Quite a bit of physical phenomena came up with that, as the knot of self untangled. Very intense waves of heat were felt throughout the body. Even now, the senses relay information much more intensely. It is as if reality, experience, is seen in its complete vibrant aliveness. There is no one experiencing it, seeing it through layers and layers of assumptions, fears, and so forth. Much more direct.
Where there was the knot in the stomach there is now quiet emptiness, nothing.
For the rest, nothing much has changed, really. I had the idea that seeing through the illusion of self would be a dramatic moment, a great achievement with the audience gasping in excitement. No such thing—all that happens is that the story of self is seen for what it is: a story, a work of fiction. This it has always been. It simply was left unchecked and taken for granted.
It’s funny to realize that there has never actually been a self behind it all—that it was simply the one great unchecked assumption that just needed one honest glance to dissolve. That is really all it takes, just one instant of really seeing it for what it is.
Experience now is pretty much the same as it was earlier, exactly the same: simply ordinary, everyday existence with assorted thoughts and feelings. The only small difference is that it is now no longer assumed that there is anyone experiencing it, there is just this experience.
That’s all I’ve got at this moment.
I really want to express deep gratitude to you for the gentle pointing and giving me that final push.
Ilona: I’m delighted for you! Welcome to the new way of being—glad to be of service and I hope soon you can start helping others here.
Much love.
Sacha: Thanks again for stepping into the story of me for a moment and blowing it up from the inside! I like how no harshness of words was needed for this.
There’s still some shakiness here, as if the body is readjusting to this, but I’m sure it will settle.
All love, S.
Ilona: Nice work Sacha, you are very welcome!
There was no need for harshness since you have been honest and did not try to fool yourself or others. I also know that gentleness is power.
Can we be friends on Facebook? Find me through my blog.
Sacha: I’d love to but I don’t have a Facebook account anymore and no plans of reactivating it anytime soon.
We’ll keep in touch one way or another.
I asked Sacha to write a couple of words for the book; this was in November 2014.
Reading back the conversation I had with Ilona in June 2011, what comes up first is a deep gratitude. Ilona’s guiding came exactly at the right time. Like a lot of us, I had been searching for answers, for peace and happiness, for well over a decade, mostly seeking refuge in spirituality, academia, and altered states. A never-ending and ultimately frustrating going in circles. Then, seemingly out of the blue, the question What is the self? arose and lit a fire that burned everything. Ilona was the perfect guide for me, urging me to keep looking and fully allow and accept the deep-rooted fear that this investigation triggered. Then there was an instant that everything fell away, total surrender. Full stop. All energy dropped from the head down into the heart. Life came rushing in and experience changed dramatically. The first couple of days I was unable to function properly, it was as if all filters were completely gone. Experience was raw, direct, and intense. This state lasted for more than a year.
Now things have settled and life continues as always. Big difference: a very quiet mind and a warm heart.
My recommendation to seekers is simple. Find out one thing: The self, what is it? Be relentless in your investigation. Don’t settle for any answer. Make finding out the truth about this, once and for all, your absolute top priority. You should be burning with desire to discover what is real and what is not. Keep looking at this from every conceivable angle. Keep looking.
Love, S.
Concepts, Words, and Stories Are Not What They Seem
Language is a tool for communicating. We can share stories with others, ask advice, learn, study, plan, solve problems, create, and explore. We use language every day; we think in words. Language has become so ingrained that we don’t look at it directly to see how it works, why it works, or what is behind it. Unless you study language, it is not something that you think much about.
Let’s take a closer look: Words are symbols, units of information, carriers of meaning. They are pointers, like fingers that point to objects. Words point to meaning. Our experiences are named by words that mean something to us. When we communicate, we exchange ideas, concepts, and stories that make us feel a certain way. The meaning is perceived and understood, and the feeling gets communicated.
When I say a few words, they land in the listener. The listener takes on board a meaning from those words, so the words are interpreted and seen through filters of beliefs; then the new idea is either confirmed or rejected. The same words can mean different things to different people or different things in different situations. It is not up to the speaker where her words land. Words land where they land and, just like a pebble thrown into a pond, words create ripples in the pool of already accepted ideas.
The meaning of a word is not the word itself but is found within what is meant by the unit of language. It is easy to get stuck on concepts and believe that they are telling the truth, but none of them are truth, they are only carriers. It’s easy to look at the finger that points to the moon and assume that the finger itself is where focus should go. If you get hooked on looking at the finger, you can discuss the finger, debate about it, argue about it, and even create a following, but the moon is not there. The moon is located where the finger is pointing to. You can miss and forget the pointing entirely if all you can see is the pointing tool. My cat does this: he always looks at the finger, not where it points.
