Processes of Selfing

Recent discussion on Dependent Origination inspired me to try to learn more about the processes of selfing itself. What sensations cause the illusion of selfing to happen and reinforce it? What exactly are the phenomena that make us infer the existence of self? How Becoming is concretely manifested in the body and mind?

I have focused just on the Becoming part of the Dependent Origination and trying to see it as clearly as possible, although my understanding of the DO is very incomplete. I hope others will correct my mistakes and help to complete the picture. This is what I have observed so far:

* Self contraction or localized sense of tension at the third eye region that occurs when a thought that is referencing to self arises. It makes the mental space contract momentarily and the sensation strengthens the feeling of being located inside one' head head.

* Bouncing of the attention rapidly between the object and the supposed subject creates a feeling that everything is seen and experienced from one point somewhere behind the eyeballs. If one directs the attention to any one sensation in the body and tries to keep it there, it will not stay put but will flip very fast back and forth between the sensation and the area in the head so fast (10-20 times a second) that it takes some steady vipassana practice to see it happen.

This bouncing creates a feeling of duality between the object and the subject and the object is seen through a vibrating filter that is preventing clear seeing. To compare this with pure and unobstructed seeing one may will a fruition or Nirodha Samapatti and see how the seeing is changes when the afterglow fades away.

This flickering of the attention seems to give rise to the sense of location or feeling of inhabiting the limited space of the body.

(Cont.)

* Narrative thoughts
Self is constantly being reinforced by continuous narrative of remembering the past and anticipating what will happen and this way creating personal history and future. The stories that our narrative mind is spinning are always related to self. Also our various identities are strengthened by comparing and criticizing thoughts: 'I am much better parent than my own dad' or 'I will never be a good dancer'.

* Creating Stories
Mind has a tendency to create stories from separate disconnected images. When a couple of short-lived mental images pop up in the mind, it starts to connect them with more images to create a whole story. Every mental image in the brain is connected to many others that will automatically follow in a sequence of free association. Even when the mind is completely silent, there seem to remain this faint undercurrent of neural activity that is bringing up single mental images every now and all of them may potentially turn into a story if proper mindfulness is not in place.

"If one directs the attention to any one sensation in the body and tries to keep it there, it will not stay put but will flip very fast back and forth between the sensation and the area in the head so fast (10-20 times a second) that it takes some steady vipassana practice to see it happen."

What if you merely observe this point in your head? What does attention do?

"What if you merely observe this point in your head? What does attention do?
- EndInSight"

The vibration / tension gets stronger and it is released. The bounce is gone until the next time, although I can turn it on if I want.

Is attention doing anything when it isn't being diverted from the place on your body that it's trying to go?

(On a side note, I found the practice of observing and releasing these areas, as you describe, to be very helpful...still do.)

The middle of the head "sense of self" that is chased after with "Who Am I?" and then merged with to experience the No Dog Witness was originally by far my strongest sense of self. I would posit that for non-meditators, this is the dominant version and gives huge bang for the buck when seen through.

"Is attention doing anything when it isn't being diverted from the place on your body that it's trying to go?
- EndInSight"

When the mind is stable, it engulfs the object completely. The division between the observer and the object is nowhere to be found. Filled to the brim by the sensation and its feeling tone.

"The middle of the head "sense of self" that is chased after with "Who Am I?" and then merged with to experience the No Dog Witness was originally by far my strongest sense of self. I would posit that for non-meditators, this is the dominant version and gives huge bang for the buck when seen through.
- Orasis"

It seems to me that the sense of self is basically felt as a physical tension in different parts of the body (for me mainly in the head). Emotional states and meditative mind states contract and expand this tension and seeing clearly these patterns of tensing makes the mind drop the painful habits as one progress through the stages of awakening.

At the later stages of the development, the bodily tension or contraction may no longer be felt, but the closer examination of the attention itself reveals more and more subtle layers of tension in the mind. The more there is tension and fluctuation present, the more synapses fire in the brain causing mental images arise even in a state of complete relaxation. These images and proto thoughts automatically cause other thoughts connected to them in the neural network to be born. Even if complete stories are not formed out of the images anymore, there is still a kind of restless fluctuation going on in the background. So it could be said that one way to measure the development is to have a look at the amount of unwanted mental activity happening in the mind. One can relieve the areas of mental tension by directing the attention to them, watching them really closely and applying the principles of Direct Mode practice or rapid noting.

