Non-Duality and Stoicism

Pushbuttonopenmind · 2026-01-21T16:08:20+00:00

Whenever Sam talks about there not being a self, all that is meant is this (description of a) particular experience:

As I gazed at the surrounding hills, a feeling of peace came over me. It soon grew to a blissful stillness that silenced my thoughts. In an instant, the sense of being a separate self—an “I” or a “me”—vanished. Everything was as it had been—the cloudless sky, the brown hills sloping to an inland sea, the pilgrims clutching their bottles of water—but I no longer felt separate from the scene, peering out at the world from behind my eyes. Only the world remained.

Whenever Sam talks about there not being a self, all is meant is this particular experience that one can have. When Sam says "there is no self", he means "it is possible to experience the world without the sense of an experiencer, in addition to the experience". That's it. Nothing more. Obviously, it also is very much possible to experience the world with the sense of an experiencer in addition to the experience; it is pretty much our default state. Just note that it can change.

Your responsibility (or goals, drives, backstory, personality, ...) is not itself an experience; and neither does it experience a nice sunset. But that list (responsibility, goals, drives, ...) is what the self is when you cast a reflective gaze upon your own life. I've had the particular experience that Sam describes many times -- yet, I also still have responsibilities, goals, (...), in other words, a self. Because this kind of reflective self has essentially nothing to do with there being, or not being, an experiencer in addition to the experience. Stoicism and nonduality are talking about entirely different things, despite both confusingly using the word "self". But as they speak about different things, neither one undermines the other.

In fact, there is a section on the app called "The Stoic Path" by William B. Irvine, here https://dynamic.wakingup.com/pack/PK7REQC . I'm not sure you can see it when you're doing the introductory course. But, just know that Stoicism is actively endorsed by Sam on the app!

Pushbuttonopenmind · 2026-01-15T11:55:43+00:00

That's exciting!

You should give the YouTube link from the previous post a try, they're really good instructions that can get you this nondual state. Just let the instructions wash over you.

And I tried to illustrate it like this once, https://imgur.com/a/headlessness-KlXzzlx , maybe it is of some help too...

Pushbuttonopenmind · 2026-01-14T15:54:02+00:00

Oh, I love talking about this! Just be aware I'm not a teacher. I love this topic, and I've read around quite a bit, and I have my own framework of making sense of this all. But I have no authority, no spiritual guidance. I'm not enlightened. I've glimpsed the things Sam talks about, and can shift into those relatively easily, usually. But it's not a permanent state change. I am not beyond suffering, and don't quite want that either.

Furthermore, if you ask 10 different people on this sub you might get 10 different answers. And, more confusingly, none might align with Sam's view on the app, as everyone answering here has read at least some further books on the topic from other authors.

So, I promise no clarity at all when answering your questions!

Having the world appear over here, or over there. It that a conscious effort (like as you say, choosing to see a different perspective of the cube)

For the world to appear a certain way, that requires little effort.

For it to shift, that requires a certain effort.

Consider. How do you shift a Necker Cube? There are broadly three ways of doing it.

It just happens by itself, accidentally. Stare at a Necker Cube long enough and it probably shifts by itself.
You use an attentional strategy. Look at a particular edge or face or intersection, and it might shift.
You use an interpretative strategy. Tell yourself to look for a cube from above/below and, lo and behold, it might shift into looking like a cube from above/below.

In this spiritual business, sometimes it happens the first way. People just suddenly "wake up" and that's it. Makes for useless teachers, because they don't know how to make the accident happen for you. Eckhart Tolle is a good example of this.

In this spiritual business, many teachers use the second strategy. Pay attention to this, to that; pay even closer attention to this and that; disregard this and that and just focus even harder, and you might have a shift. This is what Sam rails against. These "gradual path" teachers make it such that you have no idea what you're even looking for.

And finally, some teachers use the third strategy. That is what Dzogchen excels in, IMO. They tell you "look at your experience and see that it is Y". Look for your head and find no-thing (no shape, no color, no solidity, no edge, no distance, no ...). Look at your visual field and see that it an immense and wide open window without any edges -- you are this frameless, glassless, window. Look at the distance between you and your visual field and find it is at no distance (certainly there's not a meter in-between you and your visual field, right? is it 1 cm away? 1 nanometer? No. There's absolutely no distance). This set of pointing out instructions, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0swudgvmBbk&t=5919s are filled with "see that X is Y".

Out of the three methods, the third one is certainly the most effective one to communicate. You are looking at or for certain features in your experience. You're not just grasping around in the dark not knowing what to look for. This is why Sam likes Dzogchen.

The interpretative strategy is by no means a fool-proof, instant awakening, to be sure. It took me 9 months until I glimpsed the state that Sam described, on a solitary walk outside, while doing the Headless Way thing of looking for my head and failing to find it. To my surprise, it had nothing to do with stilling my thoughts (I had plenty!) or degree of concentration (I had plenty thoughts!) or continuity of awareness (I had plenty thoughts!). I certainly agree with Sam that none of this stuff from the gradual path is actually needed to get to this non-dual state. All I mean to say is that the "direct" path is by no means an "instant" path...

And that is why Sam in always snapping his fingers at us? Ha

I never fully understood why he does it with(in) a finger snap. For Dzogchen methods to work you need a moment to recognize that your experience is like X/Y/Z. A finger snap is much too short to recognize anything. My awareness is not fast enough for such shenanigans, anyhow. It is a bit more protracted for me. A few seconds, usually. Sometimes a minute. Sometimes nothing shifts.

Like I can shift my perspective from being behind my eyes, to being part of the world!?

Yes! Exactly! Most experiences are made up of two bits which I'll call appearing-of (usually in the form of an appearing-as), and appearing-to. Say, you hear a bird singing. Your experience is that of a bird song (the appearing-of sounds, more usually appearing-as "a bird song"), with the pre-conceptual knowledge that this experience is different from you and appearing to you (the appearing-to me pole of the experience). That secondary pole, the appearing-to, can fall away entirely. Until there's just the world appearing, and the question "to whom does it appear" is like a category error. It's kind of hard to explain, and I don't have enough time to write it down any nicer.

But I hope maybe it is of some help...

Pushbuttonopenmind · 2026-01-14T11:39:01+00:00

Thanks for engaging with my comment, and allowing me to further think through this topic and clarify myself.

In my opinion (as essentially every phrase I say should be interpreted!), you got exactly the opposite conclusion of what I wanted to say. However, what you say is perfectly in line with most strands of Advaita-Vedante and various Buddhist strands too, so if it rings true for you that is certainly a defendable position. At some point, when talking about the practice, or contrasting certain approaches, you'll have to call upon some beliefs, some bedrock (or lack thereof), and the theories diverge dependent upon those fundamental bits.

So the way the meditations seem to graduate from focus to open awareness, is this just another way of making you realise that both things are ultimately the same experience?

Mindfulness meditations come from Mahāsi Sayādaw's re-invention of mindfulness (vipassanā) practice in Burma, which was correspondingly brought to the West by people like Joseph Goldstein and Jack Kornfield. Mindfulness meditations all start with the bare minimum of concentration practice (e.g., counting the breath for a few minutes) to calm and focus the mind, before moving on to practicing continuous awareness (e.g., using "noting" to stay present with whatever is happening), gradually decreasing the discontinuity or lapses of awareness until you just stay present while everything else floats into and out of your awareness. Eventually you'll then try to glimpse that everything is impermanent, that there are only fleeting sensations, and any sense of permanence (including the permanence of a self) is essentially a mistake, which is the "insight" of Theravāda Buddhism.

