"I am this flesh and blood body" vs anatta

[son_of_bob]

Apologies, I have only a superficial understanding of Buddhism so hopefully my questions and points don’t come across as too dense (in the sense of stupid for anybody translating out there).

There were several things brought up in this discussion I didn’t know the meaning or gist of so I looked up definitions from a range of different sources to see how they described some of these terms.

This anatta, does it then imply the belief that the body is an illusion as well as the self?

Does this anatta (no central locus of experience/experiencer) not contradict Buddhist concepts as regards rebirth (reincarnation) and karma? Now am just curious as to what they posit as the mechanism for how those phenomena occur.

I don’t think I actually understand what the ultimate motivation for a Buddhist is then? What is their end goal and why?

[jamesy]

For the historical Buddha, anatta means that the components that make up the self are created (saṅkhata), and therefore must perish. Due to their created nature, the self cannot be improved, transformed, or really even controlled at all.

All forms of Buddhism are inherently very religious. This is an underdiscussed topic, but the historical Buddha believed that much of rebirth was really just being born repeatedly in hell—or some variation of it (e.g. as a ghost or an animal)—with no real hope of escaping this cycle: Paṁsu Suttas (SN 56:102–113), trans. Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu. So the motivation for early Buddhists was essentially to escape potential birth in hell, which is why the lowest-hanging fruit of early Buddhism was sotāpanna, which assured the individual of never again being born in hell. The attainment of sotāpanna was actually defined in terms of having faith in Buddha and possessing good moral virtue: Rāja Sutta (SN 55:1), trans. Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu.

[henryyyyyyyyyy]

What are the implications of that word, ‘created’?

[jamesy]

So the implication is theological.

In early Buddhism it’s not possible to know that the energy of the self is created without contrasting it with something uncreated (asaṅkhata). This seems to be why the forerunner of the Noble Eightfold Path is described as “discernment,” re: Mahā Cattārīsaka Sutta (MN 117), trans. Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu:

“And what is the right view that is noble, without effluents, transcendent, a factor of the path? The discernment, the faculty of discernment, the strength of discernment, . . .

We see also in Khandha Sutta (SN 25:10), trans. Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu:

. . . “Monks, form is inconstant, changeable, alterable. Feeling.… Perception.… Fabrications.… Consciousness is inconstant, changeable, alterable. . . .

“One who knows and sees that these phenomena are this way is called a stream-enterer . . .

It seems like the self’s created nature gives it a kind of contour that makes it unamenable to being changed or manipulated, re: Pañca Sutta (SN 22:59), trans. Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu:

“Form, monks, is not self. If form were the self, this form would not lend itself to dis-ease. It would be possible (to say) with regard to form, ‘Let my form be thus. Let my form not be thus.’ But precisely because form is not self, this form lends itself to dis-ease. And it is not possible (to say) with regard to form, ‘Let my form be thus. Let my form not be thus.’

So Buddhism and psychotherapy or self-help are contrasted on the basis that the goal of Buddhism is self-transcendence, and not editing, improvement, or transmutation of the self.

Obviously, to transcend the self, something external to it is needed, a kind of grace if you will, and this is why Julius Evola says:

What has to be negated most decisively is the transposition to this field to the individualistic and democratic view οf the “self-made man,” that is, the idea that anyone who wants can become an “initiate,” and that he can also become one οn his own, through his own strength alone, by resorting to various kinds οί “exercises” and practices. This is an illusion, the truth being that through his own strength alone, the human individual cannot go beyond human individuality, and that any positive result in this field is conditioned by the presence and action οί a genuine power οf a different, nonindividual order.¹

In later Buddhism, the need for grace is made explicit with the doctrine of empowerment, in which it is stated that some kind contact or transmission with a guru is needed to enable the seeker to practice a sādhana, without which empowerment, the sādhana is impotent:

Without empowerment there’s no accomplishment;
You can’t get oil from pressing sand.²

In actualism, the thing external to the self is probably pure intent, re: Selected Correspondence: Pure Intent:

Incidentally, just before/ just as the PCE starts to wear off, if one unravels (metaphorically) a ‘golden thread’ or ‘clew’, as one is slipping back into the real-world, *an intimate connection is thus established betwixt the pristine-purity of an actual innocence and the near-purity of the sincerity of naiveté*.

So the question probably centers around which school of thought considers “what” to be absolute. For Richard, the absolute is the physical universe, however defined, whereas for religion, the absolute is… spaceless, timeless, and so on. But we can debate this last question another time.

