I admit that I am perfectly unable to communicate the point I am trying to make here. The best I guess I can do (hopefully) is create in you the space to ask questions which will empty themselves out if you really follow through with them.

If I might offer simply the benefit of my own experience (which is all any of this should be taken as): you are pushing too hard. The “answer” is so simple that it could be described as “dumb”, which is why so few people ever find it, or finding it, end up accepting it.

Life is perfecting each moment. Any notion of the self can only exist there. Maybe all self really is is awareness of the moment. Maybe self-mastery is mastery of the moment. Maybe mastery of the moment is acceptance of what that moment brings to you and celebration of it. I struggle to share what I have found in my own life, but it has transformed me in such a way that I cannot help but try. I would be a failure as a human being, I would be without justice or compassion if I did not at least make the attempt, knowing full well I will fail again and again.

Hrmmmmmrmmmrrmmmmrmmmm. Hm.

That little word ’caused’ gives me pause. For starters, that particular causality clearly works both ways: the things you’re feeding in are determined by your mental and emotional perceptions. But more than that, if the mind is a big sausage machine then it’s become very lazy. Direct causal link between stimulus and response is what machines do.

Serving God is different I guess. Sorry for not being clear. I think of a slave as serving against ones will. If you were to totally disolve your ego, you would be like an empty vessel that anyone that happened by could use for whatever purpose.

But my point is being a servant for God requires a strong ego. Its a give and take relationship. You don’t just go limp.

We are these powerful space vehicles. So then God gets in there and accomplishes things through us. Before that time, we are kind of on auto-pilot.

Excellent.

while Job, my servant offers prayers for you.

But, this is where the serving comes in. It’s not slavery, not disolving but what else could Job do? Would he go through what he went through and tell these guys “Hey, where were you when I needed you? I’m not going to pray for you. Go figure it out for yourself like I did.”. He’s a servant of God and his fellow man because of his strength.

If my friend asks for $20.00 I give it to her because she’s my friend. If God asks me to give I do (or try to) not because I feel threatened but because were friends. If I don’t feel like helping people (not $$ to crack heads but crack heads need prayers too) I know I need to examine my relationship with God, I’m too much in the world.

Thus, Job (the ego) out of remaining strong and constant in the face of violent attacks from Yahweh (the Self), and not disintegrating as his friends advised him to do, is raised to the status of near-partnership with God — becomes his priest, so to speak, through whom divine dispensation finds its opening onto others. He has become, as we have been describing it, an archetypal “vessel for the continuing incarnation of God.”

That’s another quote. I’ve said enough I think. But basically I will say, if you want to have a relationship with God, try to hold yourself together. Reatian your personal integrity, Don’t just try to merge with God and become dissolute. That’s not the point.

“The reply is: Not for my own sake. This is why the previous injunction was: to begin with oneself. To begin with oneself, but not to end with oneself; to start from oneself, but not to aim at oneself; to comprehend oneself, but not to be preoccupied with oneself . . .

“Judaism regards each man’s soul as a serving member of God’s creation which, by man’s work, is to become the Kingdom of God; thus, no soul has its object in itself, in its own salvation. True, each is to know itself, purify itself, perfect itself, but not for its own sake — neither for the sake of its temporal happiness nor for that of its eternal bliss — but for the sake of the work which it is destined to perform upon the world.” (Hasidism and Modern Man, pages 162-166)

So that’s How I see it. You start out working on yourself. But that is not the end goal. The end goal is to carry out your part of the divine plan for the sake of humanity as a whole. But I mean, how the Hell can you do that if you dispense with the whole concept of self from the outset?

If that’s the case though that sucks.

God doesn’t just want to piss in us. He wants to be us. We are a bit more complex than a clay pot. if you were God would you want to be some liquid sitting in a clay pot? Booooooooring. We are clay pots that have several very sophisticated features. We are like space vehicles. O.k.? We are these powerful space vehicles. So then God gets in there and accomplishes things through us. Before that time, we are kind of on auto-pilot. We are on auto-pilot and fuctioning as golf carts or garbage trucks or some stupid thing.

