The real-self and suicide

[Orion]

Been meditating on this a lot lately, as I move through my day to day life, having experienced a lot of fragmentation and distortion of my human level personality. I've come at this in two different directions... the top down and the bottom up. Both were through therapies of different kinds. Neither worked.

The top down approach, or the "spiritual" approach, is about acknowledging that we are all oneness, or the divine. Or for the sake of discussion, let's say that we all come from starlight. The spiritualists tell us we are all just starlight, and we are not this personality, so there's no real need to suffer. That self is an illusion. How many times have I heard a Buddhist try to cleverly say, "Point to the self. Can you tell me where it is? Where is this "myself" you're talking about?" Yet if you look at a lot of the gurus teaching this stuff, there are hidden addictions, sexual scandals, various suffering. Not in all, but in many. "It's all just mind, this is all Emptiness". So it's not working. We can tell ourselves we come from starlight but it's not making the problem go away. There is a fundamental, human level SELF that is wanting acknowledgement which the spiritualists are bypassing. It's what a lot of "spiritual" people are doing. I've done it. Spiritual bypassing is a major pitfall on the path and it's one of the most insidious illusions a person can face. You need to believe that the $1000 you paid for the spiritual retreat you just went on wasn't a waste of money, so you convince yourself that the system is real and that you've made progress, when all you've done is create a new layer of self-deception that reinforces distortion of the real self.

Then there's the bottom up approach, or the modern psychotherapy approach. They tell you that you're being too in your head and that you have to get into your body (in the case of somatics). Or that you just need to re-frame the problem, which is a re-telling of the story, and then once you perceive it differently you won't suffer anymore. Or that you just need to change your environmental circumstances, be more productive, make more friends, etc. It also doesn't work. You feel better for a while, or while you're doing your exercises, or while you're doing your meditations, and then 10 minutes later after you move onto something else, you get triggered. You either pretend that you're not being triggered because you just paid $200 to a therapist to sort it out, or you give up and go back to dissonant living.

I feel that the thing that nobody is honing in on is the real self. It's the original you, before you were told that you're a you, that you have a name, an identity. You're born as this self. I'm not talking about universal consciousness or oneness. You come into the world as love wanting to experience life. To put this another way... God wants to live through you, as you. You are an individuated version of the universal consciousness that wants to BE YOU and nothing else. There is something important about this particular configuration that wants to live as itself, and it won't settle for anything else. It doesn't want to be abdicated to an Absolute or overwritten with stories that falsely explain it away. It's one thing to say that we're all starlight but you're actually starlight that has come into living in this particular form, for whatever reason. So you need to live as this real you. No other version will work. You also can't pretend that you're the universe because you're not -- you're you. You are a specific musical note that the universe wants to play clearly and freely. The real-self can never be damaged or tarnished, but it can take on patterns that make the note play less clearly, less profusely, less resonantly.

The real-self is born and then starts experiencing the body-mind. It starts to identify with the thoughts of the mind and the sensations of the body that it experiences. It experiences them as itself, when actually they aren't. Various traumas and teachings become patterns that cause the real-self to wall itself off from itself, into a sort of forgetting. On some level you say, "Oh shit! I don't want to do that! I want to be the REAL ME". At this point, most people begin grasping at the external in order to correct this... they go for materialism, or relationships, or "spirituality", or sex. All these things bypass the fundamental problem.

The real-self contains its own origin, through all the pain. So underneath these suicidal thoughts, the shame, the insufficiency, or whatever it is that comes up, is a real-self begging to be seen. It's not separate from you. It is you, in a very basic, practical way. It's not esoteric. When someone falls on the street and you go to help them up without thinking, or you put food in your mouth... it's all the real self in motion. There are no thoughts. The real self is the only thing that's present during deep sleep, which is a good way to differentiate it.

So I'm at the bank dealing with my accounts and a woman behind me in line starts getting impatient and annoyed. She gives me dirty looks. In the moment I'm thinking, "Whatever, she can wait." But then I leave the bank and I'm driving home, and the thoughts begin. What was her problem? I didn't do anything wrong. Fuck that pissed me off, now I'm angry. What's wrong with me? And so it starts... the dissonance. You start separating from the present moment because there's a pattern in your real-self that is triggered. Somewhere a long time ago I probably learned that it was not OK to hold people up, even if it was about getting my needs fulfilled. Other people come first, and if I don't listen to that I must be a bad person. The real-self, me as this person, learned that the only way to safely BE love in the world is to put other people first.

