Well that’s a big question. Why do we call this new discovery freedom how does it free? What does it free?  Freedom from what? Freedom to do what? Big questions left totally untouched so far. With good reason. If you were free you’d already know. That’s the logic at least. But even many of the people who’ve gone through this re-alignment have no clue whatsoever what is going on. I’ve made sense of it in my own way. It’s documented in my series on Human Agency.  In the work I’ve done the answer to the question “What is going on?” is “Expression of embodied human agency.” Take a look at it if you haven’t already. I’ll eventually collate it all into an ebook.


We call this freedom because… We live our lives at it stands with some flawed assumptions. We assume there is an immutable “self” that stands apart from reality. It came into being as a baby and exists as a stable entity in and of itself until it’s death. Some are so sure of the concrete stability of this self that they imagine it to extend beyond birth and death. (That’s no more laughable than the idea that the self is distinct throughout ones life)
We assume it exists as a thing in and of itself. Life happens to this self. It stands apart from life. We think of it as an unchanging and definite thing. Essential, implicit and inherent. It transcends the domain of the phenomenal and exists as both a phenomenal and noumenal entity. The unchanging and definite thing that has our body and mind and lives our lives.
We assume it has certain qualities immutable qualities and traits. We assume it is a well defined thing, that it has a fixed identity.  Always our assumptions are about the concrete and definite nature of “ourselves”.
This drive toward being a distinctive concrete self is exhibited in everyone. The constant drive towards creating a fixed identity. The need to align oneself with some permanent and definite virtue be it through marriage or a moral crusade. . The drive to be definite and fixed in our existence. Everybody’s looking for that something, one thing to make it all complete. Something to ground them to reality, to make them “real” to make them “definite” and complete. To make them well defined and true. To make them immutable, indestructible. Real.  The drive towards inherent existence.


The reason this drive exists at all is because we are not. The reason it becomes a prison is because it we can never be grounded in reality. We are empty of any inherent existence. We are devoid of essence, we have no concrete and immutable qualities. As such there is no such thing as a self, because a self must be essential, concrete and immutable. If we had inherent existence we would not have the drive towards achieving inherent existence. There is no self.


The drive towards inherent existence not the drive away from death. That is a mistake. That would require an inherently existing self that could die. In a nutshell the drive toward inherent existence is greed. That is the current state of the world. That is the current drive in most peoples life. The drive towards self actualisation. It’s a fantasy. It’s impossible. There is no inherent, essentially noumenal anything. Everything is relative. We don’t fully comprehend the implications of that statement.  We assume that there are things that are not relative, that do not exist only in relation to other things.
For instance space. That was a failure of my work towards the end of Ruthless Truth also. I took a stance on space, Void, as inherently existing regardless of form. That was dogma.
For many others, free will. It’s taken as having inherent existence rather than being relationally defined.


We call this freedom because seeing through the self means no longer having to constantly try to achieve the impossible and define an inherent self. You can if you want, but why would you? You already don’t exist and you never will. nothing can change that. The entire structure of the universe as uncovered by our greatest minds would have to shift, for you to become yourself. It’s never going to happen. You already don’t exist and you never will.


Freedom from what? The need to be real.  Freedom to do what? Express human agency. That’s all there is to be done for a human, the entire relational system of the universe converges within your body giving rise to Human Agency. All there is to do for a human is to express that.
This isn’t mystical, when I say “the entire relational system of the universe” I’m talking about a butterfly effect type thing. A causal chain. The thousands of years of evolution that have formed the structure of your body right now, considered alongside the 13.75 bn years of thermodynamic flux that are now resulting in your perceptions. Throw in cultural conditioning, life experiences etc, and you begin to understand the melting pot of humanity your physical form embodies and expresses.
What does it free? Embodied human agency. Human agency no longer needs to be expressed in order to define and maintain a self. It can be expressed for the sake of it’s own actualisation.


