and you truthfully dont experience it? just wondering...maybe you became liberated already I dont know. We are not talking about concepts here, we're talking about jumping right in to see where the feeling of it comes from.

Many inventions have been "thought together" as a Gedankenexperiment, before they became reality and could be observed. Your internal "laboratory" is the only place that you can communicate in AND with (that's a HUGE observation (lol), because it makes you realize that "you" are not ONLY what you think "you" are), without any external stimuli or without the need to COMMUNICATE said ideas in a manner that is accessible to others (compression of data, the major part of what constitutes "intelligence"), by using external media (no matter if mathematical formulas, songs, how to build car engines and so on, to communicate this "knowledge" and "experience", you have to use an external medium and compress the data in a format that is understandable by others).
As mammals, which started out as little creatures with no need for much 3D-thinking, the scenting ability was more important; welcome to the world of pheromones. A way to communicate. Sounds and later the physical appearance began to play a central role. Through that, the external reflection of internal "values". A woman can still look at the skin right under your eyes and internally determine if you are genetically fit or not. All of this is just the evolutionary process playing with resources it doesn't directly need for the survival of the species it creates. We have so much more of these resources to waste these days than our ancestors (processing power/intelligence), that our ways to show the world how much stupid stuff we can do BESIDES mating (because we can afford to do it and still survive), grows. But I digress.

Your "self" is like a camera which changes the focus of the lens and "all of a sudden" sees the "clear picture". Some call it an Eureka! moment, "inspiration", etc...
The landscape is not your "self" though. Because what you observe as "consciousness", is just the evolutionary playground that sits above layers upon layers of automata, functions and algorithmic automatisms. Or so it appears. But if you had the means to observe the huge ant colony humanity is (in the end), over centuries, you'd see that despite being made of individual cells and organs (cities/states/continental groups of countries), it's an evolving organism. And (like you), it all came from a single cell. This is an analogy of your brain at work.

You are "humanity", just as much as the hair that fell out when you were combing your hair, is You.

So as much as "humanity" is a transcending, "immaterial" concept in the sense that it's more than the sum of its parts, your "self" is more than the "I".
In fact, 99% of what the brain tells you it was being told by the external stimuli, is what it itself constructs of the data it receives. Only 1% is the real data.

And while you make roughly 40 conscious and "sub-conscious" decisions, every second (while you can "think" about only A SINGLE ONE at a time), your brain makes 40 BILLION of them, without actually telling "you".
"You" are not what you THINK you are, "You" are what the brain thinks of "You". Which is a huge difference. An alien species might think that humanity is a single organism and that it is "conscious" of itself and that it "thinks".
It isn't "here" and then disappears.

Unlike what you understand as "consciousness" that is the product of your brain. 40 times a second, it shuts itself off from the external world, to think about itself, then it opens itself up again, to receive stimuli.
You are Schrödingers Cat's Intellect. You are "thinking", "the You is", you are "conscious"........but then for a period of time (albeit short), none of this is true and "You" don't exist. Unlike Schrödinger's Gedankenexperiment.........you can't open this box to look inside. You have to accept that the moment you THINK you understand or at least observe the "I", it actually never existed and the moment you realize that it never existed, it's actually thinking about "you". "Don't worry, be happy" should be your final answer to everything. "Don't worry", if you realize the nature of things and "be happy", because you will never fully understand it.

P.S.: Eckhart Tolle is meh.

There is a fairy on my desk, it exists. Now you can say to me 'no it doesn't- I don't see it' but to me you are no different to the fairy, except I have enough imagination to be in control of the fairy, and not skitzo enough for the fairy to have its own life. Just like I could make you disappear with enough imagination, I would just become skitzo from your perspective.

I am energy. I can give this energy a name (or rather my parents). I am also my potentials. I am also blank. 'I' depends on everything else.


If I cannot believe that I am part of the energy in my hand via the nervouse system because there is no proof then there is no proof of anything including any theories you create

simple desire is fine, if I see chocolate cake I want that chocolate cake.
Hell, if I see a nice car , i think hmmmm itd be nice to have that.

Its the desires that we crave to satisfy the self, i.e. craving true happiness etc are the ones which can often result in more of a headache than a success.

You know..."quit living in the past".... and all that.

unfortunately monks do it the wrong way around, they spend their life time wishing their desires away , hoping to God , that somehow this will enlighten.
Well bad news, you cant control your thoughts ,and hence you cant control desires. I feel sorry for them all those years constantly pretending they dont want stuff.