The top-down method would be... we are all just starlight and oneness, and my feelings are temporary. So I don't need to get so distracted by them. Go back into starlight, go back into the oneness, and let it go. I would abdicate this human level experience to the universal consciousness. The bottom-up approach would be to tell myself that the woman was probably just having a bad day, or she hates lineups, or whatever else I need to make up about her in order to feel temporarily better about myself. But that need to feel better is indicating that there is a deeper need not being fulfilled, a wounded pattern that the real-self is holographically duplicating every time there is an impatient person around me. I need to go into the real self (not the body, not the mind) and ask it what it needs, what the solution would be. What do I really want? And the answer I discover is: I want to be loved even as I am fulfilling my needs; I can fulfill my needs and it doesn't make me selfish, it means I love taking care of myself. Bam... the wound dissolves and the light of the real-self shines through. The reason why the inward inquiry contains the solution is because you wouldn't be experiencing dissonance if the real-self weren't already inherently there to setup the polarity. In other words, you're suffering because the real-self knows what you need to not suffer, and you're suffering because you're not living as THAT.

The problem with wording this is that it's already setting up a mental thing, when this is not mind related. The mind is actually the obstacle to really seeing and feeling the real-self shine. The real-self examination would be to quiet the mind, enter the heart, and gently ask yourself when the first time was you ever felt this particular way - shame, abandonment, anger, whatever it is... there are many favourites. Eventually you find the original thing... the time when the real-self, which is pure love, learned that it was not OK to be love in a certain situation. It turned in on itself. But paradoxically, the aberration cannot touch its origin. It still remains pure. So as you go into the painful experience that originated the walling off, you experience a burst of light, or energy... the wound begins to dissolve and the real-self shines through. The real you.

We all have this kind of forgetting, in some ways. I believe it is part of design. We come in as a pure form and then the stories and layers of confusion begin. The mind-body starts feeling and experiencing things which seem so real, and we are so pure that we assume we are one with those experiences, that we ARE what's happening (identifying with it). It takes getting older and strengthening our human individuation before we can backtrack and figure out where this confusion began. As infants and children it's impossible to do, we're just not developed enough.

 

We can look at the superficial aspects of why people are suicidal - yes the environment plays a role, but some people thrive in adverse circumstances while others whither and die. Being suicidal and ending up in a death knell often has a lot to do with how the real self is being honoured or not. It's not enough to realize how the real-self took on a distorted pattern; it's not enough to realize what the real self wants; you have to actually live from that, every day, in order to really thrive. For example, if you begin to recognize that the real-self really has a thirst for learning, an innate curiosity, a drive to know more and more, yet you make zero change to enrich your life with complex learning, then you're doing yourself a disservice. And maybe along the way you learned the pattern that being curious means getting hurt somehow, or some other pattern.

I'm not talking about the inner child. Forget that. Working with the inner child is, in many ways, a road to getting more fucked up. The inner child is usually the first stage of distortion of the real-self, as children start to take on various patterns from experiences and their parents. The real-self is primal, it's #1. You usually know you're in resonance with it because the solar plexus lights up, like a tiny seed of light. You'll know you're breaking through to that presence, through the pain, once you get that nice little belly glow.

The truth is that we are universal consciousness. We are also individuals. As individuals we need to honour our unique natures, and not our contrived natures that the world has told us we are. It was to do with your original blueprint, as this person. It's the you that you've always wanted to be, the only one you care to be. And once you recognize this real self again, you won't long for anything else.

