Comment below: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "wayback71" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > It took a while, but it just occurred to me how different awakening is from what we are > looking for. We think we are looking for eternal life for the self when the body dies. > Instead what really happpens in Awakening is the oppposite: the self "dies" ( or the > notion of what the self is dies) while the body is alive and goes on living for a while longer. > > On a related note: a totally western, traditional psychiatrist told me the other day that the > sense of self is really just an amazingly quick "data sweep" of the different activities in the > brain, giving rise to illusion of a self in control of things. Pretty nice description, > especilaly coming form the neurscientist perspective on the mind.
**Snip to end The 'data sweep' concept (above) is a very appealing way of understanding how there can even be a 'small' self and how pure consciousness (as 'attention') creates the notion of an ego/self by putting attention on an object (another notion), and thereby manifests a triad of knower/known/knowing. The whole world emerges immediately from nothing. And just as completely, vanishes when attention is withdrawn. Kind of like the sweep of the band on a radar scope (. . . you know, like they always show on the submarines in the movies). "Suppose you had a headache and you get rid of it by taking some medicine, you then remain what you were originally; the headache is like the illusion that the body is the self; it disappears when the medicine called self-enquiry is administered." (Ramana Maharshi)
