Thank you Vineeto, your post was initially received on my end with a ‘sting’ (the sting being ‘my’ emotional reaction to the facts presented), the thought of “how can I still manage to get things so wrong”, but of course I will continue to miss the mark until I hit bullseye. It’s better to correct course in an expedient manner rather than having to go so far down the road to realise it is a dead end. I will just add that conversing with you has always made me think to what Richard wrote in his journal - “I am experiencing life from the vantage point of being a totally fascinated person … and a fascinated person is someone who can be extremely interesting to be with for those who dare”. This “for those who dare” is a key qualifier here because there is simply no way ‘I’ could predict what you are going to say. Whatever ‘Vineeto’ exists in ‘my’ psyche is of course not the flesh and blood Vineeto that writes the post, as always originally and completely impervious to anything that may be going on in ‘my’ reality.
I was doing a lot of driving yesterday for work and so I had plenty of time to contemplate on what was being spoken about. I can see now that to go down the route I was presenting would be for ‘me’ to try to squeeze ‘myself’ into actuality and of course take all ‘my’ serious standards along with ‘me’. So ‘I’ was the arbiter who managed to reverse the order of operations, now it is actuality that had to prove itself to ‘me’, against ‘my’ standards.
I did have many fascinating flashes yesterday of the answer to this, they all had the same flavour of total release. This total release was related to the nature of what happens at self-immolation, which is specifically not only that ‘I’ cease to exist but that ‘I’ would have never actually existed in the first place. So of course trying to take any standard of ‘mine’ into actuality would be back to front, for that standard ceases to exist when ‘I’ disappear. And not only that but looking back that standard would ultimately never have made sense to begin with, as it required ‘my’ existence as a reference point.
I wrote a while ago that it seems there is a pin that holds the web of reality in place and that it seems it could be pulled out. What I could see is that ‘I’ am this pin, that ‘I’ am taken as a fact and therefore ‘I’ become the arbiter, the reference point against which this entire web of belief is weaved around. All ‘my’ standards, indeed the story of ‘my’ life requires of course that ‘I’ am taken as a fact. Upon ‘my’ dissolution there is no longer any reference point, the story of ‘my’ life becomes ultimately meaningless, it was a story of someone who imagined ‘himself’ to exist.
Of course ‘I’ am not meaningless in this endeavour of becoming actually free as ‘I’ am the only one who can set this body free, it is more the seeing that when ‘I’ self immolate ‘I’ become extinct, which means that any construct that ‘I’ weaved will also dissolve, it will no longer make sense as it required ‘me’ as the arbiter.
So yes there was so much release in these experiences because it showed that with ‘me’ never having actually existed in the first place nothing was ever actually wrong, the painful story of ‘my’ life is only as real as ‘I’ am, and that it is possible for all of that to become extinct in one fell swoop.