Because our auto-pilot is the false ego and its plugged into the world system. But if there is nothing outside of the false ego, then we are nothing. Nothing is not a vehicle. Nothing is a void. Nothing is nothing. God is a void, an intelligent void. A vehicle for a void is not another void. Then you would have to voids, sitting there in their mutual voidhood. We definately have spark. I would tend to think there is more than one Ghost in the machine. One is God and one is us. The machine is our body, our minds etc.

I don’t have the structure totally worked out, but one thing I know is you need an ego, otherwise you are not worth God’s trouble.

…I think.

That says it all right there. This idea of no self is a deception. You think. You think therfore you are.

I think a false sense of self is constructed by other people. Existentialists would say that everything has no inherent meaning and you should create your own meaning. I desagree with that too. I think meaning is tied to your true self, which is tied to a higher will.

what can you be with that mindset other than a slave?

That’s what gnosis is.

My understanding would be better phrased as the opposite, though: gnosis is the knowledge that anything which can be indicated as ’self’ is more fundamentally and truly ‘non-self’.

So how do we even know if we are talking about the same things? The image of the self possesses no fundamental constancy at all as far as I can tell, not even the property of existing, which can come and go.

Ultimately, “self mastery” is meaningless with no core concept of a self. How do you get around that Tim?

I would think the goal would be disillusionment with false beliefs, and part of that is eradication of habits which support those beliefs.

Who is the master and what is being mastered?

Right. Nothing ‘I’ do (as we casually put it) or am can be accurately, logically ground to any indicateable thing, not even in my own head, I think.

Tell you what - click on my name - ( or go to http://www.thethoughts.co.uk ) then on my site look under the “Recently Written” menu on the far right for the post called “Meditating and moving around the Mask”

Yep, the world “system” / matrix / whatever you want to call it is built up of peoples expectations and perceptions. The practicality of realizing this, is that it allows you to work on self-development. You move further away from what you “think” life is about into what life “really” is about. And then you are in a much better place to live for others - because bit by bit you destroy your own Ego and all the BS it carries with it.

—

Tim, I like your idea here - because to some extent it helps you move your “point of awareness” around. You get to see yourself from a different perspective. I have done something similar under meditation, your “awareness” sees yourself from outside so to speak. And yes it solidifies your understanding of who / what you are.

Although I am not sure what you mean about not seeing ‘what the big deal is about “the Self”.‘ is? If we can’t come to discover our personal core - then what else is there to do? We can’t truly help others until we can work from a foundation of true self (and thus human) understanding.

Or perhaps that is what you are getting at?

I couldn’t get that link. But it sounds interesting. The idea I have is that the “world” is a structure built around peoples false sense of self and that the “Kingdom of God” is built around people’s true sense of self.

What is unqualified “intention”? Whose intention?

We talked about this before. This exercise of looking at another person and projecting your self image onto them is somthing you came up with several months ago and looks like its not part of your newer ideas of “self mastery”

Maybe you think its just a nitpicky little thing, but to me the concept of self is a big deal.

If the goal is to serve others as you say, and at the same time, you believe “self” is an empty concept, then who are these “others”, then?

Would not ech of these others have a corresponding “self”? The simantics of this gets all convoluted. I should take some effort to sort out all these concepts.

But there are some wierd effects of not believing in the concept of the self. You start out wanting to help people, i.e. by being “selfless” and then you realize you should not help them because then you are edifying their concept of self. better to ignore them and let them work of their negative karma. That happens in Buddhist countries.

So what is the purpose of this exercise of sitting in front of a mirror and projecting your image onto the reflection and then doing the same thing with a projection of another person?

The purpose is that it is an experiment. It is a challenge to personal perceptual exploration. See what happens. You’re not going to turn into a mindless cult freak unless you decide to do that.

Turning yourself into a blank slate is not enlightenment.

I don’t remember saying or implying that. I don’t see what the big deal is about “the Self”. The point is living for other people instead of being a selfish douchebag and suffering because of it endlessly. It has nothing to do with “negating” yourself. If that is a fear, then it ought to be faced. Your life is in your hands, you are responsible for your actions and your decisions. Further, you are responsible for your own internal states and emotional responses to your perceptions.

How can one distinguish this from what it is not?

That’s what gnosis is.

