Well, I thought maybe it would be a good idea to follow Vineeto’s advice here as actual advice being given 
So I thought today would be a perfect day to self-immolate, during an outing riding bikes. I did not succeed, but I did clear a lot of the way forward.
Firstly when I made the decision to do it, came a now-familiar feeling of fear, which indicated to me I was going further into little-explored territory, so it was sincere, which is why it was effective.
One huge thing that happened, basically of worldview-shattering proportions, was that I was able to see how actually rotten not only the ideal of ‘fairness’ is, but any ideal at all! It happened that I was feeling upset about how a conversation earlier in the day went. I thought it was unfair that when I act a certain way, the other person gets upset at me, but then they act that exact same way towards me. It was basically ‘unfair’, in that they wanted me to act a certain way without doing it themselves!
For the ideal of fairness, this is an injustice, and justice might be served, which would be served by some appropriately-chosen retributive punishment. But I did not want to serve this retribution because I knew it would just hurt the other person, and then they may very well hurt me back, and on a terrible cycle would go. But that then fed back into the unfairness because the other person would very much serve the retribution in the same situation!
I thought back to the insight about how I will actually just die one day, forever, and I saw it really didn’t matter what a person said or did on this day in the grand scheme. It hit deeper than this though, I saw that the very person ‘I’ am that has this ability to be affected this way, there is something wrong with this, this ‘identity’ that ‘I’ am being is what is at fault (and not the emotional reaction per se).
I saw that it would be silly to serve the retribution, and it is actually sensible to enjoy and appreciate being alive despite what the person says or does. And if they choose to get upset themselves or serve this retribution or what not, it is again silly to engage and ‘payback’ and sensible to not perpetuate that cycle. But wouldn’t this be ‘unfair’, they ‘get to’ serve retribution and ‘I’ don’t? And the answer is… yes, it is “unfair”, but fairness is the problem here!
In other words the sensible thing here is to discard this ideal of ‘fairness’. And instead behave sensibly in the situation, and not mindlessly perpetuate this cycle, which is actually rather childish in hindsight, despite how seriously it can be dressed up.
And then of course I saw that ideals in and of themselves are part of the problem! I at first thought they were the problem they were trying to solve, but then I saw this isn’t quite accurate. The human condition is the problem, ideals are a mechanism by which to attempt to control and restrain the human condition, and they work to a degree – better a civilization than a kill-or-be-killed wild state of constant tribal warfare – but ultimately they fail, and just lead to conflict on a world scale when ideals in different nations conflict.
And then I saw how ideals are confusing because there are so many, and they conflict, and it’s actually not possible to live cleanly and purely and in alignment with all the ideals. But doing away with ideals entirely, you can live sensibly and with full sincerity and alignment with what is actual, because actuality is a rock-solid firm foundation of benevolent existence, there are no contradictions to be had (t)here.
Ok that was one thing – the next is I saw that I was very insecure! I was afraid of doing it wrong, of being shown to not be competent.
And then I saw the temptation to flip from insecurity to overconfidence – to going from assuming I am “doing it wrong” to assuming I am doing everything ‘right’, a blanket statement about ‘me’ (‘me’ inferior → ‘me’ superior).
But both of these are utterly silly. It is sensible, rather, to take it on a case by case basis. For example I know a lot about programming and very little about embroidery. It would be silly to be confident about my embroidery skills, but sensible to be so about programming. And with succeeding with self-immolation, I’m clearly very much on the right track!
The third thing then was to see that I was feeling a feeling of ‘dread’ around what will come, about the outcome of self-immolation. This has been in the background, but only labeled as such today. And I just stopped to look at it as I realized it was so weird. All my experiences of what actuality is actually like, none of them have anything occurring in them whatsoever as for it to be sensible to react with ‘dread’ to it! It is all wonderful, pristine, pure, etc. So this feeling of dread is simply not sensible. My emotional reactions are misaligned with what is actual. Actually what it makes sense to dread is continuing to be the human condition with all its mayhem and misery!
This led to a fourth thing which is seeing that I still had a habitual habit from my days of doing vipassana meditation, which is essentially to withdraw away from what is happening and focus on internal faux-physical[1] sensations, particularly ones in my head area. This instantly is a downer and saps away enjoying being alive.
I took a nap after the bike ride and had a nightmare scenario recurring wherein the physical sensations in my head grew and grew in intensity until there was nothing but a madness cacophony of them, and I did all I could in that dream-state to back away from it and not go there!
And now I wonder if the ‘dread’ I was feeling is from intuitively mistaking the goal of self-immolation with the old long-abandoned goal of Vipassana meditation, which would indeed be going towards the direction where the dream was pointing.
And it just struck me how much of an utter lie the flavor of meditation I was doing, is! It did indeed encourage me down the path of dissociating into these faux-physical[1:1] sensations. And it is all based on the utter lie that anything in all of experience is impermanent and transitory and instantly fading (not true, actuality is not impermanent, and not everything instantly fades), that there is not really any ‘self’ that exists (not true, the identity is very real and it is madness to pretend it isn’t), and that everything is unsatisfactory and filled with and laced with suffering (not true, so much of being alive is a delight!)
And you train yourself to focus and see everything this way, which of course is a huge downer, and then is a self-fulfilling prophecy as your life will quickly start to suck after that… at which point they re-offer that same poison as being the solution to your new problem, which they say has always been a problem but you just didn’t know it before!
Utter insane crazy madness that nobody should ever even step in that direction at all.
The delightful thing of course is that now I’m percipient and aware of this and it is obvious it is all based on a lie, and I simply don’t have to do that anymore – and of course actuality does not lie in that direction at all, it has nothing to do with it!!!
Ok thus ends my day, which was certainly full and worthwhile even if my decision to self-immolate today didn’t come to fruition!
Cheers,
Claudiu