There are little bits of information regarding self-immolation which are kind of coming together experientially (although no way to tell if this is genuine until it happens of course).
This stuff is quite bizarre so it is tricky to put down into writing, which is partly why I want to try, to crystallise/challenge this understanding further.
There is like a dichotomy in the way I look at the self - whether I consider it from the angle of identity or of instinctual being. The identity is clearly seen to be a belief, it is nothing but a belief, therefore it is made of ‘air’. The instinctual being however seems to carry some kind of ‘weight’, because it is not just a product of socialisation, it is a result of evolution. Therefore it seems concrete, like hardware as opposed to software. Whereas I can see the identity clearly as software, made of nothing but a big misunderstanding lol - an error just waiting to be corrected.
But of course this kinda splitting is more to do with my beliefs/feelings, so I was trying to get at the core of it today. What is it that actually goes? What is the nature of that which happens at self-immolation (is it a physical altering or is it more a complete seeing through of that which is not actual).
What I can see is that a lot of what we call ‘human nature’ is basically that which we consider to be set in stone, yet actually it is just more beliefs. Therefore I have serious suspicions about the instinctual being as something that is in any way concrete even if it arose evolutionarily, I guess why cannot an illusion arise evolutionarily, as a bi-product of consciousness evolving. It seems to me that self immolation is simply the end of an illusion, it is the final correction of a big misunderstanding - that ‘I’ exist in the first place.
Once the illusion disappears there is no longer a possibility for the instinctual passions to exist because they needed a ‘me’ to exist (even though ‘I’ was the very passions). ‘I’ needed to believe that ‘I’ exist in order for the whole drama to play out.
I guess the very convoluted point I am trying to get at is that self immolation appears to more closely resemble the ending of a belief, it just happens that the belief dispelled is that ‘I’ exist in the first place.
With the belief in ‘me’ collapsing so goes the ‘reality’, which ‘I’ existed in, so too go the emotions which required an ‘entity’ to have the emotions happen to. This entity being taken as a fact allowed the drama to play out, with the final seeing through of the belief in ‘me’ there is simply no longer any possibility for anything to arise from the affective faculty, in fact the entire affective faculty collapses as it’s functionality required illusion.
This lines up experientially for me, because why is it that the transition to a PCE is always seamless? Why is it that I instantaneously realise that I have been this actual body this entire time, but it is just that ‘I’ believed that ‘I’ existed, until ‘I’ abdicated the throne for some time and was realised to be nothing but an illusion.
It is always so obvious, so crystal clear, always the same sense of ‘how could I have been so blind this whole time’.
Contemplating this stuff is giving me some inklings that self-immolation is so very doable, that it ‘requires no energy at all’ as it is the ending of something that does not exist to begin with.
This is in contrast with the way I was looking at it previously which viewed it as some heroic shifting of the very hardware of the brain, a getting rid of some actual part/mechanism and replacing it with a new one.
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