Also these subtle tensions / vibrations of the attention may still give rise to a faint sense of duality or location, creating an illusion of separateness. All these boundaries disappear when this mental resistance is dropped.

I have come to the following conclusion from my investigation on the process Selfing:

1. Duality arises from the fluctuations of the mind. As Patanjali defined yoga in his sutras 2nd 'YogaÅ› citta-vritti-nirodhaḥ' Yoga is the cessation of the mind's modifications'

2. These fluctuations are experiences as emotions, mind states, moods and narrative thinking. At the deepest level these modifications can be observed as a fast oscillation of the mind between the object and the subject.

3. One can make this process stop by directly observing this oscillation. When seen clearly it drops away and the mind rests in a state of non-duality that was described by Huineng:

Since all is void,
Where can the dust alight?

This is wunien, a mind that cannot be obscured by any dust of thought. It is not a mind unable to function, but a mind that is free from discursive thinking.

[Edited for clarity]

Oscillation seems to assume that we can only experience one phenomena at a time. Perhaps this is mistaken and we really do experience a large amount simultaneously.

Here's another one:

The dust is the mirror

"Oscillation seems to assume that we can only experience one phenomena at a time.
- Orasis"

This has been my experience so far: the sensations appear one by one in a row and they are 'feed' to the imaginary location of the Self creating the illusion of a separate observer.

"This has been my experience so far: the sensations appear one by one in a row and they are 'feed' to the imaginary location of the Self creating the illusion of a separate observer.
"


This is also my experience. The sense of being is not the feeling of our separate existence, but only the flavor of phenomena as they come into being (we could call it their self-luminous or self-aware nature).

If we stop the process of co-dependent origination at the level of sense contact, the 6 senses remain six separate yet interdependent streams of experience, pretty much like the image track and the sound track of a movie that, interacting together, create the illusion of reality. If we allow grasping to take hold, these streams create the perfect illusion of separate self locked into a material body interacting with a world of solid objects. Better than Hollywood!

When we say "I" can only experience one thing at a time it is the fictional unitary "self" of which that is true. But the brain, operating at multiple levels and in parallel, is doing a lot of things all at once - but "I" am noty privy to all of that. "I" (here I agree completely with Alex and Antero), can only experience one thing at a time, albeit that those things may appear to happen in parallel because they are happening/oscillating so fast.

In my experience, this "one thing at a time" business refers to focal attention. The more narrow the focus, the more literally this is true; the broader and more panoramic the focus, the more parallel processes are simultaneously apparent. In other words, attention can only focus on one "object" at a time, but depending on the size and shape of the focal aperture, that "object" can be literally anything.

The experience of a sequence of moments with beginnings and ends is an artifact of this process of focally attending, but focal attention is not the be all and end all of consciousness, awareness, experience, or whatever you want to call it.

And, yes, there seems to be a way that focal attention can shift rapidly between say an external object and body sensations and mental images such that an illusion of a substantial subject watching a substantial object is generated like a movie or a whirling firebrand.

There seems to be a neural correlate to this distinction in that there are two attentional systems, one bottom-up (self organizing sensations) and one top down (deliberate attention which seeks patterns in bottom up attention via representation, i.e., bringing the past impressions to bear on present sensate flow). There's a cool BG interview with James Austin, the Zen practitioner and neuroscientist, which talks about these mechanisms in relation to kensho (awakening experiences).

My experience lines up more with what jhs is saying - I am not ruling out one-thing-at-a-time since you guys have deeper insight than I but I am also not soundly convinced

"My experience lines up more with what jhs is saying - I am not ruling out one-thing-at-a-time since you guys have deeper insight than I but I am also not soundly convinced"

This also may be a both/and, not an either or....
-Jake

Zen Master Huang Po:
25. The term unity refers to a homogeneous spiritual brilliance which separates into six harmoniously blended 'elements'. The homogeneous spiritual brilliance is the One Mind, while the six harmoniously blended 'elements' are the six sense organs. These six sense organs beome severally united with objects that defile them -- the eyes with form, the ear with sound, the nose with smell, the tongue with taste, the body with touch, and the thinking mind with entities. Between these organs and their objects arise the six sensory perceptions, making eighteen sense-realms in all. If you understand that these eighteen realms have no objective existence, you will bind the six harmoniously blended 'elements' into a single spiritual brilliance -- a single spiritual brilliance which is the One Mind. All students of the way know this, but they cannot avoid forming concepts of 'a single spiritual brilliance' and 'the six harmoniously blended elements'. Accordingly they are chained to entities and fail to achieve a tacit understanding of original Mind.

