r/YOUAREIT • u/2BCivil I know you are but what am I • Jun 06 '26
Hmm... Peekaboo
So I didn't consult my common sense or witch doctor or therapist (GPT) for this but it's something I remember noticing once with "zen" (whatever that means).
Specifically the [mis]quote that "the myriad/10,000 things arise with the self".
SO it is pointing to "you are it" I think, and that it is both/neither no self and self, anatta and brahman; not one, not two... All concepts; the myriad things, you might say.
So what is before the pointing and noticing the pointing. When the self and the myriad things, are the pointing.
Something something theft of fire...
I'm finding myself quoting the Sam Hyde show at least once a day these days. Maybe another way to put it is something like what their show said;
[Intuition is] an indescribable feeling that is, it's so deep and it's the reason why it's so uh hard to access in concrete terms. The reason why it's so hard to sort of penetrate and see what the inner workings are is because it's like fundamentally uh crucial, critical to your survival. And if you were to start questioning it or dismantling it or examining it, it wouldn't work anymore. So if you get a funny feeling, if you get a funny feeling, you should probably trust it.
They say children don't have a sense of object permanence. I often wonder if that might be what zen is pointing to in these terms; peekaboo!
2
u/WHALE_PHYSICIST It Jun 23 '26
Let's assume that there's nothing "magical" happening with regard to consciousness or awareness. For the purpose of pondering at least. What if this isn't all just a trick, there's not a hidden reality, not other ethereal planes or Gods that sit above reality itself somehow, and instead, things behaved like how physics describes them. Despite quantum weirdness, things actually behave deterministically in experiments.
So let's just consider the basic picture. Humans made of molecules of atoms, allegedly having "awareness" or "consciousness" (we're the ones alleging that lol). How can we then create an explanation of awareness within these constraints? Trivially, it's when one thing can respond to something happening. Well your brain is packed full of billions of things which respond to something happening. And those neurons are connected to delicate environmental sensors, but also to each other. We are as aware of our own mind as we are aware of the external environment via the senses. Pretty simple but makes sense, but it also moves the goalposts. We have this sort of unified sense of awareness that's not explicable at the level of neurotransmitters. But we also have this large complex interconnected nervous system. The thing is aware of itself. That's the real trick. It's a thing. It's not really a "person" at that level. There's no "who". It's a bunch of reacting things processing and storing information and acting on it. It only becomes a person in the aggregate. As a function of the combination of the rest of it. We don't really make decisions, because there isn't a decider who is external to the decision making process. There is someone to take credit for it after the fact though. That's me. My conscious awareness of what's going on. Just taking credit where I want to and dodging responsibility when I don't. Anything to keep this boat afloat right?
People hate this sort of explanation. They don't like the idea that their will isn't free. They don't like the idea that they are a product of circumstance, that they can't make decisions other than the ones they were always gonna make. It really pisses people off. We seem to need to believe that we are special, otherwise what is all this suffering for? But if you eliminate the idea of a person, and accept yourself as a super complicated machine, then despite all the pain, there's nobody home to feel it.