Embracing the "I" or self

[Orb]

I see people mentioning here that the I must somehow be embraced. 

 

In direct experience, to embrace "I" is delusion and to negate "I" is also delusion. 

 

I'd just leave it alone. 

 

No-Self does not mean that there's a self that's being negated. No-Self points to that there never was a Self in the first place.

[Jonas Long]

its a loaded word...in Jungian terms, the "self" is something that has to be developed and attained, almost through the same effort as what some would call "no self"

[Orb]

@Lester Retsel I wouldn't worry about self or no-Self, but ironically, thats just my opinion 😅. Whatever thought chatter is there is just whats there, thats it. Theres no need to behave in a certain way or anything, its all good.

[Jonas Long]

1 minute ago, Orb said:

@Lester Retsel I wouldn't worry about self or no-Self, but ironically, thats just my opinion 😅. Whatever thought chatter is there is just whats there, thats it. Theres no need to behave in a certain way or anything, its all good.

"i" wouldn't worry about it either.  it's not a hill i'm going to die on either way.  it's also not going to prevent or enable me to do whatever "i'm" going to

[Orb]

@Lester Retsel yea exactly!

 

Feels better to live life blindly having fun and creating rather than obsessing over embracing a self or letting go of a self.

Edited March 8, 2023 by Orb

[Jonas Long]

however...re contextualizing it does pay dividends...examining assumptions made about what "I" entails insofar as it is.  it's more like like forgetting your cigarettes and forgetting you are a smoker, to forget "i"

[Jonas Long]

1 minute ago, Orb said:

@Lester Retsel yea exactly!

 

Feels better to live life blindly having fun and creating rather than obsessing over embracing a self or letting go of a self.

oh no no no no....the "blindness" is obsessing over embracing a self

[Orb]

2 minutes ago, Lester Retsel said:

oh no no no no....the "blindness" is obsessing over embracing a self

When I use blindly I mean like carefree, no worries.

[Jonas Long]

1 minute ago, Orb said:

When I use blindly I mean like carefree, no worries.

"i see you mara" is what buddha supposedly said before his enlightenment.  

[Jonas Long]

Just now, Joseph Maynor said:

If this is a bias on this forum let me know and I'll leave.  Your choice.  If you want to specialize in no self, and that's your market, you're gonna be limited.

that's like specializing in oxygen

[Orb]

@Joseph Maynor I want to understand what you mean by self? When you say embrace the self or "I", what do you mean? Like in direct experience.

Edited March 8, 2023 by Orb

[Jonas Long]

2 minutes ago, Joseph Maynor said:

 you're gonna be limited.  You're gonna become the flip side of Leo Gura.  There's an alternative to this shite.

limited like infinity is 

[Jonas Long]

4 minutes ago, Joseph Maynor said:

It's called learning to work with differing perspectives.

it's working with infinite perspectives....cause they aren't locked in a "self"

[Orb]

3 minutes ago, Lester Retsel said:

"i see you mara" is what buddha supposedly said before his enlightenment.  

Idk about those old stories lol. That's like when my mom tells her friends stories about me and embellishes them just a little bit...

[Jonas Long]

Just now, Orb said:

Idk about those old stories lol. That's like when my mom tells her friends stories about me and embellishes them just a little bit...

yeah but the allegory is solid as fuck....it was rephrased in the modern classic Fight Club.  anway, i just wouldn't say "blind" is all

[Orb]

2 minutes ago, Lester Retsel said:

yeah but the allegory is solid as fuck....it was rephrased in the modern classic Fight Club.  anway, i just wouldn't say "blind" is all

I love that movie 💙

[Jonas Long]

Just now, Orb said:

I love that movie 💙

it's like so good.  it's pretty much perfect

[Joseph Maynor]

@Lester Retsel I invited you on this forum in the first place.  I don't know if that was a good or bad decision in hindsight.  I only hope for the best for you and I I liked you enough to endorse you in the first instance.  I don't know if that was a mistake or not in hindsight.  At your best I think you're excellent.  But focus on you instead of outside of you.  For you, you'll aim outside instead of inside by default.  Or maybe not.  There are so many demons outside you can spend your lifetime on that.  But what's the expense of that?

Edited March 8, 2023 by Joseph Maynor

[Jonas Long]

32 minutes ago, Joseph Maynor said:

@Lester Retsel I invited you on this forum in the first place.  I don't know if that was a good or bad decision in hindsight.  I only hope for the best for you and I I liked you enough to endorse you in the first instance.  I don't know if that was a mistake or not in hindsight.  At your best I think you're excellent.  But focus on you instead of outside of you.  For you, you'll aim outside instead of inside by default.  Or maybe not.  There are so many demons outside you can spend your lifetime on that.  But what's the expense of that?

The demons outside are the demons inside 

[Mandy]

In continuation of my conversation with Joseph in the locked thread, (hope you don't mind the quote Joseph, let me know if its not ok),

 

Joseph said, "Try saying this without thoughts.  If you're saying this without thoughts, there must be something you're relying on to even know this is true -- like reality!   Ok, well, if no self is true, it must be a part of reality, or at least inferred from reality.  You must rely on some kind of perception or evidence to draw any conclusion.  And that conclusion is linguistic and thus conceptual.  Thus, we're all within the realm of ideas as well as embodiment.  If you use language, you're dealing with ideas too.  If you can't notice a distinction, how can you even create a statement to talk about something?  You wouldn't.  You wouldn't catch it (or capture it).  This discussion probably deserves its own thread if we want to go down this rabbit hole, which I think is important.  I propose there's a "working with" between ideas (and language), and experience (and embodiment).  But don't substitute my perspective for yours either!  I appreciate that we all come from different angles.  The idea/language that there's "one right answer" is paradoxically both true and false and both and neither.  But, I'm teaching now and that has its own kind of limitations, so take what I say both seriously and with a grain of salt, if you want to of course."

 

At first you hadn't added more text  and asked me to try saying this without thoughts and I replied in big font "I Am." By "I" in quotations I don't mean I separate self Mandy, I mean everything is saying this, everything is this, Awareness with no beginning or end, but eternal presence. When Jesus said "Even the rocks will cry out," everything IS the praise of God, the praise of itself. Not that it needs praise, not that there are two things, one that can praise the other, and not that it needs explaining or pointing, that's the point, it doesn't.

 

But still, language is a beautiful thing, isn't it? Aren't we here because we want to be, we want the fun of wordsmithing and sharing expressions and ideas and interacting? The way Rumi uses language so unobtrusively is an example of what art language can be, words are just different shades of color when we don't get identified with thoughts to the point of completely ignoring the emotional guidance of it. That's kind of the point of using language, when it aligns with emotions, or when we are listening to emotions and recognize how real time they respond to our thinking, there isn't that split between ideas and embodiment. The words themselves are innocent, but our belief in them is where the potential snafu is. To go into that further it's like what Esther Hicks teaches about feeling as if you already have what you want and it is. As I was saying earlier there is no fabric to reality, thoughts are not material yet they seem to create the idea of the materialist paradigm. In order to be separate you have to think of oneself as material, and that always gets into a lot of assumptions that perpetuate suffering or the ignoring of emotions. For example the fear of death, not liking one's appearance, thinking oneself to be not part of a group and unloved, etc, etc. 

 

No one is saying that using "I" for expression is wrong at all. I like apples. It's just the felt sense of separation ie suffering that we wish to see through. There's nothing wrong at all about it, no one to be wrong.