@Jake
Thanks Jake for pointing out that BG interview, I had somehow missed it. After listening to the podcast, I would say that Austin's definitions of egocentric attention describes very well shamatha type of concentrated mind states and allocentric vipassana/3rd gear type of choice-less awareness.

Are we actually by meditation practice gradually making allocentric attention our default modes? I am not sure if allocentric attention is by definition without sense of self, IMHO that was not made clear in the interview. If that is the case, in a state of complete no-self the receptive and choice-less allocentric attention would be alone in charge and that would explain why advanced practitioners report lack of absorption quality of shamatha jhanas.

Perhaps the gradual fading out and disappearing of the oscillation of the attention that I have been investigating is actually dropping away of the egocentric mode of attention and making that the default mode is one of the changes that can happen at the later stages in this practice.

@Orasis
In state the choice-less awareness the focus is certainly different from egocentric attention, but would you say that the input is processed differently and not one at the time? How one would even know that, since focused observing of that processing would presumably call for egocentric attention?

"Are we actually by meditation practice gradually making allocentric attention our default modes?"

By allocentric, I understand broad, spacious and unfocused. When a deep insight leads to a permanent change of our state, the attention is still free to move here and there. If it were not the case, an arhat wouldn't be able to read these lines, focusing on small characters.

The attention can therefore still be focused, or unfocused. What changes is not the focus of attention, but only the sense of self that becomes less and less identified with the body, the mind, or even with pristine awareness, until it completely vanishes.

When the latter event eventually takes place as the result of a deep insight into the emptiness of self, the inability to get absorbed in a jhana seems to be more related to the fact that, without a sense of self, no one is there to can get identified to, or absorbed in, a refined state of consciousness (jhana). Isn't it the case?

"If it were not the case, an arhat wouldn't be able to read these lines, focusing on small characters.

"

Whatever is hitting the middle of the eye tends to be in focus (regardless of mode).

"Whatever is hitting the middle of the eye tends to be in focus (regardless of mode)."

Yes. Some of what we experience is anatomically based and there's just no getting around that, not matter where we are on the path.

These pointing out instructions might form a good practice for someone looking into these modes of attention and their relation to each-other:

awakeningtoreality.blogspot.com/2008/11/...rifying-natural.html

I had a discussion recently with EndInSight that is relevant to this topic and I think some other yogis might find it interesting too, so I will post parts of it in this thread.

EndInSight:

"What does your skin feel like?

I expect you will say that there are two modes of perception in which your skin is experienced; one (no-self) in which it's pleasant and boundaryless, and another (with attention bounce) in which it's "tingly".

When you notice attention bouncing in a strong way, the perception of "strong bouncing" probably concerns two things (this is how it is in my experience): 1) a perception of comparatively strong tension in the area that attention is bouncing to, and 2) the mind lingering on the area that attention is bouncing to for a comparatively long time.

It seems that you have stated that, when there is a perception of strong bouncing, there is a tendency for the mind to linger on dualistic phenomena other than the area in which the tension is clearly felt...to linger on dualistic thinking / imagining / etc.

So, similarly, I would expect that you would notice a tendency for the mind to linger on the perception of "tingly" skin for a longer time when the perception of bouncing is strong, even if attention isn't bouncing to the part of the skin that you're looking at...as the "tingly" perception is, to me, is just another dualistic experience, analogous to thinking / imagining / etc.

(I take the perception of a distinct area that attention is bouncing to, to be a macrocosm of what is going on at other areas of the body, albeit easier to see. So the strength of the bounce, and the mind's lingering on those areas longer, indicates that the mind will do the same thing when directed to other areas. You have noticed that with thinking, so I'm interested in whether you can confirm it generally.)"

(Cont.)