This post may sound like philosophy. Maybe in some sense it is, but it's not meant to convince you of an idea, or to posit some ultimate truth. It's meant to point something out about your experience. At first, seeing what it's pointing to may elicit little more than a "yeah, so what?" But if you really manage to fully penetrate it, it can do a lot more than that.
Okay, let's begin.
Examine your field of experience -- the set of all things you're conscious of right now. You'll discover that it's made of (approximately) six distinct non-overlapping fields: your five basic sensory field plus your mental field. Let's unpack that a bit.
You see the world. The eyes may bring in the photons, but the seeing ultimately takes place in the mind. The "place" you see the world is precisely the same "place" you see a dream world at night. That's your visual "screen" or field.
You hear the world on an auditory "screen" or field, and under normal circumstances, it doesn't overlap with the visual field at all.
The same goes for the other four primary senses.
Now the "mental screen" is a little harder to describe. It's the "place" where thoughts, emotions, feelings, memories, etc. are happening. It may be a little strange to call it a "screen," so you can call it a "space" (or anything else) if you like. The point is that all the aforementioned phenomena occur in a "place" distinct from the five senses, and that together, these six fields comprise the entirety of your experience of the world (the real world, a dream world, or anything else).
Take a moment and see whether this is true in your experience. See if there's anything you experience outside these six fields. Some kinds of experiences (such as mental images) may be hard to categorize as specifically one or another field. You can feel free to pick a field to categorize them in, or even create a seventh category if you like. It won't change the argument.
Okay, now notice that everything you think of as "you," the person, is contained within these six sense fields. For example, right now you can see your body in your visual field, and feel it in the touch field. You also have a mental idea of what your body is like. You have memories of your younger self (which are a big component of what you think of as "you").
If that's a little abstract, consider what it feels like to be in a dream where you're a dog. The visual field has nothing in common with what you normally call "you". Neither do any of the other four sense fields. And it's completely possible that (at any given moment in the dream), nothing on the mental screen is in common with your normal one. In brief, there's nothing on those six experiential fields that could meaningfully be called [insert your name here]. And as we saw earlier, that's the entirety of your experience.
You could imagine something similar while you're awake. Someone scrambles your brain so that your body is visually replaced with someone else's, then the sound of your voice, then your personality, your memory, etc., until there's nothing of "you" left. Yet, what did this experience feel like? It probably felt something like this:
"Wow, my body is different. Now my voice is! And now I have someone else's personality and memories!" And maybe these thoughts are happening in someone else's voice. But the interesting thing here is that the sense of "I" continued throughout the whole process. Similarly, the "I" you had while being a dream dog is the same "I" you have now, even if all the details of experience differ.
Re-read the previous thee paragraphs until you grok this point: the sense of being "I" continues even while all the details of being [insert your name] disappear. To put this more bluntly: "I" is not [your name]. Say that out loud. To use better English, this would be "I am not [name]." Go ahead, say that out loud, and understand that it is experientially accurate.
Now you may be thinking that this is some trick of neurology. Some neurons that define "you" continued firing throughout the dream and the brain scramble above, and that explains the whole thing.
But return to your direct experience. All you need to see is that we could scramble all the details of your experience, and all the while, the sense that this is happening to "I" is unbroken. That this "I" is independent of any details. Can you see that?
This "I" is (experientially) your fundamental sense of identity, beingness, existence, and it is completely independent of your personality. Experientially speaking, fundamentally you are the sheer capacity for experience. All the other "stuff" (your personality) comes later, as an extrinsic layer.
To summarize a lot of Eastern philosophy: all problems stem from this weird thing we do where we confuse some of the details of our experience (e.g., the personality) to be our identity. In other words, from this conviction that "I am [name]" *.
You're not.
Traditionally, it's said that directly realizing this can be challenging. It's not a conceptual thing. But if you can follow the logic above, you'll see that there's really no other possibility, and that conceptual certainty can convince you to look very clearly until you see it for yourself.