We should take a quick look at what human agency is before finishing up here. An embodied eco-system of intentionality. Our intentions to act in the world. The strongest drives in the blend defining how the weaker ones are expressed at any one time. Personality is the personalization of human agency. Character, the characterization. Human agency is the mechanism by which human life operates. It is entirely relational. There is nothing inherent to any of it. Critically however, the blend of human agencies at any one time defines “your” process of mind. It filters how the mind thinks. It drives towards certain choices and away form others. You have no free will. Human agency accounts for choice, thought, internal dialogue, memory. All of it.
Human agency is what is left when you realize there is no substance to you. Human agency is what is freed from the idea of a “self”


That is why we call it freedom.

I’ll keep this short.


Claims to truth are by their nature dishonest.
At the center of every interpersonal struggle/fight/argument isn’t just belief in general, as is often claimed. There’s another dynamic at play in belief. To believe is to accept something as true. To accept something as true is to give up the quest for truth.


There’s nothing of constancy to the human condition. That is what truth means, constant. The same everywhere and at all times. The human experience itself doesn’t really work like that. Phenomena either exist or they don’t and that’s all there is to it.


Within what does exist however we have no inbuilt faculty for separating truth from illusion. You’d be hard pressed to tell the difference between an actual car and a car made entirely of plastic from the outside.


All we have of truth is honesty. That’s the closest we can get, and to claim you have truth, is dishonest. All you can really do is honestly relay your own experience. Honestly engage with your own experience. Honestly actualize. 


In terms of the human agency framework, honest actualisation, whatever that may be, is the closest we get to truth. Truth exists in action, in that it is true that we experience actualisation.


Wordy…


I’m well aware this goes against the approach from the Ruthless Truth days. The entire approach. Good riddance.  In honor of this I think I’ll change the “T” in “Burning True” to a small “t”.


The pursuit of truth itself is required to keep our beliefs from becoming dogmas. It stops things like Ruthless Truth spiraling into some kind of monster. Honesty, is the pursuit of truth. Actual engagement with the actual facts. This doesn’t change anything I’ve written about before. It’s a better description of what “truth” has actually meant.

Commissioned and Endorsed by TruthStrike.com:


Does atheism assume that the default state of the human races is one of mindless devotion to a higher power? Doesatheism do more to entrench religion in the collective psyche?

I’m an anti-theist. I see atheist badges on blogs. There’s something smug in that little A. The phrase “I’m an Atheist” bandied around as though it were proof of intelligence. Atheism has become for many a hollow identity. A caricature of free thought. A fixed intellectual position taken to be some form of intellectual credential.


It’s not right to say that all atheists adopt atheism for access to the identity that goes with it. That’s not true of all atheists. It’s true of the lazy ones. The ones who want the fruits of the atheist identity, without ever actually learning to think for themselves. Those who become atheists because somebody told them there was no god, and they chose to believe them. If you haven’t earned your atheism through critical thought, you don’t deserve to call yourself an atheist. You’re a believer.    
Atheism via belief does not count as atheism. 


The problem with belief in god doesn’t stem from gods non-existence. That’s beside the point. 
The problem is the acceptance of belief over critical thought. The problem is the promotion of irrational belief over thinking for oneself. 


My problem with the modern atheist movement is that it installs irrational belief. Belief without the groundwork of PERSONAL critical thought to back it up. It’s the equivalent of cheating on a Math(s) test. Is what matters in our society just being right? Holding the correct belief? Or learning the method to determine which beliefs are less incorrect?


The modern Atheist movement places the emphasis on holding the right belief. Personal enquiry, and critical thinking are circumvented. The maxim comes down from above, and this is equated with reason. The groundwork is ignored. No-one learns to think critically for themselves, but everyone gets to play the intellectual because they hold the right belief. 
That is ridiculous. It becomes more ridiculous when you take into account the belief in question, that there is no-puppet master in the sky. 
There are people who take themselves to be intellectually superior because they don’t believe in a puppet-master in the sky. They haven’t even reached this conclusion through critical analysis. 
Monkeys don’t believe in a great puppet master in the sky either, I don’t see them patting each other on the back for it. 