I had to stop reading here and reply. I completely agree, especially about the hair, except it is short sighted, you are separating humanity from the galaxies outside our own, you are separating that first cell from the genesis that caused it and that from all the atoms in the sun. Now you might be all like 'no I'm not' however you really are, because you are not thinking about 'why'. Science will never answer this question because what it is observing is infinite/analogue/omnipresent/omniscient and it only has finite and digital means to do so. OUr brains are finite, the celss are individual monomers of a whole, but when we break ourselves down we are energy, just part of a wave, part of a mind, and this gives us 'will'. Do not look at our species from the view of hypothetical aliens, it is a mistake I use to make.



Interesting, but no. The means of attaining this knowledge, shows a limited scope due to a limited observance. '40 billion decisions', and how do you know there aren't decisions being made in-between decisions? It is more chaotic than you think, it has to be. In the scope of it 40 billion is a very small number, there are no decisions, only flow, these 40 billion decisions is merely information existing within observable reality, a physical effect with a metaphysical cause

I disagree here, I think about several poker problems at once when grinding, and I can analyse more than one thing through hyperfocus, which is very similar to meditation and looking from 'mirrors edge'..

You realize this is an absurd position, right?

In claiming anything is "just a thought in my brain" you have already implied a "myself" exists. You can't have a "my" of any kind without a self to which the "my" corresponds. That is, "my" is meaningless without self simply by the self-referential nature of the word's definition.

Yes, sorry I just say tadaaa and forgot to point out that it is not your brain, just brain. Now, is there agreement that it is right?

you can't look at yourself because you are yourself. Unless you have a mirror, and thoughts can also be reflections, everything that isn't you is a mirror of sorts as it creates relativity. If what you are saying is something different then word it differently, to me you meaning to define your enlightenment as saying that self is not separate from entirety, which imo is a pretty easy thing to grasp and is an enlightening realisation

Well you can't look into your body or brain. But you can look at whatever you do and try to see yourself in that. If you are really honest with describing what you see, you will realize, there is no you anywhere. By the way: Your definition of enlightenment is wrong.

Senseless reliance on senses. You shouldn't start with existence or non-existence, and neither should you start with the senses.

Experience is, and is the only thing that can reliably be said to be (since the act of claiming this proves it).

You have started with what experience is. A common flaw.

You can start where you want. There is experience. But you don't exist.

What do you get out of it?

A methodology has been suggested. If the methodology is being followed then it will be seen that one interpretation of the intuition is false. The false interpretation is that there is a self present in subjective experience and that it is responsible for choices, actions, thoughts etc. If, after having completed the investigation, you still insist on using the word self, then you have to use it in a way that exactly excludes it being about a subjectively perceptible and operative self. You can do that if you want to, I just think that it would be silly to talk about a self that doesn't satisfy the mentioned criteria and I have no interest in persuading you to not use the word self in such exotic ways.

Like I've said before, "immaterial souls" is a description that misses the point about what it is that is being investigated. Again, you can interject all kinds of exotic definitions of self that are impervious to the evidence gathered from the investigation, but then you're simply missing the point and context. Further, given that it can be verified that there is no self to be perceived either directly or indirectly, how then would it make sense to keep asserting an existence of self? Why not then simply specify the exotic definition to be actually about the continuity of a biological organism, narrative identity, subjectivity? It seems to me like you're not actually defending the existence of a self, you're defending your use of the word "self" within a definition or speculation that not only could actually do just fine without that word but also suffers a diminishing of precision in insisting upon the use of that word.

For the sake of precision restate 1) as "If within my subjective experience there is no proof of the existence of my self, then my self doesn't exist". This doesn't rule out that my self may depend on the functioning of objective processes, it only rules out the existence of my self if there is no presence of a subjective experience of that self.

I've already shown for what kind of self we're looking for. "Simplistic" is relative and I disagree that it is simplistic, the evidence gathered actually is quite profound. The investigation demands us to be as alert and aware as humanly possible so as to exactly not miss any sort of experience of self.

"Subjective experiences as organized by our mind to be belonging to a self" is itself a subjective experience. It's an experience of a pattern, very similar to how we see patterns in clouds or fall for patterns in optical illusions. But, as with any illusion, if we look closely, we can see through it. The suggestion that the pattern in question shows is that there is an operative self. We can take a close look at this suggestion and see if it holds true. We will be held hostage by it as long as we keep interpreting from within that intuition and refuse to actually look because we imagine that there is no escape from that intuition. Fortunately it is possible to see the pattern for what it is and experience life from without the context of that pattern.