* In truth it's a lot more subtle -- some people get beyond the "I am my personality" phase and still confuse some more subtle aspect of their experience (such as willing or witnessing) with their personality. But we don't have space to get into that here.
Okay, let's begin.
Examine your field of experience -- the set of all things you're conscious of right now. You'll discover that it's made of (approximately) six distinct non-overlapping fields: your five basic sensory field plus your mental field. Let's unpack that a bit.
You see the world. The eyes may bring in the photons, but the seeing ultimately takes place in the mind. The "place" you see the world is precisely the same "place" you see a dream world at night. That's your visual "screen" or field.
You hear the world on an auditory "screen" or field, and under normal circumstances, it doesn't overlap with the visual field at all.
The same goes for the other four primary senses.
Now the "mental screen" is a little harder to describe. It's the "place" where thoughts, emotions, feelings, memories, etc. are happening. It may be a little strange to call it a "screen," so you can call it a "space" (or anything else) if you like. The point is that all the aforementioned phenomena occur in a "place" distinct from the five senses, and that together, these six fields comprise the entirety of your experience of the world (the real world, a dream world, or anything else).
Take a moment and see whether this is true in your experience. See if there's anything you experience outside these six fields. Some kinds of experiences (such as mental images) may be hard to categorize as specifically one or another field. You can feel free to pick a field to categorize them in, or even create a seventh category if you like. It won't change the argument.
Okay, now notice that everything you think of as "you," the person, is contained within these six sense fields. For example, right now you can see your body in your visual field, and feel it in the touch field. You also have a mental idea of what your body is like. You have memories of your younger self (which are a big component of what you think of as "you").
If that's a little abstract, consider what it feels like to be in a dream where you're a dog. The visual field has nothing in common with what you normally call "you". Neither do any of the other four sense fields. And it's completely possible that (at any given moment in the dream), nothing on the mental screen is in common with your normal one. In brief, there's nothing on those six experiential fields that could meaningfully be called [insert your name here]. And as we saw earlier, that's the entirety of your experience.
You could imagine something similar while you're awake. Someone scrambles your brain so that your body is visually replaced with someone else's, then the sound of your voice, then your personality, your memory, etc., until there's nothing of "you" left. Yet, what did this experience feel like? It probably felt something like this:
"Wow, my body is different. Now my voice is! And now I have someone else's personality and memories!" And maybe these thoughts are happening in someone else's voice. But the interesting thing here is that the sense of "I" continued throughout the whole process. Similarly, the "I" you had while being a dream dog is the same "I" you have now, even if all the details of experience differ.
Re-read the previous thee paragraphs until you grok this point: the sense of being "I" continues even while all the details of being [insert your name] disappear. To put this more bluntly: "I" is not [your name]. Say that out loud. To use better English, this would be "I am not [name]." Go ahead, say that out loud, and understand that it is experientially accurate.
Now you may be thinking that this is some trick of neurology. Some neurons that define "you" continued firing throughout the dream and the brain scramble above, and that explains the whole thing.
But return to your direct experience. All you need to see is that we could scramble all the details of your experience, and all the while, the sense that this is happening to "I" is unbroken. That this "I" is independent of any details. Can you see that?
This "I" is (experientially) your fundamental sense of identity, beingness, existence, and it is completely independent of your personality. Experientially speaking, fundamentally you are the sheer capacity for experience. All the other "stuff" (your personality) comes later, as an extrinsic layer.
To summarize a lot of Eastern philosophy: all problems stem from this weird thing we do where we confuse some of the details of our experience (e.g., the personality) to be our identity. In other words, from this conviction that "I am [name]" *.
You're not.
Traditionally, it's said that directly realizing this can be challenging. It's not a conceptual thing. But if you can follow the logic above, you'll see that there's really no other possibility, and that conceptual certainty can convince you to look very clearly until you see it for yourself.
* In truth it's a lot more subtle -- some people get beyond the "I am my personality" phase and still confuse some more subtle aspect of their experience (such as willing or witnessing) with their personality. But we don't have space to get into that here.
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