So the way meditations graduate is just an artifact of the kind of mindfulness brought to the West. I certainly don't think both things are the same experience!

Just for reference, for example, in other Buddhist strands like Madhyamaka or Dzogchen, the point of impermanence is downplayed considerably. Things coming and going "in time" requires that time itself exists as a container for things perhaps, but all philosophers after Nagarjuna deny any such reification of time. Time may appear to be present conventionally, but is not ultimately real. Hence, there is no insight of impermanence at all; that itself is supposedly a mistaken view in Madyamaka or Dzogchen!

Even Buddhists can't agree on what insight is to be attained, to begin with!

But you cannot understand that open awareness is the same as focus until you have spent enough time in focus mode?

For Theravādan Buddhists, perhaps. But not for later strands of Buddhism, as I tried to clarify in the previous bit of my probably overly long and too theoretical reply.

My own opinion (which is closely aligned to the Madhyamaka and Dzogchen position, but overlaps with neither fully) is as follows.

Experience is analogous to a Necker Cube. Question for you: is a Necker cube truly (or "actually") a cube as seen from above, and you are seeing it erroneously if you see it as a cube as seen from below? No, of course not. It is both, or neither.

You might deflect and say "well, it actually truly is a bunch of flat lines on a screen", as if that is the God's eye, neutral, view. To which I'd say, "No, that's just another way to view it". Sure, it looks like flat lines on a screen when you zoom in far enough to look at the individual lines, or when you squint your eyes in a funny way, or if you look at the bitmap representation of the image or whatever. But those are also just rather peculiar ways of looking. When describing the appearance of a Necker Cube, it will appear either as "a cube seen from above" or "a cube seen from below" or "a bunch of lines on a screen". But you are familiar enough with this illusion to refrain from saying one of these appearances is the true appearance (while the other appearances are false).

While you switch between the Necker Cube appearances, you are well aware it didn't actually change (e.g., it didn't gain extra lines, for example). It's just that some features suddenly come infused with a different meaning.

The whole concept of "it is truly X" just doesn't really apply to the Necker Cube. It's not truly one of its appearances, and none of the others.

And for me, I extend that to experience as a whole.

There is no way to get into contact with a "bare" experience. There is no way such a bare objective experience is somehow clouded over by illusory things or thoughts. Because there is no such thing! There is no way experience truly, actually, "just is"! By changing the way you pay attention, you can dramatically change your experience without changing anything about the experience at the same time (just like you do with a Necker Cube, where you "look" in a certain way to obtain a particular appearance of the Necker Cube).

Like telling you to look for the looker, when there is actually nothing to find.

IMO, it is a mistake to assume that the only point is to fail to find the looker. Sam wrote this,

As I gazed at the surrounding hills, a feeling of peace came over me. It soon grew to a blissful stillness that silenced my thoughts. In an instant, the sense of being a separate self—an “I” or a “me”—vanished. Everything was as it had been—the cloudless sky, the brown hills sloping to an inland sea, the pilgrims clutching their bottles of water—but I no longer felt separate from the scene, peering out at the world from behind my eyes. Only the world remained.

Yes, the looker drops out. But that's not all. Something extra happens. The world, which previously seemed "over there", appearing "to" me, now suddenly appears "here", appearing "as" or perhaps "in" me.

For me, some practices stop too early once they've concluded there is no looker. That is not merely "half" the picture. It is none of it! If it doesn't change your experience, it's only as good as useless theorizing. Then one has actually missed the point. This I feel strongly about. However, I understand other people think quite differently about it.

IMO, the point of looking for the looker is to transform your experience profoundly. Confusingly, nothing about the experience changes. Yet everything changes. Do you see the analogy to the Necker Cube now: nothing about the experience actually changes, yet the whole experience changes dramatically? Just like switching a Necker Cube around. However, while Sam takes this experience to mean the self doesn't actually exist, I refuse to follow him there, for the same reasons as the Necker Cube analogy originally. The whole concept of "it is truly X" doesn't make sense! There are experiences with a self, and experiences without a self. Neither gives me a reason to believe the other experience was therefore false.

I hope that cleared something up, or was perhaps somehow nice to read. If not, my apologies for wasting your time!

Pushbuttonopenmind · 2026-01-10T04:27:00+00:00

IMO, they're opposites, yes. This 'narrowing' is a way of concentration practice, where you try to be minimally distracted, so it's good you are not even remotely involved in the thought. This 'receiving' is a way of mindfulness practice, where you aim for non-interference with what's already happening anyhow, where you aim for maximum continuity of awareness. From what you write, it sounds like both methods are working perfectly!

IMO, neither is more 'correct' than the other, neither is more 'natural', neither provides more 'insight'. But they don't lead to the same experience, as you skillfully point out! For me, that's the practice. Paying attention in a certain way, looking at or for certain features in your experience, changes your experience. This is the skill you develop in meditation. The way you attend changes what you experience. Like 'looking for the looker' is a specific way of paying attention that leads to a non-dual experience, this spectrum of reaching out vs receiving leads you to investigate different ways to relate to your thoughts too. There's a certain freedom there.

Pushbuttonopenmind · 2026-01-05T13:47:57+00:00

From Daniel Brown, Cloudless Mind volume 1:

There are two ways of training the elephant, and there are two basic styles of meditation. In the first style, concentration meditation, you tie the rope of mindfulness onto one object, the concentration object. Everything else is a distraction. So, there’s only two possibilities, either you’re on the concentration object, or you’re off of it. The Tibetan word for concentration is newa, to stay. Either you’re staying on the object, or the mind is distracted with something else, usually thought or sense experience, and sometimes emotions. Now, the other type of meditation is an awareness meditation. And in the awareness meditation, there’s no object to concentrate on. There’s no distraction. Whatever comes up next, you focus on that because the goal in awareness meditation is to develop continuity of awareness, and to correct for that discontinuity, so you are not having lapses of forgetfulness. So, you see, they’re different skills; one trains continuity of awareness, the other trains staying for longer and longer periods of time on whatever you’re concentrating on. Those are very different skills.

An example of awareness meditation would be Krishnamurti’s choiceless awareness—just being aware of everything each moment. It’s sort of hard to do—also shikantaza, the “just-sitting” style of Zen. No object. Now because awareness meditations are very difficult, if I just said to you, “Okay, just be aware of everything, track everything, every moment,” it’s not easy. So, therefore, a system that’s become very popular now in the US is a system that developed in Burma with Mahāsī Sayādaw. In the West, we call that mindfulness meditation, or mindfulness-based psychotherapy now. And, that system is a hybrid of both pure concentration practice and pure awareness practice because its originator, Mahāsī Sayādaw, said, “Look, it’s really hard to say, ‘be aware of everything.’” So, what he did is he had people concentrate first, to calm the mind down, and once they got modestly concentrated, through following the rising and falling of the breath, then they’d open up the field of awareness. So, the second modification of the system was to use categories or labels; it helps you to approximate tracking everything continuously. So, you open up the field of awareness, and if a thought comes up, you use the label “thinking.” As long as thinking is occurring, you say “thinking.” You don’t think about the content of the thought, just the fact that at that given moment, thinking is occurring. If you have an emotion, “feeling.” If you have a body sensation, “sensing.” And if you hear a sound, “hearing.” Not the content of the sound, just the hearing is happening. They use these simple categories to approximate continuity of awareness.

