The Diamond Sutra and the No Self Help Book
- Maya Johnson
- Feb 2, 2021
- 3 min read
31/1/21
1/2/21
So as we moved into February, and Mercury is supposedly in Retrograde according to The Pattern app on my smart phone, I of course, am continuing my Week 2 of the Mindfulness (again) challenge. The more aware I think I am, the more complicated things seem to be at time. I get overwhelmed with the to do list’s. These days, my mind is also plagued with the incessant need to calculate, plan and decide to activate a plan of action for this year. Things must change, whether or not it is convenient for me. So what is the best way to do that? Oh ho ho girl, it’s never as easy as you’d like. Always some growth spurts, trials and tribulations...eh.
Do you know about the earliest complete suriving dated printed book?
All conditional phenomena are like a dream,
an illusion, a bubble, a shadow
The Diamond Sutra – Perfection of Wisdom – Mahayana Buddhism
Dated: 11 May 868.
İts colophon: ‘for universal free distribution’
‘A full translation of the document's title is The Diamond That Cuts Through Illusion. As Susan Whitfield, director of the Dunhuang Project explains, the sutra helps cut through our perceptions of the world and its illusion. "[W]e just think we exist as individuals but we don’t, in fact, we’re in a state of complete non-duality: there are no individuals, no sentient beings,” Whitfield writes’
A little surrealism for you by Rafal Olbinski -1945
That’s something neat worth sharing in my opinion.... J Another treat I’ll share below is another book I’ve found helpful during the Mindfulness again Challenge.
‘The İmposter Self’ of the Selfhoods in Kate Gustin’s, The No Self-Help Book – Forty Reasons to Get Over Yourself and Find Peace of Mind 2018
‘Like the mythical Wizard of Oz, the self projects presence and power. But when we pull the curtain to the side and look closely within ourselves to locate the person behind the projection, we find…no thing!
Go ahead, look in the mirror. When you look directly into your eyes, at the awareness looking back at you, what thing do you see? No doubt, you will see a face and a body to which you can assign all sorts of attributes such as eye color, age, height, ethnicity, gender. But what about the consciousness, the awake intelligence itself that peers out knowingly through your eyes? Does that have color, age, height, ethnicity, gender?
According to modern neuroscience, the self is less a thing than it is a process. In the process of selfing, the mind links together separate moments of subjectivity to give us the impression that we are a coherent, enduring entity.
When we think about ourselves, we activate a self-representation in the brain, a feeling of “me.” But just because we have a feeling of “me” in the mind does not mean that a real self exists separate from the realm of thought. For example, we can hold a compelling image of a superhero in our minds without it pertaining to anything real outside our imagination. …..
The self, like Superman, is a mental creation, a story.
Despite our ego’s posturing, no solid self actually lies within us.
Investigate for yourself: When you wake up in the morning, does the self (the narrative voice in your head) have to tell you to get up, or do you just open your eyes? When you feel sad, scared, or excited while watching a movie, are those feelings orchestrated by the self, or do they arise spontaneously? When you hug someone you care about, does the self command you to do it? Does the self manufacture each flash of insight you’re graced with? Was it responsible for the raw sensory experience of your most recent meal, for the awe you felt when you last saw a beautiful sunrise?
And yet the self ends up taking credit for all of it. Every occurrence, every accomplishment, the self claims as its handiwork. …
The “imposter syndrome” was identified forty years ago by psychologists investigating why many people often feel like they’re pretending, and why they have trouble taking their successes seriously.
Though psychologists originally believed the syndrome was caused by a deficit of achievement-related self-worth, the epidemic prevalence of self-doubt experienced by those with the syndrome seems to suggest a deeper root. When you consider that the self does commit fraud as it masquerades as something more than myth and metaphor, it’s not surprising that insecurity due to feeling like an imposter would proliferate.
The fact is it’s the self that is the imposter! The voice of our thoughts performs a dazzling act of wizardry by convincing us that it authors our lives. This is the shocking reality beyond the curtain: our subjectivity operates without a subject at the controls behind it.
When it comes to the self, there’s no there there!’
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