March 24, 2010
- Daniel Ingram on the Sense of a Separate Self -
Thus, when pleasant sensations arise, there is a constant, compassionate, deluded attempt to get over there to the other side of the imagined split. This is fundamental attraction. You would think that we would just stop imagining there is a split, but somehow that is not what happens. We keep perpetuating the sense of a split even as we try to bridge it, and so we suffer. When unpleasant sensations arise, there is an attempt to get away from over there, to widen the imagined split. This will never work, because it doesn’t actually exist, but the way we hold our minds as we try to get away from that side is painful. When boring or unpleasant sensations arise, there is the attempt to tune out all together and forget the whole thing, to try to pretend that the sensations on the other side of the split are not there. This is fundamental ignorance and it perpetuates the process, as it is by ignoring aspects of our sensate reality that the illusion of a split is created in the first place.
(running out of pictures of the guy…)
And tying this in with Gurdjieff, there can be no true “I” that is separate from reality. While we continue to allow ourselves to be split (by our search for “safety”) we can only be partial and so never whole. Only when we give up the partial “safety” of our “ability” to “separate” ourselves from reality within ourselves (which always happens within reality), only when we die to our “self” and become no-thing, no self, can we see that this is actually to be reborn as a true “I”.
All concepts are by definition limited, and we conceptualize our selves for the sake of our own “safety”. Define it, and you’ve already missed it. The name that can be named, is not the true name…
I AM is no self. No difference between the two, because there can’t be.
So much theorizing. Yet so little point to it all without practice. Still, our karmic wheels spin with the momentum of our past. Whats a poor blogger to do, but let the momentum manifest? I am certainly not working as hard at it as I used to, so that’s some consolation.
Comment by Ian — March 24, 2010 @ 4:38 pm
That comment is pretty much a post on its own… Consider it an Easter Egg for all you dedicated readers our there. :)
Now off to the gym to get back into the body.
Comment by Ian — March 24, 2010 @ 4:38 pm
One of the book’s central concepts is that as the human brain has grown, it has built upon earlier, more primitive brain structures, and that these are the “ghost in the machine” of the title. Koestler’s theory is that at times these structures can overpower higher logical functions, and are responsible for hate, anger and other such destructive impulses.
“The evolution of man is the evolution of his consciousness, and “consciousness” cannot evolve unconsciously. The evolution of man is the evolution of his will, and “will” cannot evolve involuntarily. The evolution of man is the evolution of his power of doing, and “doing” cannot be the result of things which “happen.”
Comment by Ian — March 24, 2010 @ 7:57 pm