You can blame Richard Dawkins for a lot of this but he is right on one point. You weren’t born a Christian.
You weren’t born an atheist either, at least I wasn’t. 
Like my hairy primate ancestors, I was born not giving a fuck.
I was born unconcerned by make believe questions, but keenly interested in figuring out life.
Now, unconcerned by flying spaghetti monsters, floating teapots and Gods, passionate about critical thought. 


If you haven’t earned your atheism with critical thought you’re just courting an identity. You are not an atheist because you have reached your own conclusions, but because you’ve accepted someone else’s. You want what atheists have. You are courting an identity.


If atheists gave a damn about the destructive force of theism they would be “Rational anti-Theists”.
Irrational atheism is a posture. It requires nothing from a person but affiliation and bestows upon them a sexy new identity as the intelligent moral crusader. This isn’t the absurd argument that atheism is just another belief system, rather it is the profound exposition ( =D ) that for many atheism has nothing whatsoever to do with the rejection of theism. It is completely cut off from the question of theism. Irrational atheism exists ONLY to make you feel better about YOU. It’s selfish and useless. A way of allowing you to be better than a theist. 


Where atheism is a fixed position, anti-theism is a direct challenge. Where atheism is selfish anti-Theism is selfless. “I like truth and destruction and one inevitably leads to the other.” We don’t need atheism in our society. Not really. We need to be rid of theism. Irrational atheism further entrenches theism in our society all in the name of creating a better identity. We don’t need more A’s on blogs, we need the destruction of theism. Not posturing, active and critical opposition.


This isn’t a call for war on religion but for a rational and critical anti-theism. A sustained and controlled counter to theism. Not violent aggression. Calculated critical thought. Constant intellectual criticism applied to theism, until theism goes away. That is not what the modern atheist movement represents. It represents an identity. A club whereby you can suspend your critical thinking at the door, and still call yourself intelligent. It doesn’t apply pressure to theism. It’s concerned with replacing theism rather than removing it. It’s not a movement it’s a club. To join you have to accept the rules. You don’t have to think for yourself, just accept the rules. “There is no god”


If there were a contract it would go something like this:
“I the undersigned do hereby solemnly swear to relinquish my belief in any and all divine and so reap the benefits of pretending to be intelligent”
Where it should read like this:
“I the undersigned shall think critically and rationally on my own behalf faithfully challenging my own beliefs”


The smart choice is the critical opposition of theism, not the promotion of anti-theism.
If theism fell before atheism, it would be replaced by another belief that is for the most part, irrational. 


When theism falls before the opposition of critical thought, it will be replaced by critical thought. It will not be a victory of atheism of theism, but a victory on a deeper level of critical thought over belief. It won’t be the victory of one irrational belief over another, but of critical thought over irrational belief

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.
Theodore Roosevelt, “Man in the Arena” Speech given April 23, 1910
26th president of US (1858 - 1919)

I want to talk about character and values.
To do that we’ll have to look again at what exactly human agency is.
Simply put human agencies are our drives towards acting in the world, at their point of actualization these agencies are realized. Their goal is self-actualization, to actualize themselves in much the same way Maslow thought the self sought actualization. Agencies may be emotional/intellectual/kinaesthetic/instinctive/reactionary in nature. They fluctuate over time in qualities such as strength and urgency of drive and they are better thought of as processes rather than entities. They are embodied. They inhabit both body and mind. This is our experience because both your perception of your body as well as your bodily sense perceptions are enshrined in your mind. As a result of this nuance we often experience agency as arising in our environments. A work of art may radiate some form of attraction, igniting in you some agency or other. A place may repulse you etc. Look around the room you are in right now and pay attention to this flux of human agencies


At any one time there is a single fluctuating (liquid like) blend of multiple agencies driving your existence. The human experience is one of embodiment of this fluctuating blend of humanity. The fluctuations are not random but rather ordered like a food chain with the strongest most enduring and forceful Apex agencies  at the top. These Apex agencies may have been with you from birth and if not will most likely be with you till your death. They are the guiding forces of your life. They may be the drive toward truth in a philosopher or the drive toward expression in a musician. Lower down in this eco-system reside agencies that appear and disappear at a moments notice, not so enduring, not so strong. Apex agencies focus our entire blend of agencies on their own actualization.


