Seeing through the self illusion: This blog is about spiritual awakening using the concept of the 10 fetters as described by Buddha. The first step is to see through the self illusion – the streamentry.
The moment you see through the self illusion, everything is crystal clear. You want to slap your forehead and wonder why you never saw it before. It’s just so obvious, so banal.
The moment can actually be compared to the moment when you realized that Santa Claus does not exist. That he is just a character from a story that your parents told you. A character like all the others in your storybooks. Except that your parents let you believe that Santa Claus really existed.
Just as you saw that Santa Claus is also just a character from a story, it is the same to see through the self illusion.
You realize that the self never existed. That it is just a story too. But like Santa Claus, you thought the self really existed.
That’s all it is. It’s quite mundane. There is nothing mystical, nothing lyrical, nothing meditative about it. And you will wonder why you never saw it that way before.
That’s why you will immediately recognize the moment you see through the self-illusion. There is no doubt anymore. Because the realization does not take place in thought, or in a dream, or during meditation. It is simply there, in real life, something very real.
You are Santa Claus.
Maybe you should consider what you are actually looking for before you start your search. What is the self illusion? What is the self? The term “the self” is very abstract. You might as well say that you don’t exist. You, as a person. You, as a separate person who exists in addition to the world/experience. The self illusion is seen through when you realize that you are not this something additional, separate from the world.
Do you want to see through the self illusion?
The self illusion: The self illusion is the first fetter. The assumption that there is someone who exists independently of everything else. Someone who has a life that he controls, over which he is the decision-maker. A person who thinks, decides and acts. Someone who controls something and is in control of himself.
Here you will find my own experience of seeing through the self illusion. You can ask yourself the questions:
There is no self, there is no me!
The following articles contain further clues to help you see through the self illusion:
The self: the first fetter
Doubt: the second fetter
Rites and Rituals: The Third Fetter
Inquiry into the Self Illusion
Experiments to Investigate the Self Illusion
Shift
To see through the self illusion, we *go* into direct experience. Here we separate the sensual experience from mental interpretations.
In direct experience, there is no self (and no other illusions or assumptions).
When we see through the self illusion, the following happens: the no-self that we experience in direct experience becomes our everyday experience. It is then no longer necessary to go into direct experience. The no-self can then always be experienced. Omnipresent. Of course, there is neither self nor no-self.
So if we have to “go” into direct experience to experience no self, the shift has not yet occurred.
Experiencing this shift is important, because otherwise the self illusion is not seen through and we cannot release the next fetters. We no longer examine the next fetters in direct experience, but in our everyday experience – without the self filter.
So if you find that you are stuck in the next fetters, it may be because you have not fully understood the self-illusion.
What can you do? Just keep looking. Do all the exercises to recognize the self-illusion again and again and check: There is no self – is that true?
In this text, a client describes how it feels to see through the self illusion.
Question
How would you describe to someone who has never dealt with it how it is to experience the self as an illusion and how it affects you, as you experience it?
Answer
The view is unobstructed. The window panes are free of all streaks. The view is so clear that it is no longer known whether there is a window at all. Living like this is more like an open-top ride, a convertible that is open on all sides. Wind, sun, warmth, lights, sounds and smells come in directly, without a filter, without a sieve. It’s all just there, right away. Nothing fits between the experiences and the experiencing of the experiences. Nothing is in between. Experience and what is being experienced are one. Immediately. Not a single sheet fits in between. It’s all just there, right away.
The path to clarity is not easy. The experience of the self illusion is, at least it was for me, painful at first. The loss of power, control and knowledge. There is no defense anymore. Thoughts and feelings continue to come. The first months that were experienced during the experience process were stressful. Painful. Worrying. Like a bitter loss. Like being unprotected. Relapses into thinking. But useless. It was a kind of prolonged unconsciousness. Defenselessness. You just had to go through it.
Suddenly, different experiences. When nothing can be known anymore, even everyday things are mysterious. There was a day when I found myself standing in front of the dishwasher, amazed and puzzled, shaking my head at the lights going on and off. Another time, I was standing on a busy street and no longer understood these lines of cars. I simply no longer knew why it can be important to drive these metal carts from here to there. It was like a kind of strangeness, as if I had jumped over China with my parachute and I understood almost nothing and could hardly orient myself. But behind it was also the slowly growing experience that orientation comes all by itself. Shopping comes when it’s needed. Food comes when hunger shows up. Impulses arise from within. No one has to be there to plan them. What an energy saver!
There were also days when I couldn’t remember a single poem of my own. All gone. I really had to check Amazon to see what my books were called. I also no longer knew what was good or bad. It took a long time to let go of this not knowing and not being able to act. It hurt a bit, but when it sank to the bottom, it was the experience of beauty. Because then knowledge came, or rather an experience, a perception that everything is already there, that there can be no search because everything is already there, always and everywhere, and happens by itself. There is nothing more than what is. And there doesn’t have to be anything else at all. Then a quiet laugh at the fact that there was ever a search for anything else. Where was it supposed to be? What was it supposed to be? How crazy this search was. And so simple and easy is the end of the search. Everything is simply already as it is. That sounds really banal, but in reality it is incredibly liberating.
It is a little death, but one that is more rewarding than anything else that has been experienced. The state after this “death” is emptiness. But not in the sense of absence, of loss. Quite the opposite. Rather, in the sense of new space. Another expanse. An unlimited space opens up. A space without beginning or end. A space in which nothing is really known. In which there is no one. A space of the present that does not need to know anything at all. It only receives. And it is not really known either. There is no one who can know it. It is simply sensed. Although there is no one who senses it, it is still being experienced. It is simply there.
What also really makes an impression is the experience that space is timeless. Time only arises when one tries to know space. Time is knowing. Without knowing, there is no time in this space. That is also very amazing.
The best word for all these experiences is freedom. The apparent loss of the self is the gain of absolute freedom. An incredible gain of space. No euphoria, no lasting feelings of happiness or anything like that. It is simply an incredible emptiness, vastness, infinity. The self is simply no longer there. It is neither missing nor does it somehow have a different influence. A kind of empty wardrobe. There is simply nothing hanging in it.
For me personally, the greatest liberation was the realization that thoughts have no thinker. If at all, the thinker appears with the thought and disappears with it. The thinker is the thought. It does not exist by itself. Thoughts without a thinker are no longer a burden. Thoughts are birds that come and go. To see, no seer is needed, to hear, no listener, to act, no doer. There is a sense of wonder that this is freedom. It is clearly the experience of freedom.
And yet there is something like happiness in it. No jubilant jumping up. More like a small, quiet brook that splashes along somewhere in this space. The stream of carefreeness. Thoughts, feelings, perceptions, everything is there as before. But there are no more worries. Worries were thoughts that revolved around the self illusion. This lived on worries. With the disappearance of the self, the worries also went away. What remains is simply being here. That is peace.
The self illusion is the first fetter. The assumption that there is someone who exists independently of everything else. Someone who has a life that he directs, over which he is the decision-maker. A person who thinks, decides and acts. Someone who controls something and is in control of himself.