I strongly feel that being suicidal is about this. A core self seeking its own essence, through the lens of distorted patterning. The distortions create dissonance through being triggered, and then the dissonance leads to an internal sense of self-separation and falsehood, which becomes anti-life. Fortunately the solutions are already inwardly available. It takes acknowledging what the original you wants and needs... what the green lights are for you in life, rather than the yellow and red lights. Spiritual systems and modern psychology are not addressing this adequately. Most are facilitating the person to bypass the problem by reaching for better feelings or better stories, rather than training in recognizing the real individuated consciousness that wants to live as its truest form. It's not enough to say that desire causes suffering. Suffering is created by the dissonance of living inauthentically. If we all lived according to our true nature, the individuated nature we came into the world as, I believe attached suffering would cease.

 

Recognizing and living as your real, truest self is to live in bliss. It doesn't have to be anymore complicated than that. If you're not in the present moment, if you're not content, if you feel dissonant and not in your body, if you are triggered, then you are being pointed to your freedom through the pain to your original you that wants to live as nothing other than you.

Edited May 28, 2017 by Orion

[silent thunder]

2 hours ago, Orion said:

Suffering is created by the dissonance of living inauthentically.

 

that is one powerful statement imbedded in powerhouse of insight. 

*deep bow*

 

thanks mate!

[johndoe2012]

There is an inner voice that knows what you need to do to live authentically but we suppress it to get things from our peers. 

 

At least this is my experience. 

 

Eg because of survival fears we chose a stinking job but it pays. We hate it but we survive... 

 

However it only lasts a while until it becomes unbearable. 

 

You need to live and express yourself as you feel deep down otherwise you end up suicidal and angry. 

[3bob]

we are countless woven souls but only one weavers hand is the source of  all of us, and that one never denies its countless weavings spun together out of light and which spring forth with soulful joy.... 

. 

[rene]

Your post is a true gift, Orion; thank you. Thanks also for allowing me to put it in my ppf. (-:

 

warm greetings

Edited May 28, 2017 by WuDao
ppf addition

[Orion]

You're welcome.

 

I just wanted to add... I don't mean to sound denigrating toward modern psychology or various spiritual systems like Buddhism. I am just detailing why they didn't work for me to repair my human level suffering. There's nothing wrong with experiencing universal consciousness or emptiness, I just think we have to feel whole as humans before we get to the dissolution stage.

 

To coin the chakra model for a second... traditionally in kundalini practices, you sort out your lower chakras before getting into the upper ones. The lower three are where most humans get stuck. For me the lower three are best addressed through real-self acknowledgment. If you try to get into the transpersonal levels of consciousness before your human level self is resolved, it could fuck you up further. I don't personally believe we can bypass the real-self without suffering consequences. We all experience distortional patterning of the real-self by virtue of coming into this human realm with all of its sensorial experiences. The degree of distortion depends on the personal experiences. Maybe this is by design, or by karma, or it's random -- hard to say. Regardless, the reason is not relevant because focusing on the solution - i.e. what does the real self want and need to feel its own wholeness - will enable the real-self to emerge through the distortions. I feel that regardless of a person's path in life, whether mundane, magical, spiritual, or transcendental, the real-self path has to be established or one part of the spiritual duality will remain dysfunctional and will not later be able to achieve blissful unity with the All.

 

In other words if you aren't living as the Brahman intended you to live, as you, then it will be hard to integrate divine experiences into your human level existence and you will continue to suffer on a very human level. The more I recognize and realize this, the more I see some of the real reasons for human suffering in the world across the board. If the real-self recognition is not happening; if the real-self is not the source of one's movement through life, then not only will their life force not be strong, they will also grasp endlessly at external forms in order to try and fill that void.

[liminal_luke]

Maybe I misunderstand but... I think that the people who experience "no-self" also have a really solid sense of who they are as particular individual people.  The contradiction between "no-self" and "strong-self" is only an apparent one.  And no it doesn`t make sense how both could be true at the same time.   That`s OK though, because we live in a paradoxical universe: nothing true ever makes sense, and nothing that makes sense is ever true.  The tao that can be told is not the eternal tao.

 

There`s not really a conflict between developing the self and dissolving the self.  Psychological therapies seem to aim towards building the self up while some mystical traditions seem to aim at tearing it down.  I believe we have to do both.   

