In my efforts to communicate the essence of liberation - that the self does not exist - I have made the mistake of being inauthentic. I believed I could strip my personality from the message I was conveying so it wouldn't get in the way.

This didn't work. People can sense inauthentic communication, and do not tend to be well-disposed towards it. What was meant to be the sharing of a single idea became a battle in which I tried to convince others to do something (look to see if there was a self) while holding back information which might have made them more willing to listen to me.

That might work in the Ruthless Arena, where everyone involved knows that they are there for one specific purpose - to free themselves from the illusion of self - and knows that everything that is being said is intended to serve that purpose. It might work for other contexts where people are ready to evaluate ideas on their own merit, without ego getting in the way. But most of the time, people don't expect you to take yourself out of the equation, and they react badly when you do.

So what is authenticity, and how does one get it?

Real authenticity has two parts: being honest with yourself, and being honest with others. Both are huge, and can utterly transform your life depending on the extent to which you master them.

Being honest with yourself takes courage. What it means is to acknowledge whatever arises in your experience, and not try to pretend it away or mislabel it as something else. Even if what arises is truly horrible to you, such as thoughts of violent murder arising when you are angry, or inappropriate desires, or deep fears that you don't want to admit you have, being honest with yourself means acknowledging that those things are really there.

There are many reasons why this is a good thing. First off, you can't face and deal with something if you're too busy pretending it's not there. You can't treat a wound you don't see. If you're terrified of something, only by acknowledging that fear can you find ways of overcoming it, or of compensating for its existence in some way. If there's a part of yourself you want to change, you can't do it until you accept that it's there.

Secondly, your predictive abilities are greatly enhanced. You can predict how you will feel in a given situation, so you can make plans ahead of time as to what situations to seek and what to avoid, and how to cope with unwanted sides of yourself coming up. Without being honest with yourself, you will consistently be wrong in your predictions, and incur great amounts of unnecessary suffering and failure.

Thirdly, it helps you understand other people. For as long as you deny something in yourself, you won't be able to understand what it is like for another person to feel such a thing, so you will limit your ability to connect with them. You are the only person you can understand from the inside, so honesty about what that inside contains is the absolute prerequisite for true empathy.

Fourthly, when you look at things directly, they invariably turn out to be less bad than you thought. This is because the thoughts are an extra layer over the top of the actual experience, one which emphasises and reinforces it. When you look at the experience itself, you tend to realise that it's not actually as bad as your thoughts make it sound. Check this out next time you feel pain or a negative emotion. Is the feeling, in and of itself, actually as intense as your thoughts about it say it is?

Fifthly and most importantly, it lets you see life as it really is. Ask yourself this - "do I, the person looking at reality through these eyes, actually exist? Or does the looking happen without me?" Then be honest about what you see when you look for that "I". There is a vast freedom in this honesty which no-one who practises self-deception will ever be able to access, a liberation from an entire web of lies that covers up the truth of life.

That's all for now. Look forward to Part II another time.

Q: How do I become liberated/enlightened?

A: There is no you. Look and see if this is true.

Q: What does "you" mean?

A: The thing you refer to when you say or think "I", "me" or "my".

Note that you do need to be honest about this - people will often claim to believe they are X, but then use those pronouns in a way that shows they actually believe something else. For example, they say they are the body, but when their legs are cut off, they say "my legs have been cut off" rather than "I've been cut in three".

Q: What does it mean to say there's no you?

A: It means that "you" does not exist in reality, only as a thought. You can imagine a unicorn being in the room with you, but that doesn't mean an actual unicorn is there. The same is true of "you".

Q: What does it mean to look?

A: Exactly what it sounds like. If someone asks you to confirm how many toes you have, you just look and count the number of toes you see. If someone asks you to confirm if there's a tree behind you, you just turn around and look if you see a tree.

Q: Any other question.

A: Shut up and look.

Looking at your experience of life is something that you naturally do all the time. There are no questions that need answering before you can do it. There are no doubts that need allaying or philosophical issues that need dealing with before you can do it. Even if what you're going to see contradicts your beliefs, you do not need to deal with those beliefs before you can LOOK AT WHAT'S ACTUALLY THERE.

So shut up and look to see if there's a you. It's the best advice anyone will ever give you.
 

Judge: Time, already convicted of being the greatest thief and the killer of all that lives, stands accused of the heinous crime of not existing. Prosecution, please present your case.

Another great question in the comments today, this time from a gentleman named Greg. You can find it in the comments under "A Single Act of Honesty". The basic gist of it is this: if there's no self, then whom am I telling to look and see that there's no self? And who achieves liberation?

Obviously, it isn't the "you" that is being looked for, because that doesn't exist. But if there's no-one to do the looking, then the instruction to look makes no sense. A lot of seekers of liberation get hung up on this, and a lot of gurus make the problem worse by repeating "there's no-one to get enlightened" like a mantra.

Here's a provisional model of what really happens. I may come up with a better one later, but it will do for now.

There is an organic system which we call a human being. In response to input from its environment, certain thoughts arise within it and certain actions are carried out by it. This process is completely automatic.

Over time, when certain patterns of input get repeated, the brain within that system naturally generates certain patterns of thought in response. These patterns are beliefs, and all future input is filtered through them. "I exist" is one such belief.

