Annata

Just wanted throw this out there in the spirit of inquiry and because there's a lot of collective wisdom on this site. In this community and in the Theravadan tradition, the main thrust of practice seems to be the seeing through of what we refer to as self and the contraction that comes with this mental representation. While it is obvious that the self as a permanent, unmoving entity is empty, there is undeniably what might be called private experience. I wake up each day with the same body (more or less), the same memories, the same preferences and the experience that I am having right now is not the experience that you are having. I've never woken up as someone else and we are not all thinking the same things at the same time. So, if we say no-self or not-self, why the sense of private experience. My own thought is that they are both useful aspects of the knowable and utterly mysterious nature of reality, but I am curious to hear the opinion of others.

not a permanent fixed separate entity... so like a wave, a vibration, a flow, interconnected with all the other interconnected waves.

nothing to do with disappearing into a void.

ever see the rapids on a river? there they are, 'in the same place' but constantly manifesting out of the passing flow of water and air. not a fixed thing. shifting and changing with the rain and wind and sun, but still 'there' such that you can tell your friend 'meet me down at the rapids for a picnic'.

that's how i understand that teaching.

"not a permanent fixed separate entity... so like a wave, a vibration, a flow, interconnected with all the other interconnected waves.

nothing to do with disappearing into a void.

ever see the rapids on a river? there they are, 'in the same place' but constantly manifesting out of the passing flow of water and air. not a fixed thing. shifting and changing with the rain and wind and sun, but still 'there' such that you can tell your friend 'meet me down at the rapids for a picnic'.

that's how i understand that teaching."

NICE !

"So, if we say no-self or not-self, why the sense of private experience."

I think we tend to make this a mystery but I don't think it is, really. We sometimes buy in to the version of things called "no self" that's not accurate. My perspective (no pun intended) is that all of the elements that combine to make our perceptions and experience, our senses and our sensory processing power, are located together in close proximity. That generates a pretty automatic sense of place - stuff appears to happen "here." Sounds, sights, feelings, taste, everything but thoughts, appear to coalesce in the space around our body. Once the sense of place is present there follows a sense of "me" as a separate entity, distinct from all that "other" stuff out there that seems not to be "me." It's an over-simplification to say that there is "no self." I like "not-self" because that better represents the more poetic version posted here earlier by giragirasol, which I agree is NICE. There is something to the sense that there is a self, but it is not permanent and it is not what I tend to believe is "me."

And yes, this post is probably overly analytical

I wrote about this for BG a while back:
www.buddhistgeeks.com/2011/05/psychological-self-vs-no-self/

The gist of it is exactly what giragirsol is saying so succinctly. The self is "real" in one's private experience as a psychological mechanism for organizing phenomena into a coherent story. But it is no more real than a memory or a fantasy. It is mind-made, unstable and constantly changing.

It isn't that there isn't a self at all, but rather that its nature is the opposite of what "I" assume it is.

Awesome stuff, guys! I am happy to learn from you all.

Instead of viewing "no self" as somehow special, we can look at everything as "no <name>". "Coffee table", "wall", "tree", "Justin" are all concepts and labels.

So, instead of viewing it as uniquely odd that you wake up each morning in the same body. It is just as odd that you wake up in the same solid feeling bed, in the same solid looking room. Every pattern that the mind is constantly exposed to is habitually labeled and made solid.

"No self" is only treated specially because it is the sense of the subject/observer that causes suffering and it seems that most people around these parts like to get rid of that suffering.

Also, the illusory nature of these objects/concepts is simply a View. The pragmatic purpose of that view is to decondition the mind from operating purely at the conceptual level and to engage real life more fully at the experiential level.

Whether or not these objects actually exist through some thing we call "time", we can not possibly know either way. So, pragmatically speaking, it is perhaps best to say that chairs and selves both do not exist and do exist.

Yep, we have the dualities and the non-dualities, all wrapped up in the same existence!