[rene]

17 minutes ago, liminal_luke said:

Maybe I misunderstand but... I think that the people who experience "no-self" also have a really solid sense of who they are as particular individual people.  The contradiction between "no-self" and "strong-self" is only an apparent one.  And no it doesn`t make sense how both could be true at the same time.   That`s OK though, because we live in a paradoxical universe: nothing true ever makes sense, and nothing that makes sense is ever true.  The tao that can be told is not the eternal tao.

 

There`s not really a conflict between developing the self and dissolving the self.  Psychological therapies seem to aim towards building the self up while some mystical traditions seem to aim at tearing it down.  I believe we have to do both.   

 

Agree, and well said. The 'apparent' contradiction you spoke of is not present in real-self - which needs neither building up nor tearing down, only permission to breathe and rise to the fore, which it will do, when gently left alone. Or so it seems to me.

 

warm regards

[liminal_luke]

29 minutes ago, liminal_luke said:

 

There`s not really a conflict between developing the self and dissolving the self.  Psychological therapies seem to aim towards building the self up while some mystical traditions seem to aim at tearing it down.  I believe we have to do both.   

 

4 minutes ago, WuDao said:

 

 The 'apparent' contradiction you spoke of is not present in real-self - which needs neither building up nor tearing down, only permission to breathe and rise to the fore, which it will do, when gently left alone. Or so it seems to me.

 

 

You`re probably right WuDao. I suffer from a bad case of Western Do-itis and have a hard time gently leaving anything alone, especially my "self."  What you say though...probably right.

 

Warm regards as well

 

LL 

[Michael Sternbach]

I think what is really needed is both doing and non-doing, activity and passivity, self-assertion and letting go, expansion and contraction - in alternation. This is the secret of inner Alchemy.

[rene]

7 hours ago, Michael Sternbach said:

I think what is really needed is both doing and non-doing, activity and passivity, self-assertion and letting go, expansion and contraction - in alternation. This is the secret of inner Alchemy.

 

Yes, all of which real-self does on its own, naturally, as life comes.

[Orion]

13 hours ago, liminal_luke said:

Maybe I misunderstand but... I think that the people who experience "no-self" also have a really solid sense of who they are as particular individual people.  The contradiction between "no-self" and "strong-self" is only an apparent one.  And no it doesn`t make sense how both could be true at the same time.   That`s OK though, because we live in a paradoxical universe: nothing true ever makes sense, and nothing that makes sense is ever true.  The tao that can be told is not the eternal tao.

 

There`s not really a conflict between developing the self and dissolving the self.  Psychological therapies seem to aim towards building the self up while some mystical traditions seem to aim at tearing it down.  I believe we have to do both.   

 

Language.... it's a tricky thing.

 

The real self is not the experience of no self though. You can never really be just no self. You can experience the simultaneous duality (and perhaps unification) of the real self with the All, but one cannot sublimate the other. There is a human life in here that wants to be what it wants to be, individuated. I am not talking about personality level desire or the ego. It is actually easier to experience the real-self when the ego is softened. It is more subtle than that, and more powerful. I have found that trying to be wu wei before it naturally evolves only leads to health problems. What modern psychotherapy does is create extraneous layers upon the real self... it builds structures upon something that does not need more structures. All that something wants is acknowledgment and authentic living.

 

In any case, you can't abdicate a real-self, not while you're alive. The real-self knows that it comes from divine origin (for lack of a better term), but it wants to be the divine through the vehicle of its own unique nature.

 

I'm not sure what you mean about there being no conflict between developing the self and dissolving the self. There is nothing beyond, or underneath the real-self. You can't dissolve it or add to it. There's nothing to tear town. It's just there. It's you. It's the experiencer, but not in a wu wei way, in a way that is unique to each individual. We all have a real-self but each real-self is playing a slightly different tune and only wants to be that tune.

 

On the contrary, the real-self makes 100% sense. If you live authentically from it, you feel bliss. If you don't, you feel dissonance and suffering. The suffering comes from denial of the real-self authentic nature, either by willful ignorance or through patterned distortion.

[3bob]

the way I see it is that the human self is a matrix for the soul self to act through, and the soul self is a matrix for the eternal Self or Spirit to act through. Thus the human and soul selfs can not be fully satisfied until all three (or whatever system one wishes to use) are in alignment and firing on all 8 cylinders together - so to speak