Ideas are not objects or subjects themselves. Groups of concepts taken for truth of how things are become beliefs upon which new ideas land and stick, creating an even bigger, more magnificent castle of concepts. What seems to be “my world,” the totality of my experience of all that is happening, is a creation of language, and words are the building blocks that create the story about it.
All I have are words. You read these words and understanding happens. If the idea is truly understood, you are able to say the same thing in your own words and express the same idea in a different way. This process is like having ten painters painting the same landscape: all of the paintings will be of the same scenery, but different hands with unique expressions create them. My job as a writer is to paint the word picture so that you can recognize the landscape and see what I am talking about in your own experience, even if I use words that are not the ones that you would use. Your job as a reader is to get the meaning behind the words.
Words are not experience. The story about experience is not experience. Experience is what is happening through sense perception: seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, touching, feeling, and thinking. What is happening underneath the words is what the words are pointing to. Taste an apple and see; its sweetness, crunchiness, and juiciness are ideas that are learned, repeated, and accepted as standard expressions. They only vaguely describe what is happening on taste buds. But, if you share that apple with a friend, both of you will know what you mean by these descriptions and agree.
Language creates objects and subjects out of thin air. It creates a doer, someone who does the action; the mover of something. The English language is based on nouns and verbs. Nouns tell us who or what the doer is, whereas verbs describe actions. We have sentences and statements like “The grass is growing,” in which the grass becomes the doer of growing. Or “I am breathing,” in which the “I” seems as though it is the doer that does the breathing, and so on.
The story about experience can be shared, and that in and of itself is an experience. If we focus on concepts and think that they express a solid reality, we get lost in the theory. Being lost in the head can be fun, but most often it is not. Re
alizing the empty nature of all concepts frees the mind. Holding on to ideas creates limitation, boundaries, opinions, differences, and even wars.
“My self” is a concept. That is just the beginning of it. Seeing that there is no actual discrete entity behind the words “my” and “self” opens up the doors to further exploration.
For a day or two, pay attention to language itself. See how ideas are communicated. See how concepts are built on other concepts, which, in turn, are standing on even more concepts, creating one huge bubble in which everything makes sense in the context of the other ideas.
Words themselves do not mean anything until we agree on their meaning—a meaning that is based in experience. If we don’t agree about the meaning of a collection of letters and the sound they make, say “gortumack,” then they are just a collection of random letters and a sound we can make.
So, it all comes down to these questions: What is it that the letters and the sound “my self” mean? What do they point to? Where do they land?
When the mind sees that all concepts are empty, it no longer needs to focus on thinking so much. Stories about past and future eventually stop playing out. “Shoulds” and “should nots” become less important, and the story becomes transparent. The story does not disappear, but it is seen as empty, not solid, not that serious, and, sometimes, even hilarious. It still appears that there is a “me,” but it is known to be a useful concept, not the truth. Then, the mind can relax and come back to it’s natural state of being open, curious, joyful, playful, and free. It can notice spaciousness and oneness when it is no longer trying to fit and organize experience into a frame of fixed ideas.
It’s not that one belief about how things are is true, while another one isn’t. All beliefs are not true—all concepts, models, and maps of reality are trying to find ways to explain the inexplicable. When you see that all knowledge is composed of made-up stories, those stories lose their grip. Attention goes to being rather than thinking; that is where peace is found. Stories still come up, but they aren’t fed attention nor given dramatized exaggeration; they are seen through quickly. Labels are no longer assumed to be “things.” Freedom lies in seeing that concepts are creations of language that serve the purpose of communicating. They are practical, but empty.
Ideas Are Hypnotic by Nature
When you get an idea to do something exciting, it’s like a lightbulb switching on, and there is this sense of anticipation, fun, and future fulfillment. Ideas become the center of attention around which the rest of the thinking organizes itself. New ideas don’t just come and pass by without making a ripple; sometimes there’s a big wave or even a tsunami to the system. When ideas become beliefs and are accepted as how things really are, all experience organizes around that, and we perceive the world through the frame of a core structure that is made up of beliefs. The core idea that influences all experience is the idea of separateness, a belief in a separate entity called “me,” an assumption that there is an “I” who is observing experience from outside and to which life is happening.
Thoughts may say many things, fantastic and surreal, and steal attention from what is underneath the conceptual overlay. Living, as we do, in the so-called information age, suggestions come from everywhere, affirmation and confirmation are working without taking any time off. Ideas that we feel to be the truth create the basis of our worldview. We get hypnotized by suggestions before we even know it. My aim is to get you to challenge the certainty, the solidity of ideas, to inspire you to unhypnotize yourself and initiate a rebalancing of the core organizing system, to break out of the soft prison of concepts so you can come back to the natural way of being, free of the I Virus.
