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Why can't the self be seen?
Mateeah
Explorer
I have felt a great sense of peace resting as the Witness and watching my silly little ego. . But I am wondering, why can't the Seer be seen? I don't know why this question came up but it did. for some reason (bear with me here..) it feels a bit unsettling.
"Why are you unhappy?
Because 99.9 percent
Of everything you think
And everything you do,
Is for yourself -
And there isn't one."
- Wei Wu Wei
Ps. Funny - when I first read this quote on Ken Wilber's "One Taste", I was completely stumped on what it was talking about.
i guess that would be called progress!
"Why are you unhappy?
Because 99.9 percent
Of everything you think
And everything you do,
Is for yourself -
And there isn't one."
- Wei Wu Wei
Ps. Funny - when I first read this quote on Ken Wilber's "One Taste", I was completely stumped on what it was talking about.
i guess that would be called progress! 
2
Comments
The core of non-self is finding the 'inherent self', the source of being, the arising of the sense of self, the witnessing . . . What is that?
Dakini is asking the same question . . . You can too . . .
What you observe is the response to the sense gate input of eye, ear, nose, tongue, body and mind. There is sensory input and our response to it.
The ego is simply a description of the habitual manipulation of that input.
The self is little more than a causal reaction to that manipulation.
In the absense of such manipulation, neither ego or self exists.
.
The thinking is just the thinking; the seeing is just the seeing. No Thinker, no Seer, no Self.
Peace of mind is relative. When we stop grasping and pushing away, there’s peace of mind.
It’s a simple process. When we have been walking on uncomfortable shoes all day we feel relief when we come home and get them off. Meditation can be like that; coming home and stepping out of some spasmodic states of mind and feeling peace. Maybe it’s not such a deep spiritual thing after all.
A contemporary analogy would be to say that our conscious behaviour is driven by unconscious drives - so to pursue the analogy, the purpose of practice is to make the unconscious conscious, by calming things down and observing closely.
But then that doesn't really solve the seer issue because that is the seer looking at the seer.
In non duality circles that eventually drops and dissolves into pure consciousness as oneness.
Though that is a nice spiritual experience and realization the "self" is still an issue because the one consciousness becomes the large Self.
Lol though it may feel and one may intuitively feel that there is no self because of the vastness and the seeing through the thought of I, it is still a defiled perception from the vantage point of Buddhadharma and will still condition the dependent arising of suffering.
On that note. The self is just an idea. If we deny it then we affirm it. If we affirm it then we deny it.
The self cannot be found because there was no self to begin with lol. It was just an assumption of perception and ideas.
The idea being the concept. The perception being the holding of physical sensations in the body be it behind the eyes, the heart or the very body itself.
http://awakeningtoreality.blogspot.com/2009/03/on-anatta-emptiness-and-spontaneous.html
That article is worth reading over and over and over again. Also meditate on it.
I can "see" my body, my emotions and thoughts. Although they appear to be "mine", they are not "me". There is no me.
The observer cannot be the observed because he cannot be both at the same time! Anything that can be seen, felt or cognized is not me.
The witness may be our natural sensitivity that is constantly in flux. I think that kind of witness is reliable because it is not bound. There is always a movement to get to feel better. If we turn away from touchy situations we do not respond naturally we can react as a fixed strategy that is locked up rather than unbound.
another view of this is...
The ego continually presents existence in terms of self and other. The degree to which we continue to feed our ego is the degree to which everything is seen as a reflection of this belief.
The degree to which we stop feeding our ego is the degree to which that belief disappears.
Most meditative journeys are a slow dissipation of identity based experience.
What formally arose as an experiential "witness" to bring context to our meditative relationship, later just becomes innate observation, free from the observer and the observed
There is no real self to be seen beyond the effects of it's own dream.