Hi rinkjustice,

Welcome to the forum, I just have one question why would you want to abandon ones self?

If you want to help with emotions learn the chakras or energy centres this is the connection with the brain and the nervous system which expresses emotion though nervousness, which will help stabilise emotion.

Brett.

I'll take your advice into consideration Brett. Thanks.

Why do I want to abandon my self? Two reasons: 1) when we are a self, we separate ourselves from God and the universe. 2) fear and depression needs to be identified with something, someone, to exist. No self, no fear or suffering. A tall order considering I don't even like eating mushy brown bananas.

My work is cut out for me.

Before you try abandoning the self - you should consider the following :

How can you abandon the self using the self? In other words youre driving a car and you keep driving it and youre thinking "someday the car will stop.."

If you want to abandon the self, then no more supports. No more beliefs,meditation,hope,concepts etc but thats a suicide.. hmm? and noone is ready to commit "suicide"... if you really want to abandon the self then allow "suicide" to happen to the self.

You see many people go on fooling themselves, they say "im in surrender" or "i have committed suicide", when youre in surrender you dont even say to yourself that youre in surrender because now you have forgotten all about it and it becomes a natural way of living. The masters call it surrender, its suicide not surrender, you grab the knife and cut all concepts,hopes,beliefs.. its difficult to just do it its why people go on meditating to build up the courage to commit suicide or to realize that there meditation and methods and beliefs and concepts are a hell and when they realize its a hell, suddenly everything drop on its own.
Surrender happens on its own, you cant force it, so you practice meditation and see that your beliefs, concepts etc are a hell, you see it for yourself, me saying it - is useless and pointless. Your self depends on everything everyone has told you, so if you gather enough courage to trust yourself and to send everyone to hell (including me and yes even buddha) then thats it, no more is needed.

I like how you call it "suicide" Curt. Yes, it is suicide, suicide by deconstruction. Exposing the fact is never existed. It's just a story.

And you are right. I can't force it. I only need to stop creating and retelling the story. No story, no self.

Earlier this year I hated life. I loathed existence. It was exhausting to me at a molecular level. I was very conscious and deep in suffering. So I renewed my commitment to insight meditation and began studying Buddha and his suttas. What is different this time around is I am doing sit-down meditations and focusing the mind. This has allowed me to stay present longer, without my mind telling stories. The self isn't there. I realize it never was. It was just a mesh of emotions and experiences I strung together into a narrative.

Suicide is the right word.

The self is imaginary. It is needed the ego is needed, those fools who tell you to drop the ego dont know what theyre talking about. First you think that the self is in the body and mind mechanism but it isnt, the ego is the shadow of the body and mind mechanism which is needed, i am not against the ego at all, i am against thinking and being attached to the ego which is nothing but a shadow.

Then you realize that the ego is imaginary but its a good tool to function in society. Thats what i call "first understanding", then theres the "second understanding" which is realizing the answer that lies in the absence of your ego.... hmm? In that thoughtless state lies the answer.. its simple really... all you need is to lose hope in your ego... and ill tell you there is no hope, hope is another illusion, the biggest one invented.

So now, if you dont "exist" you need to find that which is supporting you, and that is where the question "who am i" becomes relevant, so you use that question... and remember all words are false answers...

Our spirits are supporting us, but the answer of my identity is not important. The quality of now is important. My conduct and skillfulness in this life are important.

But again, I agree with everything you've said Curt. I've encountered it on my own path, but there is no doubt you are farther along the path than I am.

EDIT: On revision, there is one discrepancy. That is about hope. I define hope as being optimistic about the future. Hope is not an illusion. It's more like internal navigation that points me in the right direction down the noble eightfold path. It is right thinking.

I will comment about hope. Hope is the only support you have. The ego is divided into different alterations : The main one is the memory part. The memory gives you the past which gives the ego, and from that past - desire is projected into the future. The desire of the future arises because in your past you were not fullfilled and now you want to be fullfilled. This part of the ego is sustained through hope. Hope is the only thing that keeps the desire into the future arising and i tell you if you hope that the so-called noble eightfold path is going to in some way or another lead you into some paradise - you are wrong the so called self-realized and the not self-realized are the same, the only difference is in hope.

The second division of the ego, is in the intellect, right now an ego is being used for my intellect to stick bits and pieces from my memory and form them into an "original" sentence which is not original at all since all knowledge i am spitting out right now is from my memory and my memory got them from someone else. That is why "self-realization" cannot be said into words because it is your own self-knowledge. This ego is much more subtle then the first, and the person trys to go beyond his intellect, because in a way his intellect is a hell, but the person uses the intellect to clear doubts from other people who have gained much confusion from all masters.

The third division of the ego, is in the body but this connection is very fragile since we are more identified with the mind structure then the body structure.

For now, your identity is not important (so dont use who am i), the reason it isnt important to you is because you still hope that other people can help you. You still think that somewhere in the world there is some hope in which you can be a better person and overcome your problems or whatever it is. Hope is much more dangerous then desire, very dangerous because hope is what keeps the ego alive and therefore they consider hope a good thing, because they know they are living on hope.
You see with desire, you can alter desire, you can desire a woman then money then God then enlightenment etc, but with hope its a single hit, one stroke and youre finished, youre done, youre dead. If you hope that with "self-realization" you would become a new person, no youre wrong you will be the same person as you were.

The last thing, you mention that there is a path. There is no path. You are already that which is, so can there be a path? The only reason they give you paths is so that you get so bored and fed up with it, that the effort is dropped and when the effort is dropped, hope and desire drop simultaneously. EVERYONE comes into meditation thinking that with meditation you are going to achieve something. No, you arent going to achieve anything, you will only achieve something of body and mind(which is worthless).
"Self-realization" is simple, but you do not want that, you want yourself to survive and at the same "self-realize" it doesnt work that way. This isnt an ego trip, with "self-realization" you cannot feel its an achievement, the only reason im talking about it is because to tell people that it cannot give you what you are hoping for. The stupid masters have been describing strange spiritual experiences and always being joyful etc, thats just bull sh**. This CANNOT in any way give you what you are hoping for, its why i say that hope is the biggest poison that exists, because hope creates very beautiful illusions and an illusion is an illusion it doesnt exist.

We are just this. Thats all there is to it. Now you can either accept it or you can stay in meditation hoping that something is going to happen, NOTHING is going to happen. Spiritual experiences dont mean anything, spiritual experiences mean sh** to me. Your choice, i cannot make it more clear cut then this, and no master or guru or idiot will make it any clearer because if they make it clear then there followers will "self-realize" that very day and the function of a master is reduced to a function of a cleaner. Really, a cleaner has achieved more then a so-called master but they want to appear as if they have found special... indirectly of course theyre not gonna say it directly.

All i can tell you is, go to a master, there is one called osho rajneesh (the living one) he would interest you because he says he has undergone four samadhis (whatever the hell they are) and speaks in very mystical terminology. Then come back and post on the forum saying "i did not get anything", or maybe hope that you might be special and get lucky with him...

Hi guys, who hasn't done yet, make sure to watch Karl Renz and Tony Parsons on Youtube, where they deliver message about Advaita in a most radical way. Something to "think" about.

Curt, I see many meditators and Buddhists, much more experienced than I, get caught in what Buddha calls a "thicket of views". Too much thinking.

I'm not going to get caught up in semantics. They are just words. Signposts to meanings. Crude tools. Imprecise at best.

Who we are and who we become depend wholely and completely on how we interface with this very instance. It's as simple as that. Be the Buddha, now.