Thoughts are generally noisy, and they sound important. At the same time, they are what is happening. Ideas about life are part of life. It’s only that aliveness is not found in ideas; it’s found in the spaciousness of being, the subtle sense of “Here I am” before it’s expressed verbally. In other words, aliveness is not found in the mind, the mind is found in aliveness.
Concepts are all I have to point you to the places between the thoughts, the silence, the space of being, and the sweetness of being alive. Please don’t assume anything; don’t take my suggestions as truth, but use them to dig deeper and find that which is hidden underneath them.
Try This for Yourself Have a piece of fruit handy, or something that you like to eat. Put it aside for now. Get a pen and paper ready.
Start this exercise by imagining that you are holding the fruit. Close your eyes and see the fruit in vivid detail. Then imagine eating the fruit; feel the sensations of taste, texture, and fragrance. Enjoy the imaginary fruit as much as you can. Feel your mouth watering.
Now actually bite the fruit and see the difference between your thoughts and experience; notice how experience is richer. Feel the sensations and experience the fruit with curiosity, as if you have never tasted the fruit before. Feel all as much as you can. Savor it. Take a few bites, enjoy the flavor, and be aware of all sensations.
Now, using pen and paper, describe the experience of taste and smell in as much detail as possible. Write for a couple of minutes about both experiences, comparing the imagined fruit to the real one, describing what was different.
For the final part, compare these three experiences: imaginary fruit, real fruit, and description. What do you notice? Can you bite the words on the paper and experience sensations of taste and smell? Can you see that words don’t ever touch the real experience that happens on the taste buds? See how the concepts of sweet, juicy, tasty, and delicious are not the actual sweetness and deliciousness that you experienced but a mere shadow of experience put into words. Concepts are not experience.
The Trick of Language
When we learn to say our first words as children, parents are so happy. We learn fast and start to communicate what we want. We learn to say “I,” “me,” and “mine,” and we understand that these are very important words because we get what we want by using them. It’s my toy, my mum, I want this, I don’t want to share my stuff.
Our verbal thoughts appear as words and strings of words joined into sentences.
Language and Labels
Because of the way language is constructed, we have labels for objects and we have labels for actions. Every word is a pointer to something, be it practical or imaginary, but words themselves are only labels, symbols. Nouns like “house,” “car,” “woman,” “cat,” “thought,” “feeling,” and “sun” point to objects, to ideas, to something that appears solid.
Language Assumes a “Doer”
When we express some action through words, there is always an assumed doer of action: I breathe, I walk, I watch TV, I hear a sound, you listen to the music, we are having dinner, a car is passing by. There is always someone or something doing. But when we look close and try to find that doer, it’s nowhere to be found; it’s only a construct of language. We assume that “I” is an entity/doer who is supposedly outside of experience.
If language was constructed from verbs only, the world would feel quite different: breathing, typing, looking around, hearing music, talking to a friend, walking, eating…all the action could be expressed without a subject, and it would still be pointing to the same action. If the word “I” is dropped, nothing changes other than the way of describing. (Doing so might make it more difficult to communicate, though, or it would radically change the whole basis of communication.)
But What If There Is No Doer?
I breathe—breathing is happening. See, there is no “I” who is the breather. In actuality there is a sensation of movement of breath, in and out. The word “I” becomes the center point of life, one that needs to be protected, defended, and looked after. Great. But it’s only an idea, a label pointing to nothing that can be perceived by senses.
Ilona is typing this. I am typing this. Typing is happening. The same movement can be expressed through different words, but the action itself does not depend on how it’s labeled. Ins
tead of using the word “Ilona” to point to this body, it’s agreed that the word “I” should be used; it’s a convenient word to use in a conversation with you. But neither Ilona, nor I, is doing the typing. Typing is happening effortlessly as the next thought comes up.
Somehow we humans became the victims of language through the assumption of a separate entity. The I/me only creates misery and unnecessary suffering. Some call it “ego.” Humans not only learned to speak but also learned to never question this assumption, as everyone around us is trapped in the same invisible prison of words. That I am separate from you is the most common thing to believe, and it’s taken for granted.
Remember—language is only a tool.
Labels
When I was a little child, I learned to speak by labeling things, looking from “me” here to what is “other” out there. At least this is how I remember it.
Mum: What is this?
Ilona: This is a house. This is a car. This is a window. This is me.
Mum: Where is your nose?
Ilona: Here is my nose [touching it].
I learned to label things and experiences and tested my limits and the limits of my parents’ patience by throwing things, by saying no, and by resisting conditioning. You know that “little rebel” age if you have kids.
I learned language and started using it, communicating with other people. The most important words were “I,” “me,” “myself,” and “mine”: this is my toy, not my brother’s.
This belief in a me as a separate object became strong; it became the central belief around which everything else was happening. Like the belief that Earth is the center of the universe, I became the center of my world inasmuch as my world was filled with my experiences, my things, my knowledge, and my ego…until I looked.
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