Then, one day, the input "look - there is no you" enters the system. This prompts the pattern recognition element of the system to check the belief "I exist" against the sensory data of direct perception for the first time. The belief turns out to contradict direct perception.

As a result, the pattern recognition element deflags the belief as "true", and marks it "false".

This is liberation.

In other words, everything except the self does exist, and it's that everything which becomes liberated, with liberation defined as the recognition that the belief "I exist" is false.

The reason we say that, strictly speaking, "no-one is looking" is that the entire process is completely involuntary and automatic. To say that the system is choosing to look is like saying that the computer chooses to process data, or that the clouds choose to make it rain.

Conversely, the reason we tell people to look is that the illusion of free will persists (that could be a subject for a separate post), so it seems like not only is there a person whom we are talking to, but also a choice on our part whether or not to tell them, and a choice on their part whether to look or not. In reality, none of this is true, but illusions don't automatically go away just because you see that they're illusions.

Anyway, this is a simple model, and I strongly suspect it contains certain inaccuracies, but it is sufficient to answer the question. No-one gets liberated because the thing that gets liberated isn't a someone, not because the process of liberation doesn't take place.

adsdas, if that is their real name, posted a comment which I feel deserves closer attention:


"Velorien ,how you look to see if the belief is true?I mean , all beliefs are false and all thoughts are false, and all beliefs about self are false because self doesn't exist."


There are a number of things worth saying in response.


First off, it is not true that all beliefs and all thoughts are false. If I think "the sky is blue", that thought is true, and I can verify this by looking out of the window. If I believe "most people have five fingers on each hand", again, this belief is true and can be verified (though perhaps not by me personally, because there is an awful lot of people).


Secondly, while all beliefs about self are false, I've found that beliefs are worth examining on more levels than just that. Here's a real-life example.


I am afraid of failure.
Looking at this fear, I see that the belief behind it is "if I fail, I will be somehow diminished".
I can look at the "I" part of the belief, and see that it is false because the I doesn't exist, and therefore will not fail or be diminished.


But I can do more than this.


I can look at "fail" and "diminished". I can ask "will failure really lead to diminishment?" This leads me to at least two new lines of inquiry.


What is failure? By looking honestly, I realise that failure is simply when the reality of what has been accomplished does not measure up to my pre-existing image of what needs to be accomplished. In other words, failure is when I compare a thought to reality and discover a mismatch. As a concept, it is no more meaningful or threatening than that.


What is diminishment? By looking honestly, I see that it means that instead of thinking of myself as good at something or good in some way, I will start thinking of myself as not good at something or not good in that way. In other words, diminishment is when I trade one thought for another thought. As a concept, it is no more meaningful or  threatening than that.


By putting these two insights together, I see that "if I fail, I will be somehow diminished" actually means "if one of my thoughts turns out to contradict reality, I will replace it with a thought that doesn't". I have not only eliminated a false belief, but I have gained a deeper understanding of it that will serve me when addressing other beliefs and other aspects of human experience.


Finally, to return to the original question of "how do you look to see if the belief is true?"


You literally just look. What would you be experiencing if the belief was true? Are you experiencing it right now? There's no more to it than that.


Is it true that the sky is blue? If it's true, then by looking up I will see a blue sky. Do I see a blue sky? Yes? Then the belief is true.


Now, this approach is not omnipotent. There are two points worth bearing in mind.


1) You have to be clear about the limits of what you are testing. When you see a blue sky, all you know is that you are perceiving the sky as blue. You do not know - not with 100% confidence - that the sky actually is blue. You just know that it looks blue to you, and that if it's really a different colour, there must be a good reason for the mismatch.


2) You can never be 100% certain that a belief about something beyond your actual experience is true. It will only ever take a single counterexample to prove a belief wrong, and since you do not know the contents of the entire universe, you can never know that such a counterexample isn't out there somewhere.


On the other hand, it is possible to know that a belief is false with 100% certainty. If you believe that all swans are white, and you see a black swan, your belief is false. It is, of course, your responsibility to make sure that you are actually seeing a black swan, and not, say, a painted one, but beyond that there is no possible way for your original belief to still be true.


So look. And above all, if you haven't done so already, look at "the self exists". If you see no self, then either the self doesn't exist, or it is not something perceivable. If it is not something perceivable, then you must have concluded that it exists based on various other beliefs about reality, and those can be tested too.

I'm learning the extent to which focused honesty is more than a tool; it can become a way of life.

Here's a pattern I've gone through several times over the last couple of days:

- I feel scared of something.
- I look to see what it is I'm scared of, and what the belief driving that fear is.
- I look to see if the belief is true.
- I generally have to work through several iterations before the real, correctly formulated belief becomes apparent.
- I look at it until I see whether it is true.
- It is not true.
- I stop being scared of whatever it was that scared me.
- I now have one fewer false belief.

I'd like to get into the practice of doing this every time I feel something caused by a false belief. There is still a lot of fear left in my life (you'll recall that liberation doesn't automatically clear away past conditioning; that has to be done manually), and ditching it will let me do the things I really want to.

Try it yourself. It's a powerful method, and it's absolutely free.

P.S. I'd like to post an example of working through a belief like this at some point, but the process always seems to be a bit messy and not completely linear in practice, so I have yet to come up with a suitable model case.

Disclaimer: I don't know if it'll work as well if you're still suffering from the delusion of self. Ditch that first.