If I'm not the one inside my head, then who is?

I enjoy Zen.

But I have no desire to actually practice Zen. Not formally. Too much work. Too much discipline. Too much bowing before a master who, you eventually realize, doesn't deserve veneration.

I prefer the idea of being my own Zen teacher. That way, I can do as much Zen-stuff as I want, in the way I want to, when and how I want. 

Which includes giving myself koans to solve. This is my new one:

If I'm not the one inside my head, then who is?

l really like this koan. I'm SO happy I thought of it. Or rather, that someone inside my head thought of it. If I was sure who it was, I wouldn't have gotten this koan, would I?

It sends a pleasing tickle up my psychological spine when I try to grok it. Kind of like when you're at the top of the first big hill on a roller-coaster ride, and you know that the bottom is going to drop out of your gut soon.

I come to this koan after spending thirty-five years devoted to an Eastern form of mystical meditation. Then spending the past ten years in a churchless de-conversion from a bunch of stuff I no longer believe in.

Such as the existence of a self or soul.

The Sant Mat faith I used to follow, being based on Hindu and Sikh sorts of teachings, posited the existence of an eternal soul. The goal was to merge the drop of the soul in the ocean of God. Which only makes sense if there is such a thing as a soul.

I talked about this in "Not-self a teaching of Buddhism, not HInduism."

In other words, Buddhism doesn't consider there is any unchanging, permanent, foundational aspect to reality. Rather, everything is interconnected, "empty." 

Not empty in the sense of nothingness, a void. Empty in the sense that every seemingly separate entity lacks a distinct individuality, a quality unique to itself, an eternal aspect, a being-ness all to its own.

However, Hinduism and other like-minded faiths (including, as mentioned above, Christianity) posit the existence of Atman, or soul. Atman supposedly is an everlasting drop of the spiritual ocean, Brahman, our real self.

Modern neuroscience, of course, agrees that we don't have, or are, an enduring self.

Sam Harris hammers on this theme in his new book, "Waking Up." For him, real spirituality (and also science) is knowing that you aren't a soul or self. (Along this line, see also here, here, and here.) 

But the illusion persists, likely for good evolutionary reasons.

Our marvelous human capacity for abstraction, creativity, envisioning alternative futures, and such requires a splitting-off from the evident here-and-now to ponder a possible there-and-then. Other animals probably don't consider they have a self or soul. 

They also don't consider much of anything, compared to humans. 

So I roll that koan around inside my head, where, almost certainly, there is actually nothing like the sense of "I" that seems so real to me. 

My favorite aspect of the koan is the concluding then who is? 

If I'm not the one inside my head, then who is? 

Best I can tell, nobody. There's something like 100 billion neurons in the human brain, each connected to many others -- maybe 100 trillion connections in all. Wow. That's a hell of a lot.

More than enough to make a who is? 

And more than enough to fashion a form of consciousness able to wonder who is doing the wondering about who is?

When my koan reveals more about itself, readers of this blog will be the second (or maybe the first) to know.  

Comments

[777]

There is no God
is the same as
everything is God

after the 35 yrs you should grep that

777

ps
neither there is enlightenment or awareness
There is only Love

[Willie R.]

I were no good at English, so now I are an Engineer.

[azizananda]

Where did you get the fine drawing. I really like it. Could be multipurpose.

[cc]

Like the illusion of the sun rising and setting, the illusion of "who" persists. But the persistence of the illusion is not a problem once the mind is informed of what the illusion represents.

Everything the mind knows (consciously or unconsciously) is a representation of something real, fictitious, or fantastic, and the reasonable mind is constantly questioning its content and discarding the rubbish, that which doesn't stand up to scrutiny. The religious mind, on the other hand, makes a fetish of mental rubbish, revering it and giving it authority over all its content.

[vinny]

Whether we believe self or believe no existence of self , its still in the realm of belief. Neuroscience cannot answer why one person is born as beggar and the other a prince. We can talk of random chance here but even the shit is not formed by random chance.

[Steven B]

I like this; it makes tons of sense. "Men inside of my head" is a very weird idea.
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