I understood that selfhood was an illusion at least ten or fifteen years before the illusion collapsed. I can also tell you that I knew, without any doubt whatsoever, at least a year prior to realizing it, that when I looked at the external world, I was looking at my True Self. Only in retrospect did it become obvious that a deep sense of selfhood continued to permeate all of my thinking and understanding prior to the collapse of it.
Your speculation about the intensity of our emotional investment in various beliefs may be correct, and I have often wondered about that possibility myself. Maybe some of us have "harder" softwiring of beliefs than others, and when the beliefs collapse, the collapses trigger bigger emotional responses. I don;t know. Human beings are complex critters, and there may be that much difference in the way we get attached to ideas.
I can only tell you that my understanding that selfhood was an illusion did not result in freedom from the illusion. The understanding was, seen in restrospect, only a surface understanding; it hadn't penetrated the body. I suspect that the early Greeks were onto something when they differentiated between mind-knowing (episteme) and body-knowing (gnossis). The mind can clearly know something, but there's no power in that kind of knowing compared to body-knowing.
I've used this example before, but there is a tremendous difference between "knowing" (episteme) that a stovetop is hot because someone tells you it's hot versus "knowing" (gnossis) its hot by accidentally touching it and getting burned. No amount of intellectual knowing about the hotness of a hot stovetop can compare with touching the thing.
I guess I'm saying that what most of us are calling "realizations" are extremely visceral and intimate compared to intellectual understandings. It is also pointing to something else that suggests a question for others. Until my final enlightenment koan/question was seen-through, the body/mind was still in the grip of mind. The mind was dominant. Only when the illusion of selfhood collapsed did the spiritual search come to an end, and along with it abidance in mind. After that realization (or understanding) occurred, all seeking ended, and the body/mind felt free from the strictures of thought. Up until that point there was always a felt sense of self directing everything. I was always talking to myself about shifting from thoughts to what the body could see and hear. Seven days before that final question was answered (was seen to be misconceived) I got on the airplane headed for a seven-day mountain-hiking solo silent retreat, and said to myself, "Okay, you don;t have to think about anything now. I've got seven days in which I can just be silent and look at the world, so let's start now." With that thought the body/mind shifted attention to the visual/aural field, and kept doing that persistently from that point on. After getting to my destination and renting a car, I kept staring at the world and listening, and every time the body/mind became aware of reflective thoughts, it shifted attention back to what could be seen or heard.
I had done this many times before on many retreats, and I had been doing it off and on informally for fifteen years. For this body/mind it took that long before acting like a little child collapsed the illusion. That's how strong the illusion was. After the illusion collapsed, there was just........freedom. It was realized, or understood, in some direct way, that there had never been a separate entity at the center of things. There was only THIS, and THIS is what the body/mind IS. Only then was there a tangible (visceral) freedom from the mind and all of its crazy ideas. Maybe it took fifteen years of intermittently interacting with the world like a little child for that kind of direct experiencing to seep down into the body and dispel the deepest illusion of mind.
In many ways seeing through the illusion was like remembering something that the body knew in the past, so speculation that realizations can also be described pretty accurately as a kind of remembering seems on target.
You may have an intellectual understanding (episteme) that selfhood is an illusion, but you may not yet have an embodied understanding (gnossis) of that. The only thing I know of that will lead to such an embodied understanding is to kee[ shifting attention away from thoughts to what the body can see, hear, feel, taste, and smell.
Your speculation about the intensity of our emotional investment in various beliefs may be correct, and I have often wondered about that possibility myself. Maybe some of us have "harder" softwiring of beliefs than others, and when the beliefs collapse, the collapses trigger bigger emotional responses. I don;t know. Human beings are complex critters, and there may be that much difference in the way we get attached to ideas.
I can only tell you that my understanding that selfhood was an illusion did not result in freedom from the illusion. The understanding was, seen in restrospect, only a surface understanding; it hadn't penetrated the body. I suspect that the early Greeks were onto something when they differentiated between mind-knowing (episteme) and body-knowing (gnossis). The mind can clearly know something, but there's no power in that kind of knowing compared to body-knowing.
I've used this example before, but there is a tremendous difference between "knowing" (episteme) that a stovetop is hot because someone tells you it's hot versus "knowing" (gnossis) its hot by accidentally touching it and getting burned. No amount of intellectual knowing about the hotness of a hot stovetop can compare with touching the thing.
I guess I'm saying that what most of us are calling "realizations" are extremely visceral and intimate compared to intellectual understandings. It is also pointing to something else that suggests a question for others. Until my final enlightenment koan/question was seen-through, the body/mind was still in the grip of mind. The mind was dominant. Only when the illusion of selfhood collapsed did the spiritual search come to an end, and along with it abidance in mind. After that realization (or understanding) occurred, all seeking ended, and the body/mind felt free from the strictures of thought. Up until that point there was always a felt sense of self directing everything. I was always talking to myself about shifting from thoughts to what the body could see and hear. Seven days before that final question was answered (was seen to be misconceived) I got on the airplane headed for a seven-day mountain-hiking solo silent retreat, and said to myself, "Okay, you don;t have to think about anything now. I've got seven days in which I can just be silent and look at the world, so let's start now." With that thought the body/mind shifted attention to the visual/aural field, and kept doing that persistently from that point on. After getting to my destination and renting a car, I kept staring at the world and listening, and every time the body/mind became aware of reflective thoughts, it shifted attention back to what could be seen or heard.
I had done this many times before on many retreats, and I had been doing it off and on informally for fifteen years. For this body/mind it took that long before acting like a little child collapsed the illusion. That's how strong the illusion was. After the illusion collapsed, there was just........freedom. It was realized, or understood, in some direct way, that there had never been a separate entity at the center of things. There was only THIS, and THIS is what the body/mind IS. Only then was there a tangible (visceral) freedom from the mind and all of its crazy ideas. Maybe it took fifteen years of intermittently interacting with the world like a little child for that kind of direct experiencing to seep down into the body and dispel the deepest illusion of mind.
In many ways seeing through the illusion was like remembering something that the body knew in the past, so speculation that realizations can also be described pretty accurately as a kind of remembering seems on target.
You may have an intellectual understanding (episteme) that selfhood is an illusion, but you may not yet have an embodied understanding (gnossis) of that. The only thing I know of that will lead to such an embodied understanding is to kee[ shifting attention away from thoughts to what the body can see, hear, feel, taste, and smell.