Human agency cannot NOT express itself, it cannot not actualize itself. It is what it is. An embodied drive toward expressing passion cannot NOT be expressed. The only question is HOW that agency expresses/actualizes itself. Agencies that are lower down the food chain always self-actualize in the service of the Apex agency. For example a person may want to enjoy some leisure time and do that by reading a book. Their choice to read a book will be governed by an Apex drive the actualization of which is served through book reading. Maybe the Apex agency is the drive to become a writer. There are short term, long term, weak and strong agencies all blended as one and embodied in your reality. The Agency blend provides the engine for your reality. Most importantly however, agency does not constitute a self, but rather is the mechanism by which life proceeds selflessly, and there’s some more.


The embodied blend of agency has one critically huge implication we have yet to explore. This system of blended human agency -objectively speaking- is a result of millions of years of human evolution. It’s part of the circuitry of human nervous and social systems. Many drives are evolutionarily wired into our brains and bodies or conditioned and augmented by our society and experiences. A lot of the scientific mechanics of human agency subconscious and must be studied scientifically, but the experience of agency itself is not. It’s phenomenological. The blend of agency exists in a very obvious way. It is the single and unified engine of individual experience. Take a look at your own reality and see.


Before we look at this implication let’s deal with our experience of our mind body and reality.
From the POV of experience, our body mind and reality are the same thing. Reality is our perception of both body and mind, including bodily sense perceptions. Our mind contains not only our perceptions of our thoughts and senses but our perceptions of our body itself. Body mind and reality are inseparable, what exists for one, exists for all three. Reality = mind = body.


Here’s the critical implication. The embodied engine of human agency acts as a conceptual and cognitive filter that not only drives the human towards actualization but in doing so defines the shape and topology of the process of mind.
Agencies constitute a large portion of the mind and as such shape/define it. The voice in the head at any point represents the current fluctuating blend of human agency. Agency defines what you think/feel and is a large part of the reason you think/feel it. In a way the mind belongs to human agency. The human mind IS human agency’s interaction with reality.


Ego is the ego of this human agency. Thought is the thought of this human agency. Decisions are the decisions of this human agency. Our mistake was in thinking that we were human agency personified. We we’re not. We don’t exist. Self is an abstraction one made by human agency, an assumption perpetuated by society. We mistook the engine of our realities as person and that person as “me”.
There is no me. There is no self. What’s left after liberation? After self becomes transparent? The smae thing that was always there. Human agency.




The bedrock of reality is pure unbound emptiness. All of reality is without roots. Everything contains it’s own voidness of self, all reality, is relative, none of it is absolute, none of it is “true” in and of itself, none of it is constant. In fact none of it IS in and of itself. Voidness is where all of experience is unfolding. The space permeating experience, the location where all of this exists from subjective/objective perception of “your” own hands to celestial bodies back to all we actually have of those celestial bodies, perception, -the base level of reality-. That reality, perception, is driven in it’s formation and dissolution by the engine of human agency. All that is absolute is that context itself the void.
Void allows for the existence of existence itself, the space between your fingers, the potential for thought and area around each and every one of them. It’ is the ultimate and only context the rest is content. It’s NOT WHAT you are, it’s WHERE you are, always have been and always will be. It’s where Human agency drives experience and it permeates that reality holding it together.


Embodied human agency is possible only because of the embodied voidness that must proceed it.

