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Of course you do exist, I mean something does exist, but it’s not what you call “I”, so you don’t exist, not that I do, but that wouldn’t have bothered you at all.
Life is full of many very persistent illusions; this sure does comes in my personal top three though. Well, let’s go straight into it then.
When we are angry, we don’t call ourselves anger, we believe we are something other than anger, one who does anger, it’s same with every other emotion, every other thought.
We believe that we are the experiencers and everything else is what we experience, like there is a sensation and there is you sensing it, but is it actually like that? What is this “I” you are referring to? Isn’t it just another sensation, just another feeling, another experience? Anything you point as “I” is just another experience because it’s bound to be one. Why is it that whenever someone asks you who you are, you cannot answer them the exact question, instead you have to tell them what your name is, what you do, where you live etc.
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So why can’t you tell who are you?
You can only tell them about yourself, but you can’t tell them who you are or more specifically what you are, not that they were asking for it to begin with, but that’s exactly the thing, we usually can’t tell or ask about something that never comes into our own perspective, and why is it that we ourselves never comes into our own perspective? It’s simple…… because we don’t exist in the first place. You see, for an experiencer to exist it has to be something other than experiences, otherwise experiencer becomes experience itself and one experience can’t experience other experiences.
So, what is one, other than experiences? Again, whatever you point at can only be an experience coming from senses, mind or brain or how do you even know it.
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Whatever you are, whatever you think you are, whatever is there in your life is just a CONTINUTY OF EXPERIENCES, every thought, every feeling, every desire small or big, every emotion is just another experience even the realization of yourself is nothing but an experience.
Experiences and experiencer.
Experiences don’t require any experiencer, they are self-sustainable, and they stand on their own feet. So basically, there is no one angry, just anger, we don’t feel anything there are just feelings; there is no thinker only thinking. Your experiences come and the consciousness of them comes at the same time, it’s more like your experiences themselves are the consciousness. The thing is, it’s not that you don’t exist outside of experiences; it’s more like you simply can’t.
It comes and goes just like any other thought or feeling and the moment this continuity of experiences breaks you cease to exist, like when you are in deep sleep every night. For you to continually existing you need to be in dreams at least, but when there are not even dreams, where are you then? More importantly what are you in those moments?
What are you when you are not experiences?
You simply don’t exist then. When a person is in coma without any brain activity, he or she only exists as other’s experiences, nothing more than that. Truth is, even for a soul to exist by itself there should be some sort of experience going on. You cannot go beyond experiences because the moment you assume you did, it will only be an experience not the experiencer.
You can put soul, consciousness, mind or whatever into the mix, but you will always end up with this same problem, they can only exist with some sort of experience or else they cease to exist, like you do in deep sleep or in a coma.
A look at personality disorders
If you have read or researched about multiple personality disorder or condition you may understand this. In this condition, there are different personalities living in the same body, they are different individuals, it’s not just about different likes and dislikes, they seem to have different genders, different ages and different sexual orientations, they even communicate with each other most of the time by writing to each other. In this condition different continuities of experiences are happening in the same body rather than a single continuity which is a norm
Most of the time if communication between these personalities is not good, they don’t even realize each other’s existence because their memories are different as a result of different experiences, basically they are different people living together, but not in a house, in a body. So, when a body with multiple personality dies, do you think only one person died? If you think so, then which one of its personalities was that person? Actually, so many different individuals died with that body, it’s not a death of a single person, but if you only look at the body it will surly seems like it.
What it all means?
We are just our own continuity of experiences, we are the sum total of it, that’s what an individual is, once this continuity ends and a different continuity starts, it’s not the same person anymore. New continuity means new individual, doesn’t matter if it’s in a same body or different bodies.
Whether you understood, what I said or not, you will still and always feel like you do exist, because it is another feeling, another experience. This is why it’s a very persistent illusion. People usually claim that your ego is not real, it’s an illusion, it doesn’t exist, that’s not true at all, ego is as real as it comes, as real as any other experience or emotions are, because ego is just another experience itself. Ego does exist like love exists, like physical pain exists and like rocks exist.
If it’s what “you” are experiencing, it exists, because experiences exist. It’s the YOU in the previous sentence that doesn’t exist. Everything we experience actually never claims to be anything more than just an experience, but our assumptions gives the belief that there is something more than just that.