1. Julius Evola, Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for Aristocrats of the Soul, trans. Joscelyn Godwin and Constance Fontanta (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions), Google Play, chap. 29.
2. Dpal-sprul O-rgyan-ʾjigs-med-chos-kyi-dbaṅ-po, The Words of My Perfect Teacher, trans. Padmakara Translation Group (Boston: Shambhala, 1998), 332.

[henryyyyyyyyyy]

Thank you for this excellent breakdown, it has given me a little more insight into buddhism.

It’s interesting that the Buddha seems to regard that which is changeable as therefore automatically stressful whereas for free people that is an aspect of infinitude, non-stressful. I suppose changeability is always uncomfortable for a ‘self;’ where is security when anything can (and will) change?

[Srinath]

@jamesy Seems you know your Buddhism I’m curious about how this came to be and how you chanced on actualism, if you would like to share. Also what you are doing these days in terms of actualism practice (if any)?

[jamesy]

So I live in (probably) what Richard would call an Altered State of Consciousness. The exact description of what my day-to-day state is is almost exactly what Bernadette Roberts describes as the unitive state in her initial trilogy of books. Basically it is as if the constituent parts of my person are oriented around an impersonal center, this center exerts a kind of magnetism on my faculties which is constantly lulling me into a kind of “sleep.” This impersonal center is basically the absence of any created aspect of my personality, but it forms the lynchpin of my entire person.

Apart from that I experience all of the emotions however, such as anger, nervousness, and so on. What spurred my recent participation in this forum was the (regular) recurrence of this kind of confession-and-repentance cycle that I’ve been going through in my personal life; essentially my anger would always get the best of me in some kind of situation, and afterwards I would feel guilty and some kind of need to confess to it. I found the cycle to be tiresome and I know that Richard mentioned this kind of phenomenon in his diary.

For the past year or two—or maybe just the past year—I’ve noticed a seeming ability for myself to tap into pure intent, which in my experience is felt like a kind of silencing of all the decision-making faculties of my person, and alignment with a kind of simple and honest sincerity. But despite this ability, I’ve found that I haven’t been able to squeeze much out of pure intent, nor make it stick. After the most recent confession-and-repentance cycle, it seems like my access to pure intent has been “blocked,” but I’m not sure how that’s possible.

So I wouldn’t say I’ve ever had an actualist practice, especially not something like being attentive to or investigating feelings. Essentially I was initially existential fascinated by actualism but intellectually revulsed by it, re: its claims of newness and being 180 degrees opposite. But in recent years this intellectual revulsion has dwindled somewhat and I’ve come to (somehow) see more and more how some of Richard’s claims of newness and being 180 degrees opposite can be interpreted literally, which to me was a surprising observation. (I can give examples later, some of these are quite fun. It’s basically possible to prove Richard’s claim of there being no potent enlightened beings after 1992.)

So yeah that’s basically me. I do feel as if I have an intuitive understanding of what self-immolation and being out-from-control entail, but I don’t really have an explanation for how I would know that.

Part of me is curious as to how people have succeeded in becoming actually free whilst circumventing any involvement in an organized religion, but then again, maybe that’s the whole point of the Actual Freedom Trust website.

Thanks for asking @Srinath.

[jamesy]

So I think most of the rhetoric in modern Western Buddhism about the historical Buddha’s concern with impermanence and so on is maybe overblown. I don’t think Buddhism is really a “psychological” religion, its truth is probably theological. This is probably why over time it has tended to become more and more theistic, especially in East Asian Mahāyāna and Tibetan Buddhism.

My understanding is that the Buddha probably directed his followers to observe the aggregates (khandha) because being one’s self is probably the most intimately accessible kind of experience one has, and therefore probably the only sensor by which someone can come to know whatever transcends the self (in actualist terms, “God, by whatever name”). So whoever understands themselves can thereby understand whatever they depend on for their existence, and so on and so forth.

In theory, one could become enlightened by contemplating rocks, but we don’t really know what it’s like to be a rock—we do know what it’s like to be ourselves, however—hence why the rock contemplation is probably not prescribed.

[henryyyyyyyyyy]

Do you think you’ve benefited from what Richard has to say about the anger-confession repentance cycle? Are you still exploring that?

That’s interesting what you have to say about proving that there have been no new potent enlightened beings, could you say more about that?