When I looked for “self” I discovered total emptiness. When I looked back I saw my life carrying on without me. Human agency unfolding in this unbound infinite potentiality. The thing I thought of as me was actually human agency, there was no me. Ever. There couldn’t be, that would require me to exist outside reality, which is to say it would require “me” to be unreal, a fiction in the mind of human agency, which I am. You can do a simple test to check this out, take a look at the drives of human agency alive in “you” right now and see if you can pinpoint the “self” that owns them, that has them.  The fact that there is this gap opening into the Void where my “self” should be located is awe inspiring and still weird.


We’re getting closer to making sense now of the question of character. What you think of as your character is an emergent property of human agency. What you think of as your value system is similarly an emergent property of human agency. Character is a question of HOW human agency is actualized. The HOW is determined by the overall composition of human agency most notably the living Apex agencies in the specific blend. Remember human agency is best conceptualized as a process in constant flux with certain constituents growing to ecological dominance within the blend. The Apex agency defines the HOW of all lesser/subordinate agencies expression.
Take for example one of the Apex agencies in my life, the drive toward insight and truth. That drive defines HOW I interact with others how I go about my daily life. What I think, how I think. This Apex agency guides HOW I live my life. If you’re looking for a certain kind of life, you need to be concerning yourself with finding a something that ignites a lasting passion in you. An Apex. An agency that won’t just go away but will guide and shape HOW you experience life. Your values the things you hold dear arise from the Apex agencies living your life.
If your drive is towards the truth, people will perceive certain values within you. “He’s an honest guy” they may say, if one of your Apex agencies was the drive towards truth. Are you an honest guy? Not technically, but honesty is a character of your actions (agencies actualization) simply because an Apex human agency is guiding HOW human agencies are actualized.


That’s the key to streamlining your life really. Not that it’s something you can technically do. Apex agencies will take you and never let go and your life will be actualized in their service. It’s the way it goes. For many the Apex agency is concerned with the projection of a self. When you see through the illusion of self. When you are liberated. That agency becomes less important!!
If truth genuinely becomes an Apex agency for you, if you are taken by truth you are done. You’ve “made it”. Of course youcannot make that happen. Not really. All you can do is put yourself in close proximity, constantly choose truth where there is a choice to be made, and hope that truth and honesty become Apex agencies for you. At any one point the human experience is one of embodied agency, it is that agency that makes choices, that speaks inside your head, not you, it is that agency that that must choose truth.


When truth is an Apex agency in your life, you can trust because all other agencies, all your actualisations ARE what they seem. They are honest
Honesty is so key in this. It is THE key. Honesty is what arises when the drive towards truth becomes your Apex agency. Truth is THE single most important Apex agency. More important than goodness or even love. It precedes all other agencies. If love isn’t true then it’s not love. Truth precedes love, truth precedes everything.
Even Goodness? Especially Goodness. Good and bad are fantasy. Is and Is Not, are the only concrete and constant matters of reality. The only constant matters in anything, on any conceivable level.


As we’ve said human agency is always expressing. It cannot NOT express. When truth is king of that eco-system of human agency, top of the food chain, all other agencies on down the line are expressed honestly because Apex agencies define how the other agencies express themselves.
Without truth at the top of that food chain of intentionality things like passive aggression (dishonest expression of aggression) and resentment (dishonest expression of dissatisfaction) start to happen.
Truth restructures the blend of human agency in such a way that these things simply don’t happen. They are after all issues of dishonesty.


Your values arise from human agency. Your character arises from human agency. These things are not set in stone. They are processes just as the human agency blend is a process. Character is the characterisation of the human agency blend. The characterisation of the engine of your life. It’s that simple. Values are the value attributed to the human agency blend by you or another. Evaluation of human agency.

Of course we fear death. With every exhalation it is upon us and with ever new breath we gain some respite. Each new breath saves you from death. But all of us know intuitively, that at some point. There isn’t going to be a next breath.

To live is to die, one is indistinguishable from the other. Is living just dying with a different value judgement tacked on? In different terms?

Actually…

No! It’s not a linguistic trick.

We are dying.

