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#Post#: 43234--------------------------------------------------
Am I the one suffering or am I the one who is aware of the suffe
ring?
By: feanor Date: November 4, 2021, 6:31 am
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Hi, I'd like to open this question to Zara and all the forum
members, as Jed is no longer with us.
I am trying to do autolysis on "Am I the one suffering or am I
the one who is aware of the suffering?" How would you dissect
this one?
I know the right answer is that "I am not suffering, just aware
of suffering." But I can't arrive at this conclusion either
logically or through my experience.
#Post#: 43245--------------------------------------------------
Re: starting journey of no self
By: Zara Songull Date: December 9, 2021, 1:53 am
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I’m glad you asked this. The Jed that I knew had mixed feelings
about Spiritual Autolysis. For all that it is held up in the
books as the ultimate practice, as far as I know this idea came
from the actual authors/editors of the text, and not from Jed.
Jed supported anyone attempting to make use of the practice, but
he recognized that it’s very difficult to do well. I know you've
had some dialogue with Jed about SA already, and gotten some of
his ways to cut through to the heart of the practice, but let me
add a bit about how I think it works.
Mostly, what people do in the name of SA is the equivalent of
journaling, and in fact that’s what’s demonstrated in the books.
Journaling can clear the mind, or it can further clutter it. It
can be a tool of discovery, or merely a way of recycling and
rehashing mental activity. Journaling is not really what SA is
about.
If you want to get closer to the real point of SA, it helps to
remember that the idea came from Descartes and his Meditations.
Here’s how he started his first “Meditation”:
“Several years have now elapsed since I first became aware that
I had accepted, even from my youth, many false opinions for
true, and that consequently what I afterward based on such
principles was highly doubtful; and from that time I was
convinced of the necessity of undertaking once in my life to rid
myself of all the opinions I had adopted, and of commencing anew
the work of building from the foundation.”
Pretty bold, right? He then gives some suspect reasoning about
why he waited until he was so old to make the attempt (though he
was only 43 when he started - ha!), and says:
“Today, then, since I have opportunely freed my mind from all
cares and am happily disturbed by no passions, and since I am in
the secure possession of leisure in a peaceable retirement, I
will at length apply myself earnestly and freely to the general
overthrow of all my former opinions.”
That is spiritual autolysis - the systematic overthrow of all
the nonsense that has come to comprise your world-view. You
interrogate absolutely every belief to see whether it’s actually
true. And the punch line, of course, is that none of it is.
Descartes’s basic tool of skepticism was that everything that
seemed real to him could be an illusion spun by a malignant
demon trying to trick him. There just wasn’t much sci-fi around
in Descartes day, or he would have gone on about simulations and
implanted memories. Instead he went supernatural and decided
that no matter what tricks that demon was up to, there was still
some thinking being (Descartes himself) having the experience of
being tricked. Cogito ergo sum: I think therefore I am. That was
the only thing he could be sure of. At least it was until he got
into some nonsense about the necessity of God’s existence (with
a capital G). He was, after all, a creature of his culture and
his time.
Your job as a universal skeptic (more universal than even
Descartes managed to be) is to try to find something that you
can know is actually true. That’s the reason for the exercise -
to be rigorous enough in your questioning to try to discover the
difference between Truth and everything else. To not stop until
you get there.
As for your starting point about suffering. I am personally
certain that you aren’t suffering. Not because we can get all
non-dual and say there’s no “you” there to suffer. Even if we
imagine there’s a you there, that you isn’t suffering.
Something is happening. That’s for sure. That something seems
pretty unpleasant, and you’ve learned to interpret the something
as “suffering”. But you want to find out what that something is
really made of. What is occurring that you’ve learned to call
“suffering”. Pop the hood and look inside. Really dig around in
there. What’s it actually made of? What can you know about
what’s actually happening and why it gets experienced as
“suffering”.
Question every answer you come up with. Is that really what’s
happening? Could you break it down even further? Can you
discover an interpretation that is at least more “truthish”?
As you mentioned, logic can only get you so far. Coming up with
an intellectual answer won’t be satisfying for very long, unless
it dramatically alters the nature of the experience, or of the
experiencer. That’s how you know when you hit upon some Truth!
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