Appearance Without a Perceiver
Apariencia sin un perceptor
A gentle investigation into how sounds, sensations, and thoughts simply appear on their own, without a separate self at the center experiencing them.
Appearance Without a Perceiver
Breathing is happening.
Sounds.
Sensations are happening.
Thoughts are happening, most likely.
What if we could notice thinking at the most subtle levels?
Listening closely
If you hear a sound and you bring it into foreground focus,
you can discover all of the details and the subtleties.
Explore all of the ways in which it appears.
The totality of the sound is the experience of it.
There isn't an aspect of the sound that is unseen or not experienced.
And there's no effort required to experience the sounds.
Their appearance is the sound itself, the sounding.
There is no hearing of the sound.
There is no verb or action or entity hearing the sound,
although there might seem like there is.
The appearance of the sound is the sound itself, completely.
Sensation without sensing
Same with a sensation.
The sensing of sensation is a concept, a mental construct.
Experientially there is just sensation.
We can talk about the mechanism of sensing conceptually,
the verbal action of sensing,
but there is no such thing. There is only the sensation.
Same with thinking.
Observer and observed
The exercise of distinguishing the observer from the observed is just a tool.
In reality there is no such observing entity.
At most you can say the totality has thoughts,
but it also has oceans, planets.
Just as the ocean has waves.
The distinction of the observer and the observed is just a tool.
In the same way as sounds appear, or a cat appears,
so does the sense of a subject.
If you look closely, when there is a sound,
there might be a sense of: sound there, me here hearing.
But really there is a sound,
and then there is a thought: sound there, me here hearing.
Anything other than the sound is thought.
It's a very subtle thought.
You could imagine how a baby hears,
how you heard as a baby,
before the process of mentally saying: sound there, me here hearing.
Just sound.
Just touch.
Just seeing.
Just thought.
Just memory.
The notion of a separate thinker, hearer, seer (central, local, stable) is just a thought.
It requires a subtle attention to see this.
Looking for the thinker
Notice a thought.
And when the thought appears, when there is awareness in the form of thought,
look for that sense of: there's a thought, and I'm here seeing the thought, thinking the thought, observing, experiencing the thought.
What is all of that made of?
Isn't all of that also just appearing?
What is it made of?
For example, you can use the thought, concept, image: banana.
You can play with the image or the sound of the word
and look for that which seems like it is the thinker or perceiver
of the sound or the image, banana.
What is it made of?
Is it not just another image?
The image "I."
It is a subtle image, a shape shifter.
It is just more thinking.
But if you're able to know this "I" thought, this me-sense,
if it is part of your experience, use the tool:
you cannot be that.
What is the subject that experiences that me-sense, that "I" thought?
Maybe there is no such subject.
The last thing we want to see
This is, in a sense, the last thing we want to see,
as well as what we truly long for.
We love the self-hypnosis of this me-sense,
and simultaneously we suffer it: the tightness, the contraction.
But even the tightness and the contraction are a form of hypnosis,
because the tightness is just a sensation occurring.
From a past based on thinking about memories,
going to a future consisting of imagining.
Another sense is a sense of agency, independent will,
and it's just the thought
that this conceptual, separate, located me chose in the past
and is choosing now, independently.
Freedom from knowing what we are
Total freedom is freedom from the attachment to knowing what we are.
By knowing what we are, we become separate, independent.
But because it's based on illusion, that sense of self is impermanent, unstable.
This we call suffering.
It's always the sense: if only I managed to do this or that,
if only I change this or that, if only that changed,
then I will finally be able to rest.
Things will be stable.
We become so attached to this image of a separate, independent me
trying so hard to become solid and stable.
We are so attached to that because we've forgotten we are not that.
A leap or a falling
And to remember this requires a leap.
It could be a leap or a falling.
If we see fully through this illusion, we will fall out of it.
Disillusionment.
Release. Liberation.
Nothing is needed.
Nothing needs to happen in the future.
Nothing needs to be done or achieved.
Just to see through this, now.