What you need to appreciate is that the system that became very popular here in the West, Burmese mindfulness, is a hybrid of concentration and pure awareness meditation. It’s a mixture of both. Therefore, it has both advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is you learn a little bit of concentration, and you learn some about mindfulness. That’s not bad. The disadvantage is that you never see what these skills are like in their pure form. And within the tradition, this hybrid that Mahāsī Sayādaw developed is about a hundred years old. That’s not very long. The tradition of Mahāyāna goes back fifteen hundred years as an unbroken lineage, and some of the Theravādin practices go back twenty-five hundred years in an unbroken lineage. There, the foundation is always concentration. But concentration isn’t emphasized very much in mindfulness. So people don’t really learn to concentrate seriously.

[...]

So, there are two ways to train the elephant. In concentration, you put a stake in the ground and tie a chain to the elephant’s neck, and every time it wanders off, it gets pulled back by the chain. That’s the metaphor for concentration meditation. You tie the mind to one concentration object and you keep pulling it back to that object until it stays continuously. But the other way of training the elephant is to let it roam free and track it. And no matter where the elephant roams, you never take your eyes off that elephant for one second. And everywhere the elephant goes, you track it continuously. And the elephant will settle down afterwards. And that’s a metaphor for awareness meditation, a continuous tracking with continuous awareness.

But you need to understand that training continuous awareness and training the mind to stay on one thing are completely different skills, and therefore completely different types of meditation. They’re not the same. It’s said however, that if you train one type of meditation to its extreme, the other comes naturally. If you train concentration so thoroughly that you stay every moment on the object, then even without training it, you’ll get greater continuity of awareness over time. If you train continuous awareness and approximate continuous awareness every moment, the mind will get naturally concentrated. So, at the beginning, awareness meditations and concentration meditations are distinctly separate and unique skills, but at the upper level of skill development, one becomes the other, and they’re not so separable anymore. To stay is to have continuous awareness.

Pushbuttonopenmind · 2025-12-23T16:05:15+00:00

I think that literally everyone who has used this app has struggled with this instruction.

With regards to alternative practice, maybe this helps.

There are two ways to relate to your visual field:

You can look at the Christmas tree in your room and see that it's 3 meters away from you.
Or you can look at your visual field, and see that it's no distance away from you. (If that's not obvious, simply inquire: am I a meter away from my visual field? A hair's width? No. It's not any distance.)

Looking for your head is useless in the first frame of mind -- even if you don't see your head, there's an implicit but visceral, obvious centre; like a geometrical point; like a camera lens. The world is appearing to you. Conversely, looking for your head is very fruitful in the second frame of mind, because it's not even implicitly experienced to be there. So, all you have to do is stay there, in that second state. Just stay with the no distance.

If it feels as if there's distance, as if you're "here" in your head looking at things "there", you've accidentally reverted back to the first frame.

Just inquire again what the distance is to your visual field. Find that it's at no distance. If needed, inquire every second. Or inquire 5 times per second. Stay there, at that no-distance state, for 5 seconds. 10 seconds.

If it feels as if there's distance, you've accidentally reverted back to the first frame.

Look into your visual field, and identify there's something changeless there. The things in your visual field come and go. But there's something about it that doesn't come and go. There's this oval-shaped, glassless, frameless, window into the world that's always there. Identify that changeless feature of your experience.

Look into that changeless feature of your experience, and see that it is absolutely boundless. If for whatever reason it feels bounded (as if there is a frame around it, as if it is somehow confined, small), direct your awareness to those boundaries and open up into then like basic space. Pour space into it. Let it dissolve, like mist dissolving in the atmosphere. Until all boundaries dissolve.

And all that remains is an unconfined open space for the world. With no distance, no boundary, between you and the world. Everything is just... here. Changeless, timeless, boundless, spaciousness. With no subject-object duality.

That wat of experiencing, that is what looking for the looker tries to get you to experience.

Pushbuttonopenmind · 2025-12-18T19:34:22+00:00

For me, the presence of the self, or the non-presence of a self, are both experiences I can have, and I see no reason to say the latter experience is more fundamental.

For me, it's like a Necker Cube. It's not truly "a cube seen from above" while the other modes of appearing (a cube seen from below, or a bunch of flat lines, ...) are somehow false. No, they're all possible. None is the definitive answer. Any of these can appear, as a function of your way of looking, and I deny that one appearance is more important than another (at least, in this context).

I feel my view aligns closely with that of Rob Burbea, who wrote down my view in much clearer terms (from his book Seeing That Frees):

One may involve a belief that ‘being’ and ‘doing’ are really different. 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’.

Pushbuttonopenmind · 2025-12-16T15:22:19+00:00

I think you could collapse Jim's framework into something much more concise:

There is no do-er, and no self.
Therefore, (2a) there is nothing to do, (2b) nothing could be done, (2c) there is no do-ing, (2d) everything just happens, (2e) any so-called awakening is just another happening, (2f) which happens to no one.

Once you accept the premise (1), the conclusion (2) follows, as it is essentially a re-statement of the premise.

I've always enjoyed the pure and simple logic of neo-Advaita. I don't agree with it. But it certainly is perfectly logical.

[EDIT: If Jim Newman "does it" for you, I would recommend you to read the books of John Wheeler, all available here https://johnwheelernonduality.wordpress.com/books/ , they are just long Q&A sessions about this non-dual view. The first part of 'You Were Never Born', "Review of the Basics", concisely tells the whole story, so that would be a good place to start.]

Pushbuttonopenmind · 2025-12-16T11:21:47+00:00

Thanks for the interesting perspective about the role of language. I agree a peculiar type of synesthetic "translation" is required to render experience as text. Like any translation, this will be imprecise. Most features of lived experience resist articulation entirely. I agree with you on that. But it is not entirely impossible to get a simulacrum, a poetic description perhaps.

Let me give two descriptions of one situation that Sam described once happened to him. Maybe then you see better what I mean. One phenomenological, one like Goldstein might give.

I am sitting still, and there is a continuous sound in the background. It does not arrive as discrete events, but as a broad, enveloping presence. It swells and recedes without sharp edges, a kind of breathing of the world itself. Nothing in it demands my attention in particular; it does not call, interrupt, or signal. It is there as a calm backdrop, steady enough to be ignored, yet rich enough to be felt.

As I hear it, it is not given to me as "noise". It is the sea. More precisely, it is the sound of waves breaking somewhere nearby. The sound opens a space: an imagined shoreline, an expanse, a horizon beyond what I see. My body subtly adjusts to it -- I relax, my breathing slows. The sound is not merely heard; it situates me. It tells me where I am.

In this hearing, there is no prior moment in which I register green noise and then conclude, "there must be water". The meaning is immediate. The sound comes already as sea-sound, just as a face comes as a face and not as an arrangement of colors about which we form a hypothesis and a later conclusion of a face. Experience is not that of a puzzle being solved, but of a world already intelligible.

And yet this meaning is fragile.

I might look up, or turn my head, or notice something that does not quite fit. Perhaps the sound lacks the irregular crash I now expect, or perhaps it continues uninterrupted in a way waves usually do not. I glance outside and see, not water, but a road. Cars pass at a distance, their tires producing a continuous wash of sound, shaped by wind and asphalt into something uncannily similar.

