Here I am is not the same as I am here?
Our sense of self is an illusion, and it is quite a useful one (especially for children), it better to think of it as a process that has kept you alive and moving through life to get you to this particular moment, it helped you to survive and thrive in the social and competitive world that we live, it delivered food, shelter and water to your body, it allowed you to develop your mind to be useful to you and others. However at a certain point, once your lower Maslow needs have been met, the process of self stops being useful and we become aware that the sense of a permanent, stable self have a huge downsides (not that we link the cause and effect that is happening here) that almost inevitably lead to confusion, suffering and even depression. To dispel this illusion we have to see through both the primary illusion and it's supporting infrastructure, especially the sense of hereness that accompanies our thought, feelings, emotions and body sensations.
When we ask what is point of life, and our senses offers us a nice cup of tea instead of a way out of the crippling paradox that the fulfilment of wants and needs does not make us happy and healthy, that our ego drives our wants without ever having telling us what we need to complete this game of ever expanding desire and finally satisfying them, is not it's fault, it was never meant to make you happy, it's only job was to keep us alive. Once we realise that our health and happiness requires what the ego can not provide, it becomes entirely our responsibility, no one and nothing else can take you down the path to freedom, it is up to you to wake up from the illusion and develop a real mutual relationship with a reality that is empty and where everything in our senses unfolds from that emptiness, and our liberation starts by simply paying attention to what is happening right now and here.
Watch, listen and feel to what is in your awareness at this moment, and it will quickly become apparent that attraction, repulsion and boredom are the driving forces of our daily life, all of which lead into each others, an endless game of musical chairs, we chase about and sit on one, then the music starts and we are running round again. It is so tiring, and we feel it through our sense of meaninglessness, and we do not even get to see the pieces that we are trying to play with, we are never told what we are, so how can we know what it wants, it is like negotiating a trade deal with Santa, you can not even talk to them or understand what motivates their desires and needs. However it is worst than that as unlike Santa, the self does not even exist, we are tricked by our senses, not deliberately but by the inherent speed of our changing senses.
We are overloaded by data, one thing happens after another at such a pace that we are left with the optical illusion of a human being acting in the world and others doing the same, there are the six major senses, sight, touch, sounds, smells and taste, then the catch all sense of mind which both mirrors our external sense such as the mind's eye, inner touch (emotions), sounds (thought) and then adds extra one's such as time, balance and space. It is this last one which we are focusing on as it so subtle that it can be tricky to unwrap it as a separate component from our others sense that as a pair convinces you that there is a self. When you have a thought there is both the sense of hearing the words of your thought and the sense of it being in your heads (it is possible with practise to move that sense to have the thought in your heart, but it rare to have that thought happen in your foot!), there are two separate components here which are experienced together as a self having a thought, however neither individual components have any element of self in themselves (which as there is no self that is consistent with reality)
The sense of here is routinely ignored as being both so ordinary that we pay it no attention, and so insignificant as it is seen as being completely unimportant to anything, it just infrastructure of the mind that we do not notice it, however like the roads, you only notice them when they have potholes in them, suffering should be considered as the potholes of the mind and that you really should start paying attention to what you are driving on. As the sense of being here is incredibly important as it covers up the cracks on the illusion of self as it is so hard to argue that we are not here when the here is felt so strongly that is impossible to deny the very hereness of any particular moment, in this logic there is a here and there is a thought, but crucially here I am is not the same as I am here.
The mind works like a film we notice one thing at a time very quickly and just that like a film when we are shown sixteen frame per frame we think it is real, that the polar bear is actually walking across our screen, our experiences or individual senses happen at a much faster rate, we can count out loud and clap our hands five times in a second, try it, you noticed each number and clap, whilst seeing those hands, feeling them clap, you also saw everything else in the room, heard every other noises in room, knew where everything was, felt your body and a whole world worth of data. That is a lot of information in a second that you just do not register in your mind as individual pieces of information as they are not important to you in themselves, but they are there in your stream of consciousness, we just notice the usual or things that we are attracted to or repulsed by, if a dog started singing we would instantly notice it, whereas gravity we only pay attention to if we fall over.
We are lost in the stream, carried along by it, so when a thought appears in out head, it is natural to think we are having a thought, this is not true, there is a thought but the mind is not here (even according to scientists who are two and half thousands years late to the party on that spoiler), we can not point to one place and say that is where the thought is, in the same way the polar bear is not inside your television. The thought always represents something else, “I am hungry” is really your stomach wanting more food and our instinct for survival makes you think about food, it draws your attention towards it in a way that you can not ignore, that is why you can have the non-rational thought that you are going to die immediately if you do not eat a doughnut in the next ten minutes. No one in the history of humankind has die from missing one meal, the mind does not care for logic, it just wants to fulfil this desire and all you have to do is eat the doughnut, take it everything will be better, you know it!