[Srinath]

@jamesy

So I live in (probably) what Richard would call an Altered State of Consciousness. The exact description of what my day-to-day state is is almost exactly what Bernadette Roberts describes as the unitive state in her initial trilogy of books. Basically it is as if the constituent parts of my person are oriented around an impersonal center, this center exerts a kind of magnetism on my faculties which is constantly lulling me into a kind of “sleep.” This impersonal center is basically the absence of any created aspect of my personality, but it forms the lynchpin of my entire person.

Fascinating stuff and thanks for your detailed reply. Would that translate roughly into being an Arahant/Arhat in Theravadan Buddhist terms – or do you not see it like that? I’m curious about how you would map or parse you current condition in Buddhist terms used to assess these sorts of things e.g. adivader from the DHO who was on here once and said that he had an “adept level skill in stopping the chains of DO at contact itself.” Would you consider yourself to simply be enlightened - or does that sort language not appeal to you?

@jamesy

Apart from that I experience all of the emotions however, such as anger, nervousness, and so on. What spurred my recent participation in this forum was the (regular) recurrence of this kind of confession-and-repentance cycle that I’ve been going through in my personal life; essentially my anger would always get the best of me in some kind of situation, and afterwards I would feel guilty and some kind of need to confess to it. I found the cycle to be tiresome and I know that Richard mentioned this kind of phenomenon in his diary.

I’m guessing you mean from his enlightened days. I can’t recall exactly what Richard said, but that sounds about right. I do remember Richard telling me once about this well known aspect of ‘holy rage’ that was not uncommon in enlightened gurus in India, whose disciples and students gave them a wide berth as a result! I know Nisargadatta was famed for this.

If you are aware of it, how you would compare your current experience to that documented by Richard in his enlightened days?

@jamesy

For the past year or two—or maybe just the past year—I’ve noticed a seeming ability for myself to tap into pure intent, which in my experience is felt like a kind of silencing of all the decision-making faculties of my person, and alignment with a kind of simple and honest sincerity. But despite this ability, I’ve found that I haven’t been able to squeeze much out of pure intent, nor make it stick. After the most recent confession-and-repentance cycle, it seems like my access to pure intent has been “blocked,” but I’m not sure how that’s possible.

Here is where it gets tricky. I wouldn’t really characterise pure intent as ‘a silencing of all the decision-making faculties of my person’.

Secondly …‘alignment with a kind of simple and honest sincerity’ while getting a little closer to it is still quite some distance away from an unequivocal tapping into pure intent. Richard’s definition which is hard to improve on is: … a palpable life-force; an actually occurring stream of benevolence and benignity that originates in the vast and utter stillness that is the essential character of the universe itself.

So that’s what is like – it is experienced as this rather lovely, pure, radiant energy (used loosely) that bathes and saturates everything. It is especially experienced like this as a feeling being, where it is quite the hit! But yes, there is this experience of giving over one’s striving and agency over to it – ‘giving up the controls’ so one melts into the effortless ease and inevitability of this moment.

This is going beyond my pay grade given my very limited experience with meditation and none with enlightenment. Not meaning to offend, but I guess going by Richard’s take on it would be that you’ve gone pretty far down the wrong way and will need to come back out before you can make genuine contact with pure intent and progress to actual freedom – as he did.

But I’m guessing this is not what you want to hear and that you probably want to see if you can harness pure intent in order to become actually free and eliminate feeling being and emotions whilst continuing in your present state? Okay, I’m happy to speculate in a very wild, heretical and probably ill-advised way here lol. I guess it would mean that we’d need to somehow completely overhaul the AF/Enlightenment model in a way radically different to the AFT and see them as able to co-exist side by side rather than being mutual opposites, so one could have all the benefits of anatman on one hand, whilst also enjoying pure intent and the absence of feeling being on the other! If such a thing were ever possible then the main problem is execution. How do you do it and how do you stop yourself from getting totally lost in some strange hybrid condition, with no ability to tell the wood from the trees. From what I remember ex-DHO alumnus Christian claimed to have done this and possibly Tarin Greco. Not sure if you know or heard of them. I’m not going to go into the problems with their claims, but there is a somewhat long laundry list.

@jamesy

So I wouldn’t say I’ve ever had an actualist practice, especially not something like being attentive to or investigating feelings. Essentially I was initially existential fascinated by actualism but intellectually revulsed by it, re: its claims of newness and being 180 degrees opposite. But in recent years this intellectual revulsion has dwindled somewhat and I’ve come to (somehow) see more and more how some of Richard’s claims of newness and being 180 degrees opposite can be interpreted literally, which to me was a surprising observation. (I can give examples later, some of these are quite fun. It’s basically possible to prove Richard’s claim of there being no potent enlightened beings after 1992.)