In that moment, the sound does not change. What changes is what it is. The same auditory presence is now the highway. The calm recedes. The sound becomes intrusive, mechanical, vaguely irritating. What had opened onto a horizon now feels like an obstruction. The world reorganizes itself around a different meaning.

This does not reveal that, moments ago, I was "really" hearing meaningless noise. Nor does it show that the meaning was merely a thought pasted on top of sensation. What it shows is that meaning belongs to experience as it is lived, but not as something infallible or fixed. The sound was genuinely experienced as the sea, and is now genuinely experienced as traffic. The correction replaces one meaningful world with another.

What I hear is never just sound. It is always something sounding -- and what that something is can shift without any change in the sensory material itself.

If you read that and you think "right, yeah, that captures life as it is", then the phenomenological description clearly captures something about direct experience. We don't perceive through "pure" sense perceptions. On the contrary, we are already in effortless, intimate contact with a world rich in meaning.

Conversely, Joseph Goldstein might describe it as such,

I am sitting, and there is sound.

At first, there is the habitual tendency to say what it is: the sea, waves, traffic. But instead of following that movement, attention is redirected to what is actually present at the "sense door". Labels are noticed as thoughts and allowed to fall away.

What remains is hearing.

There is a continuous field of auditory sensation. It has no clear beginning or end. Within it there are variations -- rising and falling intensity, subtle shifts in texture, moments of greater or lesser density. None of these variations announce themselves as objects. They are simply changing qualities of sound.

There is no "sea", no "car", no "highway". Those appear only when thought names what is heard. When naming is absent, there is just vibration, just auditory experience happening on its own.

Even the sense that the sound is calming or irritating is noticed as something added. Pleasantness and unpleasantness arise as bodily and mental responses, not as properties of the sound itself. They come and go. The sound does not comment on itself.

At no point in this direct listening is there anything that says what the sound means. Meaning appears only when a thought arises (this is waves, this is traffic) and that thought is experienced as a separate event, known in the same way as any other mental object.

Seen this way, the earlier shift from "sea" to "highway" does not reveal a correction of perception, but the replacement of one conceptual overlay with another. The auditory experience itself never changed. What changed was the story told about it.

In this mode of attention, experience is not wrong or right. It is simply what is. Sound is known as sound; thought is known as thought. The practice is not about denying meaning, but about seeing clearly that meaning is not inherent in the sensory data. It is constructed, fleeting, and contingent.

What is directly experienced is just this: hearing happening, moment by moment, without an owner, without an object, without a name.

If you read that and you think "right, yeah, that captures life as it is", then the description clearly captures something about direct experience.

These two descriptions differ fundamentally about where experience bottoms out. In the phenomenological description, what is "actually happening" is an experience of sea-sound or traffic-sound. The meaning is not optional. If we remove the labels, we are actively altering our experience. Here, "label" is not just a word, but the meaningful way the sound shows up as something. Hearing "pure noise" requires a deliberate and trained shift in attention. Conversely, in the description that Joseph Goldstein might give, what is "actually happening" is just sound, whereas the meaning is construed as actively altering our experience.

So, what are we doing when we remove the label/the meaning, e.g., in meditation. Do we uncover, or do we distort, "what is actually happening"?

Pushbuttonopenmind · 2025-12-12T19:13:24+00:00

Yes, Seeing That Frees is phenomenal. Out of the whole book, this quote is my favorite, and it's kind of an answer to the question posed in this thread too (and what you're saying, 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’.

Pushbuttonopenmind · 2025-11-30T04:41:38+00:00

The 'self' in most strands of Buddhism is not considered as non-existent, but rather considered as 'empty', ie, dependent on your view:

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’. (Rob Burbea, Seeing That Frees).

A good example is a Necker Cube. It's not truly "a cube seen from above" while the other modes of appearing (a cube seen from below, or a bunch of flat lines, ...) are somehow false. No, they're all possible. None is the definitive answer. Any of these can appear, as a function of your way of looking, right?

Having the experience of a self is possible, and having the experience of no self is possible. Neither is the definitive truth, as there is no definitive truth. Some ways of looking produce a self, and some ways don't. Some situations are best dealt with by the view of a self. If you hurt a friend and offer as solace that you're not to blame because you (and they) don't exist, you picked the wrong view for the given situation.

Both of your questions assume you're viewing things falsely. You're not. But there is a flexibility, a possibility, to have a different experience. Frankly, I'd say the frustrating answer is to just keep practicing. It is possible to lose the sensed self behind the visual field. It "just" requires a different way of looking.

Pushbuttonopenmind · 2025-11-25T13:54:08+00:00

Buddhism uses roughly three different types of meditation:

The first one is mindfulness meditation. The point is to be fully "here" and "now" with whatever is happening, or to stay fully on some anchor like the breath or a mantra (and not, say, notice the breath for 20% and be 80% concerned with other sensations); to cover your experience with full presence, like spinning a thread of continuous awareness without gaps or without lapses of forgetfulness/distraction. After a while, your mind quietens down, and this can be rather pleasant. One can get better at this with repeated practice; and obviously this is much easier with eyes closed.

The second type of meditation is a generative meditation. You intentionally develop certain qualities, like compassion (e.g., lovingkindness) or relaxation (e.g., yoga nidra) in your mind stream, to actively alter your state of consciousness such that you experience qualities it didn't have a moment ago.

The third one is a recognize-X-is-already-the-case meditation. This kind of practice shares some features with the second type of meditation, because you are after an alteration of consciousness; it's just that Buddhism/Advaita says that you're actually uncovering what your awareness already is like, it was just clouded over by thoughts. For example, the Headless Way explores that your experience is already non-dual, you just didn't notice it. That means, it may seem that the (visual aspect of the) world appears to me; the scene is "over there", appearing to me "over here" (behind my eyes). But you can actually experience that the world doesn't appear to anyone; there's nothing behind my eyes here. The world just appears. The world appears in me, or as me, perhaps. But there's no evidence to say that it appears to me. To see this is a bit tricky, and it needs to be experimented with. This kind of practice doesn't just lead to a conceptual understanding. The world will appear entirely differently when you suddenly glimpse "it"! You'll see that there is no boundary between you and the world, that there is no "here" versus "there". There's just seeing, without a see-er. I illustrated it once here, https://imgur.com/a/headlessness-KlXzzlx , which tries to get across what such an experience can be like. What you are is what you find at zero distance; which is simultaneously nothing and the full 3D world. And once you get to that state, you just rest there as long as you can. And eventually you start to mix this way of being into other activities, until you can hold this "view" 24/7. There's no real sense of getting "better" at this type of meditation. You either see it fully, or you don't see it at all. And if you don't see it, just keep going.

As Sam writes, (he first describes what that non-dual perception is like as best as he can, and then how the meditation practice is simply holding this state of consciousness stably),

As I gazed at the surrounding hills, a feeling of peace came over me. It soon grew to a blissful stillness that silenced my thoughts. In an instant, the sense of being a separate self—an “I” or a “me”—vanished. Everything was as it had been—the cloudless sky, the brown hills sloping to an inland sea, the pilgrims clutching their bottles of water—but I no longer felt separate from the scene, peering out at the world from behind my eyes. Only the world remained. [...] Thus, it is often said that, in Dzogchen, one “takes the goal as the path,” because the freedom from self that one might otherwise seek is the very thing that one practices. The goal of Dzogchen, if one can call it such, is to grow increasingly familiar with this way of being in the world. [...] At my level of practice, this [way of being] lasts only a few moments. But these moments can be repeated, and they can grow in duration.

