who do not have those are more likely go on to be eaten by animals who have them. Or maybe even starve themselves to death. So the reason you have these is because your ancestors had them.

Now this is not to say that realising anatta / advaita to some degree is necessarily a negative trait from the point of view of fitness. To know this, we would have to study the correlation between paths and fertility. In any case, I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out that there is a negative correlation between meditation and number of children. It is not a crazy hypothesis to suppose that enlightenment is maladaptive in the biological sense of the word, but to study this, we would have to have a rigorous measure of enlightenment, which we currently lack.


Type 2:
Who/What is realizing the reality? Is reality realizing the reality?

If there is aversion/craving, then what,who is having it?


I think that these questions are grammatically correct, but logically meaningless. There isn't a correct answer because the question does not make sense. Language itself is selected with constructs that make the speaker more likely to survive and have more offspring, or at least make him/her more likely to make other people learn the same language through e.g. trade or conquest and enslavement. Linguistical structures that make meaningless questions such as these ones ungrammatical come with a lower memetic fitness.
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O'lorin, modified 7 Years ago at 5/31/17 7:20 AM
Created 7 Years ago at 5/31/17 7:19 AM

RE: Questions after realizing selflessness.

Posts: 21 Join Date: 5/5/17 Recent Posts
[quote=
]1)Who/What is realizing the reality? Is reality realizing the reality?]



I think of experiential reality as being like a painting on a free floating canvas. The idea/sensation of being a self is just one part of the painting(that seems to predominate for unenlightend schmucks like myself). No-one is really looking at the painting, awareness is simply a brute-fact of it. 
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Noah D, modified 7 Years ago at 5/31/17 10:09 AM
Created 7 Years ago at 5/31/17 10:09 AM

RE: Questions after realizing selflessness.

Posts: 1211 Join Date: 9/1/16 Recent Posts
As a broad answer to your line of inquiry, all is patterned.  If you have a genuine insight experience, that will leave some imprint on the mind.  However, it is not reasonable to expect that that imprint will immediately effect everything.  To get to that, you must repeat the experience at deeper levels and across different segments of being.  

Past complete "seeing" that there is no self, there are many perceptual dualities that will remain.  Cleaning these up are a whole other path.

Past eradication of perception (one thing observing another), lies an entire course of integration.  How does what you have come to be or abide as inform the thoughts, speech & behaviors that this individualized pattern expresses in the world?

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