Living isn’t something you do before you die.

Dying is something you do before you die.

Living is a WAY of dying. To live is to get the most out of dying. If you are not getting the most out of dying, if you can’t even admit the fact that you are dying, then you are not living. The only fact dying has to offer you is that you are dying. Living is a quality of how you die. Living is what happens when you are aware that you are dying. It is an emergent property of your honest appraisal of your own impending death.

We are conditioned to move towards death in terms of life. That is dying, while pretending to live.

That is deluding yourself. Dishonesty. Wasted opportunity.

Living happens when you accept death on it’s own. When you are aware that what is going on here, is your dying. Living with open eyes. Accepting your fate. True living happens,  when we proceed in terms of death. You must dye as though you are proceeding towards death, and that is not hard to do, because you are, but in doing so, life (the true appreciation of dying) emerges.

Moving towards death in terms of life is what the fearful do, eyes closed to the inevitable. Dressing their dying up as a living. Thinking of their slow death as a life.

The fix their gaze firmly on the transient inconstant and false as though a firm gaze makes for a firm existence.  It doesn’t. Life is transient. Death is forever. A constant. The only constant.

What is the point of living life in terms of death? Of dying in terms of death?

Stop dressing your dying up as a life. Life is a quality OF your dying, not a separate opposing entity TO it.

Life is for the daring. Those who dare to see their dying honestly. Those who dare to die. If life is not daring honesty it is fantasy. If it is fantasy it is not your real life. Real life is real. Real life is the love dying.

You don’t live your death, you die it. How you die it determines whether or not you will have a life. Retain an awareness of the second side of that next breath. Without that you are not living at all, but dying in vain.

And feel free to be afraid. To fear death is to love life, you cannot have one without the other. Until you accept your fear of death, love of life will be beyond your reach.

That’s jumping ahead. Get to actually dying your death first, so that life can emerge from the honest/authentic/truthful engagement with your death, you can get to loving that fact later.

Are sugar skulls making more sense to you now?

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.
Theodore Roosevelt, “Man in the Arena” Speech given April 23, 1910
26th president of US (1858 - 1919)

There is a commonplace fortune cookie insight that goes something to the tune of “Life isn’t about Winning. It’s about taking part.” How many times a year are we been bombarded with something to that effect?


I hear it more and more of late. Winning doesn’t matter. If you are alive you’ve already won.  En masse our generation conditioned toward an Oprah and Dr Phil mentality are turning away from “Winning”.
Of course we haven’t really. The point has been missed totally.


Winning doesn’t matter. Daring is what matters, and it doesn’t take much daring to give up winning.
Winning doesn’t matter in the slightest. Daring matters to the fullest. Daring is what is important, not winning.
Those who say that winning does not matter but do not dare to win are lying to themselves. For someone like that winning is the only important thing. Winning is the ONLY important thing for them and because they abandon the only thing that they think matters, winning, they lose the only thing that does matter. Daring. Sounds crazy doesn’t it? I’m afraid it gets worse.


Those who forsake daring do it in order to win. They give up trying to win, in order to win. They forsake daring -the only thing that matters- for the sake of winning all the time declaring that winning doesn’t matter. In our obsession with winning we have lost touch with daring.


In terms of my work, daring is quite simply the drive towards actualization in the face of risk. It is the expression of humanity in the face of adversity. What becomes of the expression, of the actualization of human agency, is not nearly as important as whether or not it is expressed, where embodied drive becomes action.


One dares therefore one is and it’s not you that dare’s. It’s wired into what it is to be human. Daring is the blood that pumps through the heart of humanity. It’s not the magic pill that destroys fear rather the scared soldier that fights on anyway. Every act requires a certain amount of daring, because every act carries a certain amount of fear. Daring is to courage what flame is to fuel.
The root of all action, the mode by which all human agency is actualized, by which all drive and intention becomes real.
Daring is action in vulnerability. Progress in fear. Daring regardless. Action in the face of vulnerability, risk and fear. Daring regardless.