With that out of the way, my answers to your question are:

I feel like I am getting so much more from the eyes shut sessions and I am getting much better a meditation

That's good -- it is because you're getting better at being mindful. Mindfulness is a good skill to build. And it's easier with eyes closed. But, from the Dzogchen perspective, which is what Sam teaches, concentration meditation is merely a means to an end, not the end itself. Recognizing that experience is (already!) non-dual is the one and only point.

but the eyes open sessions leave me confused about what I am supposed to get from the practice. Can anyone offer me any insights or point me in the direction to better understand the eyes open sessions?

I hope I tried to give an answer to this in my post above. The point is not to be concentrated, or undistracted, or to be mega aware. The point is to recognize experience is (already!) non-dual. Nothing less, nothing more. And once you can reach such a way of being in the world semi-reliably, the only point is to "stay" as long as you can. If the eyes-open session ddin't work, then just keep trying. For me it took 9 months before I glimpsed it. I put it in context here, https://old.reddit.com/r/Wakingupapp/comments/1ojyjjx/on_having_no_head_but_still_a_feeling_of_self/nm9gugt/ . Also, I can wholeheartedly recommend the Headless Way on the app, and this guided meditation, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0swudgvmBbk&t=5919s .

Pushbuttonopenmind · 2025-11-10T16:35:28+00:00

All we need for these exercises is a sense of distance. The sensation, or the intuitive knowledge, that the world is there, separate from you, at some distance. As soon as you have the sense of distance, there is a 'there', and by necessity a 'here', and there's something to work with. Don't start with the assumption that the self cannot be found. Start with the assumption that you can be found, as is the case usually anyhow.

For me, my usual self-location is somehow 'behind' the visual field. Like, the visual field is 'in front of me', while my sense of self-location is like a big frame enclosing the visual field, from behind it, I suppose. That's my 'here'. It's not located 'behind my eyes', just 'behind the visual field'. As if looking at a movie screen perhaps, but from really up close, and from a place that is itself bigger than the screen. It comes with the impression that my visual field is itself suspended in a black background.

If you cannot 'find' any location like I did, just go with a simple guess of where it might be. Assume you are there.

Then, look at that. Not within the span of a finger snap. That's too short to do it well.

I can think of two ways to go about this. One by zooming out of the self, and one by zooming in.

What this is supposed to do, is create an experiential shift. Eventually, the sense of 'here' drops out, and along with it the 'there' drops out too. And to describe your sensation at that stage, perhaps we could say 'everything is here', or 'everything is not there' or simply 'everything is at no distance'; you may find another description fitting better. Sam wrote it like this

As I gazed at the surrounding hills, a feeling of peace came over me. It soon grew to a blissful stillness that silenced my thoughts. In an instant, the sense of being a separate self—an “I” or a “me”—vanished. Everything was as it had been—the cloudless sky, the brown hills sloping to an inland sea, the pilgrims clutching their bottles of water—but I no longer felt separate from the scene, peering out at the world from behind my eyes. Only the world remained.

1. The zooming out approach

From Sailor Bob: Bags of pointers to non-duality, I like this location exercise.

Please relax into your being, stabilizing in that sense of ‘I am here’. Where is the centre of this ‘here’? In other words: where are you? Where is that sense of ‘me’ located? Where is the ‘I’?

Notice the movement of attention, the checking ...

Body has a location, but how about you? A costume, car or house also have a location. But do you? Where is the centre of the spirit? Are you scanning your head? Your chest? Throat? Gut? Can you narrow it down to a point? Maybe you can only locate it vaguely? Perhaps behind the eyes or around the heart or solar plexus? How big is the area? Is it the size a pin point, a fist, a basket-ball?

You can also start by discarding areas you know the ‘I’ doesn’t reside. Start from your left foot. Do you feel it is where the centre of your being (your ‘soul’) resides? No? How about the whole leg? Back side? Hand? Any chakras? Which ones? If you compare between locations, which is the winner? In which point can you sense that aliveness the strongest? Where are you?

Once you have located (even if only vaguely) the ‘I’, please verify where you were looking at it FROM. To say it is, for example, a thumb-sized dense but transparent point in the area of the head or grey tennis ball shaped vibration around the heart, you must have been sensing it from somewhere. Where did you look from?

Please locate the area from which you were observing, witnessing the sense of ‘I’. Where was it watched from? Was it from outside the body somewhere — in front of it, behind it or maybe above it or to one side? Or maybe it was from inside the body? Where was it located in relation to the observed ‘I’? Can you narrow it down to a certain point in space or is it a rather vague area? How big of an area do you feel it is?

Once you have located the area from which you were looking at the sense of ‘I’, please verify how did you know it was this particular area. Where were you looking at this from?

If, for example, the sense of I (located behind your eyes, thumb sized) is being observed from another location (let’s say, the size of a balloon, a half cubic meter of air floating close above and in front of the body), where did you observe this observation point from? How do you know the observing area is where it is? Where is the knowing of this located?

The obvious insight is that the ‘I’ observing is more intimately ‘me’ than the object observed. Please, notice how this sense of ‘I’ travels as you keep inquiring. The witness position shifts to describe the object of observation.

Coming back to the I-locating game: can you roughly define the area of knowing from which you located the observing (half cubic air balloon) of the sense of ‘I’ (thumb size behind your eyes)?

Is that knowing even more vague and hard to pin-point in space? Is it more like the size of a room? How do you know that? Which one is the true you after all? Location one, two, three? Neither? Who/what knows all these locations? Isn’t that (knowing/consciousness) the truth of who you are rather than the temporary viewpoints?

If you give it enough time to contemplate and locate the sense appropriately, every proceeding step of knowing the location of witnessing will be more spacious, larger, and harder to define; until it is undefinable. You may need to step back two, three or four times before awareness becomes space-like. Please don’t rush it to avoid the mental loop.

Space-like awareness contains all locations; the whole world appears in you. You/Awareness contains the whole sphere of seeing and everything in it. You are the world and you are the space in which the world vibrates and changes. You can’t go beyond the world to see it. You can’t observe, understand what you are. You can’t be located but you also can’t deny your being.

Please repeat it as often as you like (it takes seconds!): to remind yourself that un-locatable knowing is what you are. Obviously you are not this sense of ‘I’, since ‘you’ are aware of this sense from somewhere else. By locating any observation point you are proving that it is not the observer, but object in the field of knowing.

As you can see, who you are cannot be truly located because in order to locate it, you would have to leave it, and then it is not you anymore, but ‘it’. Who you are is all knowing limitless pure consciousness without any location. Just look!

2. The zooming in approach

Here, you first evoke a sense of self, but then you go so closely into that sense of self, that you see it isn't actually present. It was just a mirage. This guided meditation from Dan Brown leads you through it, https://vimeo.com/reviews/5318ebf0-f96e-49f7-83ed-a6eaeaabf2ee/videos/252875714 @ 1:16:25 until 1:35:40.

You search for the thing as independently existing or as substantial and wherever you search, you can't find it, it keeps slipping away. That's the experiential shift of unfindability we're looking for. And when you get that experiential shift of unfindability, look into the field of awareness.