As for the energy signature that gets imprinted on the body. I agree with that also; in fact I wrote about that very subject here:

[URL="http://www.thethoughts.co.uk/thoughts/meditating-and-moving-around-the-mask/"]Social-personal ‘Energy’ Mask[/URL]

I think there is some core of energy that is uniquely “you.”

How can one distinguish this from what it is not?

The problem with Buddhism in this regard, in how this idea of oneness and no self ruins peoples lives and lets them be preyed upon by cult leaders:
http://www.mimbres.com/holp/holpath/kramer/oneness.htm

Jeremy Puma on the difference between Buddhism and Gnosticism in regards to the ego and the self:

http://www.palmtreegarden.org/fp/2007/08/27/the-ego-self-hypgnosis/
The idea of the ego in Kaballa and the ideas of Jung and how it differs with Eastern Religions:

http://www.donmeh-west.com/evolvego.shtml

One other thing I want to throw in here-India is a civilization of a bunch of violent Aryan “blonde beasts” that took over the original highly cultured and literate inhabitants of India and brought them under domination and created religious doctrines to keep them in their place.

This last paragraph may seem incongruous with the rest of my post, but its not.

Psychopaths are skilled at “negating” people. So to me its no wonder that a psychopathic race of people (which aryans have that tendency) to create a religion centered around people negating themselves.

Turning yourself into a blank slate is not enlightenment. Because you didn’t start out as a blank slate. You came from the divine and have a divine purpose for being here.

So to me this self mastery stuff is about interfacing correctly with your body in order to fulfil that purpose.

I can have a false sense of self, but that is not to say that my idea of having a self is a delusion. The delusion is a false sense of self. I have a true self and I get “occluded” in my perception of my true self.

So what is the purpose of this exercise of sitting in front of a mirror and projecting your image onto the reflection and then doing the same thing with a projection of another person? To demonstrate that both are a total illusion?

You aren’t the person in the mirror and you aren’t the person in front of you?

Well, you aren’t the person in the mirror, because it backwards, but there is complete one on one correspondence. I think our true self is composed of energy. This energy signature creates a body. What I mean is the energy signature leaves a clear and unique imprint on the body. This is a dynamic plastic thing to a degree, you can chang your character and it will show up on your body. The energy you take on will change your countenance and as you age your emotional energy will leave an imprint on your face.

But I think to say that this interface is plastic and dynamic as opposed to static and immutible is not to say that it doesn’t exist or that its a mere illusion.

I think there is some core of energy that is uniquely “you.”

I actually think this post describes a utopian world, where what we all output reflects what we all input, ie its the truth. In reality, the process becomes a lot more “constipated” than that because people become liars, which is to say that they craft their words to have a desired impact on the people around them. When words are used as a method of manipulation rather than a to convey reality as the teller experiences it, they become poisonous and divorced from reality, regardless of the intent of the teller. Or at least that is how I would define “poison” in this sense.

As I was coming here today I considered how to preach to you clearly so that you would understand me properly, and I hit upon an analogy. If you can understand it, you will be able to grasp my meaning and get to the bottom of all that I have ever preached about. The analogy is with my eye and wood. When my eye is open it is an eye: when it is shut it is the same eye; and the wood is neither more nor less by reason of my seeing it. Now mark me well: Suppose my eye, being one and single in itself, falls on the wood with vision, then though each thing stays as it is, yet in the very act of seeing they are so much at one that we can really say ‘eye-wood’, and the wood is my eye. Now, if the wood were free from matter and wholly immaterial like my eyesight is, then we could truly say that, in the act of seeing, the wood and my eye were of one essence. If this is true for material things, it is all the more true of spiritual.

-Meister Eckhart

Thoughts and emotion, likewise, arise from the intake of sensory data, it being stripped for “nutritious” elements and then expelled through the processes we normally glorify as “self-expression.”

I agree very much with this. It seems to me that the internal voice we speak to ourselves with is an end-product, only the result of the silent voice. As it passes into maturity, the words form more clearly, sometimes we repeat them to oursleves or rephrase them to be more satisfactory (to who?)

The written/spoken word is dead, or near-dead. It is the skeleton (or blossom) of the living word, which is silent and eternal. If the dead word ‘does’ anything at all, it is used as food just as you described. That is its proper role in its maturity.

I liked this post very much!