One of the ways that the mind makes it demands known is by tapping into your sense of space, where things are in relation to each other, it places your thoughts firmly in your head, thoughts in theory have no need to put anywhere into relationship to anywhere else, they could just appear like ghosts or the devil and saints on either shoulder whispering in your ears. Note how crazy you would sound if you went around telling people that the devil was whispering in your ears and yet when you say they are in your head that seems totally normal. That is how much your sense of ownership over rules logical thinking, we associate thinking and it's apparent location, we think because it happens in our head, and as we have a head where thinking is happening, the sense must be real because our head is real (and it is when we hit it, it is very hard not to take a punch in the face personally, and indeed that is a moment when our sense of self is at it's strongest).
We protect what is ours for a very good reason, survival, our gene has evolved to reproduce themselves and does nothing else really, that is their sole reason to exist (and in a circular way only genes that reproduce would survive in the first place, as genes that did not would not exist now as they did not reproduce) this is our inheritance and like an old cars with sentiment value there is no getting rid of it. No one starts from beginning, we are born to parents who were born themselves in a line that links us back to the birth of our world, we are the current effect of a straight line of billion causes, we had to come from a cause as there is no way to just start for a cause to spontaneously emerge, and if you allow it your whole life will be one long series of causes and effects, this is the world of determination, it says that what happens now is determined by what has happened in the same never-ending link of cause and effect. It means that it might appear as if you have free choice but this is also an illusion the same as self, however there is a freedom of choice that is available to you, you can pay attention, then these illusions will disappear and will be replaced with the real freedom of insight.
It only by insight into what is happening in this moment that we can become aware of our reality, the mind only has the ego through which to understand the world, it is how it understand the changing physical world, that things change in the world either for the worst or better and we have an agency to change the world, this complex relationship is managed by the simplifying assumption the mind and body does not change, that there is a permanent, stable being. However the world is also completely interconnected, whilst there is competition, we also rely on each other, not just communities, even the predator and prey need each other, they keep each other in balance, the crops that feed us are fertilised by the dead bodies of insects, there is the web of life that we are cutting through by developing our attention and awareness, to be able to see clearly is to see the sum of life and death in it's glorious dance, being alive is wonderful, ever changing and evolving, when you watch a firefly, you watch it's journey and you are filled with magic, seeing ourselves as complete spiritual and physical being, frees us to see our journey as we are on it, we get to see the wonder of it all.
Our minds are not the tools for this work, the mind and body needs to be drop, our attention and awareness need to look past the physical and mental, and instead rest in the spiritual aspect of our being. It is the emptiness, the element that is left after we have dropped the rest, which include our sense of here, the self is not here, we are everything, and almost everything is empty, and what is comes from that same emptiness. We all have moments where this emptiness is more apparently (though it is always there), when we watch the clouds on a sunny day, that pleasant, space-less and timeless quality is the emptiness shining through. It our sense of space and hereness that is the hidden structure that makes the world feel so real, by knowing where we are, that thoughts happening in our heads, we are making the world more solid that it actually is, we have a sense of relativity between our sense of self and others, there is a hereness and thereness, our actions are effect the other.
This is absolutely true, just a planet circles the sun, they effect each other, changes their orbits, though neither claims to be people, our area of effect is smaller but just as powerful and complex, the effect of us in the world shows up as a cause in the experience of others, it is an impressive dance. We can watch two computers play the greatest game of chess ever imagined, they can come up with new strategies in Go, write music or poetry, without anybody being at home, claiming to be a person, and at a certain point they will not just pass the Turing test but be completely convincing to any human being, however they will never believe they are human being unless we program them to ignore reality.
What will truly differentiate us in the long run is that our conscious is able to experience the emptiness as it came from the emptiness in the first place, it born from emptiness. That is the spiritual component that computers and planets lack, they do not have the senses that we have, they do not have awareness that comes from beyond the physical world, and this awareness is even able to be aware of itself and it's source. It is only by dropping the anchor of the strong forces of the body and mind that we are able to notice the subtle light of emptiness, that consciousness contains it's own self-awareness, it realises itself and then everything else.