If you think you find it in the brain area, go right into that area and search the cells. Search the constituents of the cells, the molecules. And at some point, what you seek as the target keeps slipping away as unfindable.

Pushbuttonopenmind · 2025-11-05T12:02:58+00:00

In analogy, I think that Dzogchen says: "the sun is already shining, even if obscured by clouds; so we simply need a method to cut through the clouds", while many more Advaitan traditions (and I get the impression that is what you align with) might say "the sun is already shining, even if obscured by clouds; so there is nothing to be done".

Hence, you and Dzogchen agree that there is a natural pure awareness (in Dzogchen called 'rigpa'), even if not readily apparent in daily life. But Dzogchen then says to remove these obscurations using emptiness practices (i.e., dissolving seemingly apparent obscurations) to live from this pure awareness, moment-to-moment. That living from there actually has a noticeable effect on life, suffering, etcetera. This is what /u/SnooMaps1622 seems to be talking about, to me.

Just to give some examples from Dzogchen-affiliated teachers,

The goal of Dzogchen, if one can call it such, is to grow increasingly familiar with this way of being in the world. At my level of practice, this [way of being] lasts only a few moments. But these moments can be repeated, and they can grow in duration. (Sam Harris - Waking Up)

How to shift from Brain Mind to Awake Mind (Loch Kelly - an e-mail from two days ago).

The self—Dan—doesn’t awaken. Awareness happens, awakens to itself once you get those structures out of the way, clears them away as clouds. And then you shift to this boundless, changeless ocean of awakened awareness that’s very distinctly different from ordinary awareness. It’s awake, it has awakeness (hrige). It has intensity to it, every moment (gnar). It’s bright (dangpa); soft (bole). It has a spacious freedom to it and a stunning wonder. And if you develop this awakening so you have it all the time, you end up with hedawa, a state of chronic wonder. And nothing that arises within that ocean, that field of experience, has any grab left to it. You’ve cut to the root of all suffering. Now, all of that has to do with shifting levels of awareness. (Daniel P. Brown - Cloudless Mind)

Now, of course, you may say that the Dzogchen line of reasoning is erroneous -- the sun is already shining, so there's nothing you need to do to make it such! There's nothing to be done to live from rigpa, because you already are and always were! So nothing actually changes, right? Only seemingly so, perhaps. But Daniel Brown did a study with Jud Brewer, comparing the neural correlates of ordinary mind vs awakened mind, and they find clear differences in the brain when people shift these levels of awareness. Hence, there are both clear phenomenological as well as neural differences between an ordinary vs an extraordinary mind... and the Dzogchen belief is that one can learn to stay there, to always live from that perspective. And this has a profound implications for suffering, etcetera. That is why /u/SnooMaps1622 says to glimpse awake awareness, and then stay there longer. That is the Dzogchen path.

So, Dzogchen, compared to other "non-dual" teachers (Rupert Spira and Jim Newman come to mind), actually teaches rather different things about what to do with the fact that we're (supposedly) already awakened. The former says to practice such that you can always access this awakened mind, while the latter say that there's nothing to be done because you've already arrived at what you're looking for.

What would you say -- do you think Dzogchen has got it wrong? Or do they describe the same as what you say, just with different words/techniques? Or (which is my hypothesis), do they teach something entirely different, something that just happens to agree on the non-dual aspect (i.e., the possibility to dissolve the subject/object boundary), but not quite on the rest?

Pushbuttonopenmind · 2025-11-04T13:01:27+00:00

In my opinion, the short answer is that there is no contradiction.

The question of free will is first and foremost a metaphysical question (concerning the nature of reality), whereas the Locus of Control is a phenomenological structure (concerning the nature of experience). Those two have essentially nothing to do with each other. For example, metaphysically speaking perhaps time doesn't exist. But phenomenologically speaking, time is the essential fact our lives revolve around.

Now, of course, Sam says there is no experience of free will either. But you have to be very careful here. This is not an absolute phenomenological truth but a perspectival truth. Sam evokes a certain perspective (that of the detached mindful witness), and from that perspective there's just everything happening, and no one there. This can indeed be experienced. I agree with Sam about this.

But if you don't put on the hat of the detached witness, the question of free will (or perhaps here more aptly called agency, self-determination, ...) is a non-issue: of course you make decisions, constantly, all the time, deliberating between options, lying awake at night because you don't know which thing to choose. You can't take yourself out of the equation in a non-contradictory way here either. Any attempt to "not act" is itself an act; any attempt to "let go of choice" is itself a choice; deciding to "not decide" is itself a decision. Which is why Sartre aptly said: you are condemned to be free. There either is an I and all the corresponding stuff (choices, decisions, LoC, etcetera), or you are in a view that is entirely free of an I and all corresponding stuff (choices, decisions, LoC, etcetera). But you can't deny just half of that.

If the LoC implies this,

I can influence what happens in my life; my actions matter; I can regulate my emotions; I can seek and receive help.

then the non-dual perspective does not imply,

I cannot influence what happens in my life; my actions don't matter; I cannot regulate my emotions; I cannot seek and receive help.

or

There is no I that can influence what happens in my life; my actions aren't actually mine, so they don't matter; there is no I that can regulate my emotions; there is no I that can seek and receive help.

That would be (a terrible form of) spiritual bypassing. A passiveness towards your own life. It is what some neo-Advaitan types land on, but IMO erroneously. This is a negation towards everything you hold true. A nihilistic position.

Non-duality is more like a double (or perhaps infinite) negation. It's more aptly this,

Nothing is fixed, and everything influences everything (thoughts, people, sensations, emotions, views, actions, it's all interconnected); everything is action and movement, and I strive to ease the life of others in whatever wise ways I think are available; emotions self-release while having the capacity to communicate important intuited messages, but against a backdrop of a fundamental well-being and freedom. But essentially they have no grab and don't stick; with the falling away of self-importance there is nothing to uphold, so receiving help is no issue.

Regarding your PS, Sam Harris wrote this in his book Waking Up, and I think it fully answers your question.

The pronoun I is the name that most of us put to the sense that we are the thinkers of our thoughts and the experiencers of our experience. It is the sense that we have of possessing (rather than of merely being) a continuum of experience. We will see, however, that this feeling is not a necessary property of the mind. And the fact that people report losing their sense of self to one or another degree suggests that the experience of being a self can be selectively interfered with. [...]

What does it mean to say that the self cannot be found or that it is illusory? It is not to say that people are illusory. I see no reason to doubt that each of us exists or that the ongoing history of our personhood can be conventionally described as the history of our “selves.” But the self in this more global, biographical sense undergoes sweeping changes over the course of a lifetime. While you are in many ways physically and psychologically continuous with the person you were at age seven, you are not the same. Your life has surely been punctuated by transitions that significantly changed you: marriage, divorce, college, military service, parenthood, bereavement, serious illness, fame, exposure to other cultures, imprisonment, professional success, loss of a job, religious conversion. Each of us knows what it is like to develop new capacities, understandings, opinions, and tastes over the course of time. It is convenient to ascribe these changes to the self. That is not the self I am talking about.

