Spilling the beans

[tsuki]

I will now tell you everything I know, definitely, through self-observation and participation in the unfolding of the mind. If it seems difficult, it only seems so because it is usually unnamed, too obvious to notice so it is not discussed. Try to see it in yourself as you read this.

The most basic unit of the mind is a story. It has a past, present and a future. The present moment is always infinitely small in it, unnoticeable, fleeting and valueless. The most important feature of the story is that it wants to be played out, it needs to reach its conclusion. All stories have a charge, innate motion which is a compulsion from its origin to its conclusion. They grab us and take us places, we participate.

The experience of participating in a story is called emotion. We can always make the story explicit with language by experiencing the emotion. When the story is expressed, we can inspect it more clearly. In inspecting the story, we make it into an object of the mind that we can manipulate. In doing so, the underlying emotions change. We can completely decouple stories from emotions, which is to say that we stop participating in them, by not believing them. The more we believe a story, the less it is an object of the mind, the less we can manipulate it, the more real it appears and more emotions arise. We build stories ever since we were born as a person and a lot of stories have not been expressed and are still believed/participated in. There are no emotions apart from participation in a story.

Identity is the character of the story. You only have an identity because you do not realize your true nature. This "hole", or "gap" needs to be filled. It will never be filled with the mind because what you are is more basic than the mind. Thinking "I" is like having a pen and a piece of paper and trying to draw paper. 

[No1Here2c]

8 minutes ago, tsuki said:

Thinking "I" is like having a pen and a piece of paper and trying to draw paper. 

To me it is more like having a pen drawn on a piece of paper, then attempting to utilize that drawing of a pen to sketch with. Never going to work.

[tsuki]

The greatest secret of the mind lies in the fact that you are doing it. All of the stories are made up in some way or another. All of the stories you participate in (emote) have been believed by non other than you yourself. And the biggest secret of it all is that the person you think you are is a character in a story. It has exactly as much appearance of reality as you grant it by believing the stories. Belief is a form action, like grasping an object with your hand. Grasping and letting go can be trained. When you believe a story you make it true, you behave as if it is the truth, you act in accordance with this story. The compulsion (the must) of this grasping is emotion. Experience the emotion and in doing so, you experience the grasping, the compulsion. The emotion "makes you" behave in accordance with what you believe. In truth, you want to feel what you feel so that the story progresses towards its conclusion. You want to experience all emotion you have, so that all stories you believe in keep playing out the way they are "supposed to". Even the "negative" emotions such as fear, anger, sadness and depression, all of them is what you want to do, so that the story keeps being true, because you believe it. "Positive" emotions are rare because they do not serve the purpose of progressing the story. Some of them, such as hope or wonder can appear so that stories can keep on going.

The biggest reason you need others is to give "objective", "external" validation to what you believe. You can only exist in groups that have similar values, pursue similar goals, take part in similar stories. You say that someone "gets you" when they feel the same things you feel when you tell them the story of your life. This is the same as saying that they believe the same thing you believe in, that your stories converge. If someone contradicts your experience, when they offer a perspective that makes you feel different from what your initial reaction was, you feel hostile because you value your stories. When someone says something that contradicts your story ("you're stupid") you feel hurt. You may respond in the like so that they are also hurt, by messing with their story, by presenting evidence that their story is incorrect/invalid. Sometimes, when there is a painful event, someone makes a comment that makes the event seem unreal, silly, you laugh. You call it humor and pay people to relieve you of your burdens this way.

[tsuki]

There is another step to this.

Things do not exist the way they appear to.

Everything you can point to is activity pretending to be a thing. A self is activity. A thought is activity. Fear is activity. Personality is activity. A relationship is activity. A nation is activity. Even the body is activity.

They look stable only because the process is continuous.

A flame looks like an object but it is burning. A whirlpool looks like a thing but it is flowing. The self looks permanent but it is being continuously recreated every moment through mental activity.

This is why the mind is exhausting.

The mind is doing.

Constantly:
- maintaining,
- comparing,
- remembering,
- anticipating,
- defending,
- justifying,
- correcting,
- becoming.

The self is not something that exists.
The self is something that is being done.

And this is why it feels unstable under observation. Because when the activity weakens, the thing weakens with it.

People usually think they are afraid of losing something they have. In reality, they are afraid that the activity maintaining the character will fail. They are afraid of dissolution.

This is why silence feels so strange.

Without constant mental movement, the character starts disappearing. The mind immediately starts doing again:
- thinking,
- fantasizing,
- worrying,
- remembering,
- planning.

Anything to keep the structure going.

And this is where the deepest confusion happens.

People think that "being" means existing as a thing. But all things are unstable. All things are temporary. All things require maintenance. In that sense, all things are existentially false. They appear self-existing but they are not. They are processes.

Meanwhile nothingness, emptiness, the not-a-thing all things appear within, does not need maintenance.

It does not continue itself.
It does not defend itself.
It does not become.
It does not resist dissolution.

Because dissolution itself happens within it.

This is why "nothing" cannot disappear. It is not a thing among things. It is the openness all things happen within.

Mind is movement away from this.
Mind is doing.
Mind is becoming.

Awareness itself is already still before the mind starts moving.

This is why no achievement finally satisfies the self. The self is made out of continuation. It survives by moving toward the next thing. The moment one story finishes, another one starts immediately.

The self is a machine that turns being into becoming.

Most people are never at rest because they are continuously recreating themselves through mental activity. They think this activity is what they are.

But you can observe it directly.

Sit still and watch.

The mind starts doing.