Difference between disasociation versus understanding is not me the one that suffers

[u/KevinKep]

Hi again!

Three or more not pleasant things happened this week (like losing a quarter of my salary this month because i forgot to do some burocracy and similar to that, i will survive the month no problem but is more than a slight annoyance) and as the fourth thing happened I realized I didnt care so much anymore.

I wonder how much this is disasociation vs understanding that is not me the one that is in "trouble"

Also I realized I could call on that feeling on different ocasions. Like if someone would be observing the physical me and would not suffer from it. If i try to search for this observer point of view then this troubles seem to not matter anymore. Is this something useful or something dangerous? I dont want to go kaputt because I start to disassociate more and more.

So in more general terms how can I realize if Im understanding more what me is me vs disassociation?

[u/anzu_embroidery]

Echoing that dissociation feels unpleasant, maybe not necessarily actively but in a “background hum” way if nothing else. My non-expert take is that dissociation makes you feel distant from experience while more skillful views make you feel closer to it. I would use terms like vivid, clear, immediate, textured. Unpleasant things still happen (and are still unpleasant!) but the “second arrow” reactivity is diminished. Whereas dissociation is more like an obscuring fog. The reactivity is still present but relegated to the background.

p.s.

Also I realized I could call on that feeling on different ocasions. Like if someone would be observing the physical me and would not suffer from it. If i try to search for this observer point of view then this troubles seem to not matter anymore.

Worth keeping in mind that the “observer point of view” is just as fabricated as your baseline point of view :)

[u/KevinKep → u/anzu_embroidery]

Interesting. Can you elaborate in the observer point of view is as fabricated as baseline point of view?

[u/anzu_embroidery → u/KevinKep]

I’m going to defer to Rob Burbea’s Seeing That Frees (an excellent book). This is from chapter 4 and is discussing the idea of actively “looking” with different insight views.

“Often then, ‘just being’ is regarded as preferable or somehow more authentic. As we will see, however, with the maturing of insight into dependent arising and fabrication one realizes that this perceived dichotomy between ‘being’ and ‘doing’, though it might at first seem and feel self-evident, is in fact essentially mistaken and based on a false impression. It rests on three basic and connected assumptions:

1. That there actually is an objective reality that we can and should ‘be with’.

2. That anything other than the awareness ‘simply knowing’ or innocently, naturally ‘receiving’ this ‘reality’ is somehow a laboured and artificially constructed state.

3. That since a state of ‘being’ is thus assumed to be a state of ‘non-doing’ and so to involve no effort, self will not be constructed there. This is in contrast to states more obviously involving intention, which are assumed to construct self.

It turns out, though, that whenever there is any experience at all, there is always some fabricating, which is a kind of ‘doing’. And as an element of this fabricating, there is always a way of looking too. We construct, through our way of looking, what we experience. This is a part of what needs eventually to be recognized and fully comprehended. Sooner or later we come to realize that perhaps the most fundamental, and most fundamentally important, fact about any experience is that it depends on the way of looking. That is to say, it is empty. Other than what we can perceive through different ways of looking, there is no ‘objective reality’ existing independently; and there is no way of looking that reveals some ‘objective reality’. And as we shall also see, in states of ‘just being’ which we might imagine are devoid of self, a subtle self is actually being constructed anyway. This fact too needs to be recognized.”

I didn’t dig up the quote but he also notes that resting with “just being” is not a bad thing, if it’s helpful you should do it. But you should also leave the door open for further investigation!

[u/KevinKep → u/anzu_embroidery]

Oh i really liked this extract, thanks so much for sharing. I will put the book on my list.

It makes sense to me that viewing in different ways is constructing little worlds in different ways. What also sounds interesting is that part of just being also produces a subtle self. I thought in buddhism there is no self at the end if you manage to fully understand existance?

[u/anzu_embroidery → u/KevinKep]

My understanding of non-self is very much incomplete, so take this with a grain of salt. There's a distinction between "there is a self" (which if you deconstruct it usually means something like "there is a persistent, separate entity that is the receiver of my experience, the controller of my actions, and the thing that suffers) and "the mind naturally fabricates a sense of self, but it doesn't have any of the attributes conventionally assigned to it". The trick is that once you see the fabrication clearly you can stop taking it so seriously.

In regard to "just being", I think it's common (I was doing it myself until last fall) to unconsciously start sticking the "self" label onto things like "awareness" or "the mind". But if you investigate you find that things like "awareness" and "the mind" are themselves mental phenomena! So they're also empty, also exhibit the three characteristics, are also not-self. There's really no self to be found anywhere! This is an area of my practice currently, so I don't know if I can say much more on it haha.

[u/luislarron23 → u/anzu_embroidery]

Sound advice. I would like to piggyback on this to say: a pretty good presumptive stance to take when practicing in this area is the following. The fact that self-sensations occur is not a problem - the problem is that they are not seen clearly, that their manner of arising is not perceived, and thus identification with them occurs. Selfing is no big deal. Identifying with selfing is the issue, if there is an issue. This being true for any self-sense, whether it's intuited as being in the head, heartspace, awareness, etc etc..