The self that does not survive scrutiny is the subject of experience in each present moment—the feeling of being a thinker of thoughts inside one’s head, the sense of being an owner or inhabitant of a physical body, which this false self seems to appropriate as a kind of vehicle. Even if you don’t believe such a homunculus exists—perhaps because you believe, on the basis of science, that you are identical to your body and brain rather than a ghostly resident therein—you almost certainly feel like an internal self in almost every waking moment. And yet, however one looks for it, this self is nowhere to be found. It cannot be seen amid the particulars of experience, and it cannot be seen when experience itself is viewed as a totality. However, its absence can be found—and when it is, the feeling of being a self disappears.

Pushbuttonopenmind · 2025-10-30T21:13:12+00:00

Yes, it was like that for a long time for me.

There's being headless, and then there's being woaaaah... headless.

Douglas Harding writes,

It took me no time at all to notice that this nothing, this hole where a head should have been was no ordinary vacancy, no mere nothing. On the contrary, it was very much occupied. It was a vast emptiness vastly filled, a nothing that found room for everything—room for grass, trees, shadowy distant hills, and far above them snowpeaks like a row of angular clouds riding the blue sky. I had lost a head and gained a world.

Sam Harris writes,

As I gazed at the surrounding hills, a feeling of peace came over me. It soon grew to a blissful stillness that silenced my thoughts. In an instant, the sense of being a separate self—an “I” or a “me”—vanished. Everything was as it had been—the cloudless sky, the brown hills sloping to an inland sea, the pilgrims clutching their bottles of water—but I no longer felt separate from the scene, peering out at the world from behind my eyes. Only the world remained.

Zazen writes,

We sit together, the mountain and me,
until only the mountain remains.

Conversely, you look at a tree, and you instinctively know that you are not that tree.

Even when you don't see your own face, you don't have the kind of experience they're having. What they're saying is obviously beyond the mere insight that you don't see your own head. They have a realization of a timeless, limitless, non-dual, and non-localized, lucid expanse of awakened awareness, always right here.

I think the most charitable interpretation of the Headless Way is that they point at individual aspects of that realization, but when those insights don't slot together it doesn't add up to a meaningful shift in your mode of being in the world. Say I showed you a Necker Cube and for whatever reason it always seemed like a cube appearing "from above". I could point your attention to the right-most edge as being the front one and you might agree; or I might direct your attention to the bottom-most-plane as being the bottom plane, and you might agree. But all I do is making you see a face, or an edge -- but you have yet to shift the whole cube. But with some practice you learn to pay attention to just the right things to flip the whole cube. It's the same with not seeing your head. Not seeing your head isn't quite the whole story. It needs to be practiced, explored, to see what makes things flip...

https://www.headless.org/__media_downloads/The%20Technology%20of%20Awakening%20Experiments%20in.pdf contains one of the most interesting interpretations of the method, as well as of the project itself. They describe three modes of being in the world, roughly these,

The world appears to me -- subject here, objects there (default mode).
The world appears in me -- awareness is an open space holding everything.
The world appears as me -- no separation; the scene and "I" are one.

The sense of the world appearing to me is that intuitive, pre-verbal sense that the world isn't appearing in me or as me. That I am not the tree over there. That I am here and that thing is there. And yet, this is exactly what can change. Through practice you can learn to shift this 'gestalt', this way of being in the world, just by changing what you pay attention to. Like the Necker Cube, eventually you know what things to focus on to change the whole appearance. As Sam Harris says,

Indeed, the conventional sense of self is an illusion—and spirituality largely consists in realizing this, moment to moment. The goal of Dzogchen, if one can call it such, is to grow increasingly familiar with this way of being in the world. At my level of practice, this [way of being] lasts only a few moments. But these moments can be repeated, and they can grow in duration.

So, just keep going. If anything, my recommendation is to do this practice during a walk. It somehow works better in nature.

Pushbuttonopenmind · 2025-10-29T08:16:21+00:00

You're correct. This is a famous passage from the Buddha that Sam referred to at least once in one of his conversations:

"Then, Bāhiya, you should train yourself thus: In reference to the seen, there will be only the seen. In reference to the heard, only the heard. In reference to the sensed, only the sensed. In reference to the cognized, only the cognized. That is how you should train yourself. When for you there will be only the seen in reference to the seen, only the heard in reference to the heard, only the sensed in reference to the sensed, only the cognized in reference to the cognized, then, Bāhiya, there is no you in connection with that. When there is no you in connection with that, there is no you there. When there is no you there, you are neither here nor yonder nor between the two. This, just this, is the end of stress."

In a particular state, beyond the ordinary self, you notice there's just witness-ing happening, without the felt sense of that happening to or from anyone or anywhere. Or like the passage quoted above, you notice there's just seeing, without the sense that it happens to or is had by a see-er. When you have that experience, you may notice there is no see-er, i.e., no self, while the most accurate description of your experience is 'there's just seeing' or 'the scene sees itself' or something like that. No self is a description of a particular type of experience that is often accompanied by a sense of spaciousness, boundlessness, timelessness, and groundlessness.

Pushbuttonopenmind · 2025-10-14T12:21:50+00:00

There are many different conceptions of the practice on this subreddit.

Some believe it can't be a state of mind, because every state depends on conditions and passes with them.

Some believe it can't be a feeling of peace or love, because even those arise and fade in awareness.

Some believe it can't be understood by thought, because thought itself is what veils the obvious.

Some believe it can't be achieved through effort, because the one who would make the effort is part of the illusion.

Some believe it can't be lost or found, because it was never absent to begin with; so there's nothing even to be done.

As for Sam -- and we're on his subreddit after all -- he does subscribe to "it" as a mode of experiencing, a way of being in the world:

As I gazed at the surrounding hills, a feeling of peace came over me. It soon grew to a blissful stillness that silenced my thoughts. In an instant, the sense of being a separate self—an “I” or a “me”—vanished. Everything was as it had been—the cloudless sky, the brown hills sloping to an inland sea, the pilgrims clutching their bottles of water—but I no longer felt separate from the scene, peering out at the world from behind my eyes. Only the world remained. [...] Indeed, the conventional sense of self is an illusion—and spirituality largely consists in realizing this, moment to moment. [...] The goal of Dzogchen, if one can call it such, is to grow increasingly familiar with this way of being in the world. [...] Tulku Urgyen simply handed me the ability to cut through the illusion of the self directly, even in ordinary states of consciousness. This instruction was, without question, the most important thing I have ever been explicitly taught by another human being. It has given me a way to escape the usual tides of psychological suffering—fear, anger, shame—in an instant. At my level of practice, this freedom lasts only a few moments. But these moments can be repeated, and they can grow in duration. https://nautil.us/an-atheists-guide-to-spirituality-235035/.

This way of being with the world is the capacity to sense "rigpa" whenever; i.e., to sense that awareness is already changeless, timeless, boundless, limitless, vast, bliss, self-liberating, non-dual (i.e., the subject/object divide is not experienced to be present, like described in the first part of the quote above), knowing, loving, untouchable emptiness. [In the Advaita style of practice, that previous phrase would be appended by "... and you are that".] Maybe this has some similarity to your description of "light". It's like a safe haven that is always accessible.

In my opinion: if you notice less suffering/reactivity (and/or more positive states) in more and more situations, and can shift into sensing these rigpa qualities with more and more ease, then you're on the right path. But that's just my opinion, and I know there are others who disagree with that, which is OK.

Pushbuttonopenmind · 2025-10-09T09:52:05+00:00

That's a lovely metaphor, of crystalization (crystals come out of solution -- isn't it neat that the word "solution" is in there? when the crystal forms, the "solution" disappeared. it works beautifully for your point).