It is our sense of hereness that forms such a strong link in that anchor, it ties us to here when we should be nowhere, just sensations forming and disappearing, the natural rising and passing of sensory information, just as we can watch the sun rise and pass over a day, every other experience does the same, even hereness. Whilst being subtle, it's power comes from being ignored as background information, it provides the hidden gravity of our false sense of being a permanent, stable being, the good news is that once you start being aware of it, it turns out it is the easiest sense to drop, unlike the sense of mind and body that can take years to drop, when you start noting it as part of a noting practice (where you name or notice the sense as your attention is drawn towards them), it can be dropped remarkably quickly, and in being dropped proves proof that the senses in general can be dropped.
Ultimately all content can and should be used as a lesson in our ability to drop our attachment, aversion and boredom to come back to the baseline of our reality, what our sense of hereness does is teach us how our experience emerges from a complex and continuous source of sensory information. This information is not good or bad it is just what is happening, nothing more or less, we do not need to add to it with our judgements or hyper focus on particular parts of that flow, and it turns out that being in the flow is actually an incredibly pleasant way of experiencing the world, just as I imagine being on the hunt in the stone age, just listening and being a part of the natural world, that is why a walk in the countryside relaxes us so much.
When we walk we stop being here in the sense of being a part of our processes, the hidden world of the mind is full of ghosts, memories and worries, the sense of here and being surrounded by danger is a negative experience, it might be good exercise in facing your demons and problem in the relative safety of your mind, however from your point of view it is the same experience as in real life. The only way to walk away from this inner terror is to treat the mind as you would a dangerous environment, you watch, listen and then name to yourself what is there. In the wild you are aware of the shadows, rocks and trees that can hide the wolves and monsters, in the mind you can learn what hides the same dangers, the anxiety that hides behind thinking about money, the memory of childhood that comes from fear, the disgust that controls what you eat. You have to name the demon to have control over it, and the sense of hereness is the first step in having that control.
If your fears have no place to call home they can not stay for long, there is no here in your experience, there is just your minds react to the world around us, there is a relativity between objects, but there no absolute here or there, just as there is no absolute self, this is all just a house of cards that is waiting to fall down. It is by removing the small card of the sense of hereness that the rest of the house can start crumbling that is why it is really worth paying a lot of attention (ironically the way through to dropping something is more attention in the short term) to this smaller sense, as once you know one of our senses can be dropped all the rest are suddenly in play, and that includes the whole of your sensory experience.
When you truly understand that, here I am is not the same as I am here, you will have made a major break through in understanding yourself, you will see that the flow of sensory experience does not and can not contain a permanent, stable self, we are not a separate observer of this flow, we are the flow. Each of these flashes of the senses are not experience by anything else, they contained their own awareness, they rise and pass, nothing more, they can cause a later effect like a memory of something that happened earlier, different sense can add together to form a greater meaning, however a calculator can do the same, and if you stop putting data in that calculator it is just a lump of plastic.
Though unlike a calculator, something quite different happens with your consciousness, once you stop putting the data in, you get to experience emptiness, which it turns out is quite pleasant. This is not easy, dropping the mind and body sensations only arises from internalising the habit of letting things be as they are, no longer reacting to sensations as they arise, you can breaking the chain of cause and effect by not giving attention to the initial causes as they happen, instead you turn towards what is happening in the background that is normally crowded out by larger sensations and reactions. What is special about our sense of hereness that it is an easier sensation to stop paying attention towards, and yet it gives our experience of sensation a grounding in reality, when you take this away the rest of the sensations becomes floaty, spacey and free floating, they have less stolidity to them, and their flowing natures are more apparent.
They certainly lose their sense of being permanent and stable, they no longer have that anchor of hereness, they just happen, they are aware of themselves and nothing more, which has the danger of making life sound pointless and nihilism, indeed in the dark night of the souls (which can last for years) that is exactly the quality of existence that comes to the forefront. However that is just another sensation that is producing a judgement, it is part of re-experiencing our lives from this new perspective of no-self, when we move into a more mature part of our growth, you get to realise that this is the liberation from the illusion of there being a permanent stable self that needs protecting.
Instead of this constant defensiveness there emerges a fearless to act for whatever is right or necessary, we are still ourselves, our patterns of how to be and act with love, there just is no longer a here to defend, as we know for sure that here I am is not the same as I am here, this is the truth, and if you can accept this with logic or emotionally before you know it through direct experience, if you can take it on faith your journey will be shorter. If not test through that direct experience, doubt it, fight it, find arguments against it, it does not matter but it will make the journey harder as everything I just said are reactions which are exactly what you are trying to let go of to experience your consciousness in it's raw form. I hope by giving you a small part of the pie of the illusion that traps you that you get to take the rest of faith, stop being here and you never know where you might go.
