I don’t know how to write or formulate this idea(s) so bear with me.

I was having angry and hateful thoughts all day. Then sometime in the early evening I couldn’t cope with it, and sat down to meditate. Within a couple minutes I began to feel better. I was still having the same thoughts but the anger was dissipating. The thought was no longer colored by hate and anger, but plain. How did that happen? As I withdrew from the overload of sensory information (eyes, ears, etc….) my breathing improved and a feeling of pleasantness and equanimity arose in me. It’s as if those emotions were put on pause and my thought stream became bare – no longer fueled by anger, hate, etc. This is when I started my little experiment. I said to myself, “these thoughts, I don’t want these, I don’t like these, these thoughts are not mine”. I had the impression my self – more aligned with that pleasant-equanimous feeling – was being regenerated, and perhaps, I associated that feeling with the body, and not the mind (a problematic duality?).

A later day, I was sobbing uncontrollably. That evening, I was feeling the pressure of living my life, and I began to well up inside. I couldn’t hold back, nor could I stop the lengthy release. Perhaps it was my ego, but I just couldn’t understand, and I didn’t want to be associated with the event; so I cleverly started to use the thing paradigm (a perversion of Kant’s noumenal ‘thing in itself’ theory). I said to myself, “I don’t understand this thing, I can’t help it anymore, I don’t even want this thing.” And as before, as this shift occurred, I perceived my self regenerating, but this time towards the cool detached thoughts of my mind, and not my body.

From these two accounts I suspect a couple of things: the self is a fabrication, the self is not permanent, but evolving, and one naturally prefers happiness and pleasure. Some questions: what’s wrong with a moving self? Isn’t the no-self (not-self) concept extreme?

…to be continued