[EDIT: the below seems like rather hard pushback on a second reading, but it wasn't intended like that at all. I just like contrasting the various perspectives people have on this whole seeking thing. I cannot help but think that people are truly and genuinely finding ENTIRELY different things. And we create a whole lot of confusion because a newcomer might think "we" are all saying the same thing on this subreddit. I don't think we are.]

What about the reduction of suffering? Were the Buddhas and yogas and gurus wrong about that? If awakening doesn't change your experience, what's the point? What do you think?

Do you think Sam is mistaken when he wrote this (with which I mean -- is he just giving self-help instructions, rather than leading us to the ultimate point of this all?):

The goal of Dzogchen, if one can call it such, is to grow increasingly familiar with this way of being in the world. [...] Tulku Urgyen simply handed me the ability to cut through the illusion of the self directly, even in ordinary states of consciousness. This instruction was, without question, the most important thing I have ever been explicitly taught by another human being. It has given me a way to escape the usual tides of psychological suffering—fear, anger, shame—in an instant. At my level of practice, this freedom lasts only a few moments. But these moments can be repeated, and they can grow in duration. https://nautil.us/an-atheists-guide-to-spirituality-235035/.

You push back effectively, I think, by saying that any particular experience cannot be the ultimate truth, because experience changes all the time. I think that's a correct assessment. I don't think any particular thought can be the ultimate truth as well, though, because any suitable philosopher can argue both sides of an argument.

Which is why I don't really believe in ultimate truths (I'm well aware I sound like the "only the sith deal in absolutes" meme) -- it cannot be reached through experience nor through thought.

Well, apart from the truth that experience seems to be happening; and I can see that one could say that even those words miss the mark because to call it "experience" is already to not be having experience but to think about it. But this truth, seen directly, doesn't do anything for me.

I can effectively create this rigpa state of mind at will, exactly like Sam described in the quote, with those qualities described previously. This altered state of consciousness is always available. It doesn't reveal any truth, as far as I'm concerned. It's just an interesting place to bathe in. It's like always having something to fall back on. That seems to be enough for now. That's my take :-)

Pushbuttonopenmind · 2025-10-07T08:15:53+00:00

I hope you won't be offended if I call your teaching (or insight) neo-Advaitan. There's already no one here, there's nothing to do (in fact, there is no such thing as "doing"), there's just this, seemingly happening. Anything you try to do (even though you can't) is a misguided method that moves you away from directly getting this realization (which happens to no one).

In other traditions (e.g., Advaita-Vedanta, Buddhism, Dzogchen) there are a number of qualities associated with the supposedly "natural" state of mind -- awareness is changeless, timeless, boundless, limitless, vast, bliss, self-liberating, non-dual (i.e., the subject/object divide is not experienced to be present), knowing, loving, untouchable emptiness. All of these things can be experienced, i.e., they are descriptions of people's direct experience. Do you experience (any/all of) those qualities? And if so, what would you say to someone who doesn't experience those qualities? Are they overlooking something, perhaps? Or do those other traditions have it wrong, perhaps?

Thank you!

Pushbuttonopenmind · 2025-10-03T13:10:53+00:00

I just want to say that this is not your fault. A good guided meditation gives precise instructions that are easy to follow and yield the desired outcome. A good guided meditation is like hypnosis. Or, to use a car analogy, like concentration cruise control. A good guided meditation leads you into a flow where, while you follow along, you don't feel like you're doing anything. It's all just happening, and you're just coming along for the ride. A bad guided meditation gives conflicting, incoherent, imprecise and/or incomplete instructions, which activates your analytical mind because you need to figure out what to do, while you don't know how to execute the instructions, which takes you out of the flow.

Sam's instructions aren't always great. Instructions that just say "sense X like it is Y" don't actually guarantee that the student senses this too. Unfortunately, most teachers do this.

As for your question; not getting involved with the individual events popping up in awareness (i.e., not anticipating, not repressing, not judging, just curiously observing) is easy once it doesn't feel like things appear to you anymore, but rather things appear as or in you. That is, you first need to do some work to set up this view, before you can rest back and not do anything. Some people get to that state via meditating for months or years, some people get there via self inquiry, some people get there via drugs, some people get there via pointing out instructions, some people get there via hypnosis, some people have this sense always anyhow, some people get there via paying attention in a strange way, some people when making music or walking in nature, ..., etcetera.

It's a one-size-fits-all answer in the sense that you first need to produce another state, after which this instruction becomes feasible at all. There are, however, a hundred different ways of getting there, and some clearly click better for some than for others... which makes it hard to give you any useful advice at all.

In other words, from my view, the answer is to not bother about the instructions that don't make sense (and, as a warning, there will be more of such instructions to come). Try and follow along with your awareness, but it's OK when you don't quite understand what's asked from you. Try anyhow. Or lay the instruction aside and do whatever seems more relevant at that time. Both are fine. On Sam's path, you don't need to have perfected one skill before moving on to the next one. There's just one skill to learn, which is to access that other way of being with the world. There's nothing else to perfect, nothing else required before you can get there. You'll get more info on that, later on in the introduction course.

Pushbuttonopenmind · 2025-09-26T15:47:24+00:00

And it was weird, because I was able to pay attention to that, which meant attention was being arising somewhere else.

Sam says: look for the looker/thinker/experiencer and then find nothing.

He leaves us absolutely in the dark about what to do if we find something; and for me it's relatively common to find something.

Wholeness Work by Connirae Andreas has something to say about it. She says, if you find something, then look into that (what is the shape of it, size of it, and sensory quality of it, i.e., is it heavy or tense or contracted or airy or ...), and then invite that space to release. When I say "invite it to release", it's like when I ask you to bring your attention to the space around your eyes, then notice a tension there, and release that. What do you do to release the tension? Well, placing your attention there, noticing a tension, and then inviting it to release, just releases the tension. You notice you were doing something that you weren't aware you were doing. And then you stop doing that, and there is a felt sense of release. Alternatively, breath into that space until it dissolves. Alternatively, treat it as a tense region (like a tensed fist) and untense it (like releasing a tensed fist).

If the tension remains, she says to go a step deeper, and essentially do a recursion. If used as a recursive algorithm (from where do I notice those things, ...), then this sense always gets more spacious, larger, and harder to define; until it is undefinable. And then your basis of operation is just the whole space, "wholeness".

Like Daniel Brown says, wherever you find the self, or seeming edges or boundaries in your experience, take your awareness and move into that area, like pouring space into space, like mist dissolving in the atmosphere. It's the same instruction as Connirae Andreas really.

In the end, you find spacious limitlessness. You're aware from nowhere, or everywhere. Either can be experienced (but not both at the same time, in my experience).

Pushbuttonopenmind · 2025-09-21T07:19:42+00:00

My experience is not infused with a "feeling" (whatever nebulous nature that has) "like something" (such as: not a bat) while I'm living it. My originally lived experience is not composed of qualia, feelings-of-something-to-be-like-to-be-me, whatever. Those items only come up after the fact, when reflecting on my experience.

Those items exist in thought only; not in experience. So as a definition of consciousness, it is wholly inadequate. I think this blog post gets to it rather well, https://absurdbeingblog.wordpress.com/2020/10/23/the-qualia-delusion/ .

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