Yes, I recall similar irritations

@jamesy

So yeah that’s basically me. I do feel as if I have an intuitive understanding of what self-immolation and being out-from-control entail, but I don’t really have an explanation for how I would know that.

Part of me is curious as to how people have succeeded in becoming actually free whilst circumventing any involvement in an organized religion, but then again, maybe that’s the whole point of the Actual Freedom Trust website.

I don’t think it is possible to intuit self-immolation really. But maybe you’ve had parallel experiences in your own practice that i’m not aware of. Being out from control, is not an uncommon experience so fair enough.

And yes, exactly to your last point!

I wonder what Craig would have said to all this?

[claudiu]

@Srinath

I guess it would mean that we’d need to somehow completely overhaul the AF/Enlightenment model in a way radically different to the AFT and see them as able to co-exist side by side rather than being mutual opposites, so one could have all the benefits of anatman on one hand, whilst also enjoying pure intent and the absence of feeling being on the other! If such a thing were ever possible then the main problem is execution. How do you do it and how do you stop yourself from getting totally lost in some strange hybrid condition […]

I don’t think it would be possible! As you described it yourself here, it would necessarily be a ‘hybrid condition’

Buuut more to the point… the experience of what’s called “anatman” is a function of the feeling-being! You can’t have one without the other. So any combination of the two would be no combination at all, it’d be still being a feeling-being , with some imitations of actuality thrown in . . .

However! I will reiterate that of course being enlightened to whatever degree doesn’t mean one can’t pursue actual freedom, as Richard obviously did and succeeded. It may be harder than if one weren’t, but … we all start where we are at. This would require a being willing to “let go” of that state… but self-immolating as a ‘normal’ person requires letting-go of the ‘normal’ feeling-being-ness anyway.

@jamesy

For the past year or two—or maybe just the past year—I’ve noticed a seeming ability for myself to tap into pure intent, which in my experience is felt like a kind of silencing of all the decision-making faculties of my person, and alignment with a kind of simple and honest sincerity. But despite this ability, I’ve found that I haven’t been able to squeeze much out of pure intent, nor make it stick. After the most recent confession-and-repentance cycle, it seems like my access to pure intent has been “blocked,” but I’m not sure how that’s possible.

It is interesting and a promising step that you noticed the confession-and-repentance cycles. It has shown you that there is something rather fundamentally lacking about the “unitive state” !

The way you talk about pure intent here, indicates already why you’re having difficulties with it. Firstly you talk of your access being “blocked” as if by some outside force – but the only thing that would ‘block’ any access to pure intent is you yourself of course! So think of it more like you have ‘lost’ or ‘misplaced’ your access to it, and it will help to clarify the nature of it. You don’t need to find out what external thing is blocking it… rather you just need you yourself to find it again (it’s in your hands only).

Secondly you talk of “squeezing” things out of pure intent, which I know is a colloquialism, but it indicates a controlling approach to it – as in, pure intent is a tool in your toolbox, you take it out and try to apply it to things to get some use out of it, etc. But it’s rather the other way around. It’s more like pure intent is something that already exists out there and is everywhere all-at-once. You can’t modify it or change it. You can’t grab it and apply it to this or that. Rather it is more about allowing yourself to experience it. You “let it in”, so to speak. And then once you have that thread to it, you follow the thread. The thread leads to the actual world of course .

But the key distinction I’m drawing here is it’s not that you → use → pure intent, it’s more like you ← allow ← pure intent. Instead of you living life, it is letting life live you. You are purposefully swapping the agency aspect of it, instead of you controlling it, you allow yourself to be guided by it. And it’s not a semantic trickery, that is experientially how it works. Then the degree to which it is effective is the degree to which you allow it to happen, with the PCE being the ultimate in a temporary experience (where you allow yourself to completely disappear, albeit temporarily) and actual freedom being the ultimate of the ultimate, where ‘you’ go away forever.

Cheers,
Claudiu

[FrankN]

@Srinath

Richard telling me once about this well known aspect of ‘holy rage’ that was not uncommon in enlightened gurus in India, whose disciples and students gave them a wide berth as a result! I know Nisargadatta was famed for this.