A core theme that comes up in meditation circles is the insight into ‘no-self’. Understanding what this piece of wisdom pertains to is indeed key to the restructuring project of mind, which leads to a life of less suffering.
“No self = No suffering” so they say.
However, it is beyond not obvious what this really means. Even, if you believe you have some degree of insight into no-self, it may be there are ways in which the identification process is revealing itself which you have yet to locate, deconstruct and see-through.
An issue with this topic is there is a poverty of vernacular among most spiritual groups when it comes to deconstructing the sense of self and the various experiences of ego loss. Ego loss is not so rare in fact, and it is very possible for many people. However, despite this, most people have trouble interpreting their experiences. I think this is simply because they haven’t been given good frameworks in which to fit these abnormal experiences into. The fashion of language at the moment doesn’t have appropriate outfits for these odd shape figures of consciousness – yet.
This week I will introduce some terms I hope will be helpful for making sense of the self, and we will practice looking for these forms of selfhood in us.
What is the…
–Epistemic Agent
–Spatial Self
–Historical Self
–Categorical Self
….?