Surrender yourself to daring and your done. You don’t need anything else to be human and yet everything it means to be human rests upon daring. 

**********************************************


Question:

You write coherently, and clearly. That is something I appreciate. You consider a variety of perspectives and that is admirable. I would like to ask what I hope is an honest question. One that rings loud and clear to me like the elephant in the room that everyone knows is present but no one wants to talk about. Please explain how “not seeing” something constitutes proof that the “something” in question doesn’t exist. It seems you are willing to overlook the inherent flaw in that logic. This is followed up with another interesting question: how can an eyeball see itself? The answer to that question poses another question, if one is defined by one’s reflection, ie the difference NOT associated with the other, then does ‘said’ reflection accomplished by the ‘difference’ between one and another not accomplish the definition of self before we even question where self is? Are we not obviously not that?

Answer:

‎*Please explain how “not seeing” something constitutes proof that the “something” in question doesn’t exist.*
The question is deeper than that. That’s a very abstract and generalized question and there are 2 main flaws with it.


The first is this: Not seeing something does not equate to proof of it’s non-existence. Neither does it equate to proof of it’s existence.
If you look at the ground and say “I don’t see the sky it must not exist” you are wrong.


But that’s not what we’re doing here. Not even close.


If a farmer wants to figure out whether there are any foxes in his chicken coop. What does he do?
He goes into the chicken coop and he searches high and low. He takes into account the entire chicken coop. Possible entry points, hiding places the fox may occupy. He practically takes the chicken coop apart investigating it atom by atom until he can say BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT that there is in fact, no fox in the chicken coop.


The farmer isn’t looking for a fox. He’s checking to make sure that there is no fox. He’s looking for the absence of a fox.


That is the difference. He is taking apart all the available info and investigating in order to discover whether the ABSENCE OF A FOX exists.


That is the critical point you are over-looking.
You take the entirety of your life. The entirety of reality. You check to see if a self exists. If you cannot find a self, you check again to see that there is an absence of a self.


Are you following? The difference here is that you are dealing with specific target area.
The second issue here is more critical:
It is a question of location.
When you say *Please explain how “not seeing” something constitutes proof that the “something” in question doesn’t exist.* you are making that point that. The thing you don’t see could well exist somewhere else. In a different location to the one in which the person is looking.


What WE are saying here is to look in a very specific location to find the self. The only place where that self could be. Your life. If there is no self within the boundaries of your entire life, then there is no self within the bounds of your entire life.
That is the point. We are dealing with a a very specific area. We are looking for a fox in a chicken coop. We are looking for a self in your life. If a self cannot be seen WITHIN THE BOUNDS OF YOUR LIFE… WITHIN THE BOUNDS OF EXPERIENCE. Then there is no self in your life. That is the point. We are dealing with your life. Reality
*This is followed up with another interesting question: how can an eyeball see itself? *
You’re making a huge logical error here. You are assuming the existence of a self. You are saying “How can a self see itself”. Your question presupposes a self without actually proving it.


*The answer to that question poses another question,*
Doesn’t really matter. the question is flawed. Th answer is wrong-minded
*if one is defined by one’s reflection, ie the difference NOT associated with the other, then does ‘said’ reflection accomplished by the ‘difference’ between one and another not accomplish the definition of self before we even question where self is? Are we not obviously not that?*
You’re assuming a self that has a reflection.. You’re just assuming a self here.

bomjumaku asked: Somehow I managed to avoid the idea that you are liberated until this point. I'm going to read through your posts and start asking you questions if you don't mind. For some reason I didn't understand your message before. I think it is because you use original terminology. I thought that you couldn't be the genuine article because you didn't use the same words as others. Liberation can be expressed in an infinite spectrum of ways. I see that now.

That’s understandable, I don’t really carry on or talk like many of the established liberated people.  I’m not really into spirituality and I was only 22 when I got liberated so didn’t spend half my life in some religious cult. 

What’s your story?