I'm extremely confused.

I don't understand. Hopefully someone will be able to help me out in trying to understand Buddhism a little bit more.

I've read that Buddhism is meant to help one destroy the illusion of the self. To end delusion and therefore end suffering. What is the self? How does one differentiate between the illusion and the actual? Is there even an "actual" self, a being that does not perpetuate suffering? How does a person exist without the self? Should one "seek" enlightenment? Isn't that just another attachment?

How do you know when you are perpetuating delusion? How do you learn to recognize the difference? If something makes you "happy", how is that suffering? If getting a new pair of shoes makes someone happy, Buddhism might say that they are continuing their suffering through attachment. What can make someone happy without attachment? Isn't everything attachment?

And when you ask the question: "Will this get me where I want to be?" isn't that giving attention to the delusion of the self? could a person asking that question still be on their way to ending the idea of the self, or is it just continuing suffering?

I'll end it here to avoid this getting more jumbled, but hopefully someone can help me. It would seem that Buddhism is more personal, so these questions can't really be answered for me. It's just that I'm SO confused and would like input from people who have studied/practiced Buddhism for longer than I have (which clearly isn't very long at all).

 

Buddha did indeed warn his monks against become attached to their wisdom and attainment in the dharma.
Everything can be an attachment.

A new pair of shoes might make you happy... but what if they get damaged or lost?
The happiness a person can get from shoes is a short-lived happiness, and if your happiness and self esteem is built upon things like shoes, then it has been built upon a flimsy foundation (like the old parable of the houses built on sand and rock that Jesus told).

I think meditation helps us to to understand our mind, and to slowly recognise when we are deluding ourselves, and engaging in destructive behaviour.

As we become more aware of own mind, these things become more apparent.

 

The illusion is the self that you are identified with. The actual is the self that you already are. When it is said '"I am extremely confused", this is simply thinking. There is nothing within thinking, it is as it is. There is no truth, thinking cannot contain who you are, because you are the one that is aware of it. When it is said "I am suffering" there is identification with feeling, which the thinking labels as suffering, and there is identification with the thought that there is one that suffers. You are neither, you are the one that is aware of the thinking and the feeling. It's quite difficult to talk about in terms of this and that, because again, this is ignorance.

 

You could read Plotinus and the Upanishads and the Gita. The self is the self and the Self is the Self. There is a difference...

The Self is the life force which gives life to consciousness. You see reality, you see illusion upon waking from a dream and you know that for a time "you weren't" while in deep sleep. And yet your body keeps breathing, the blood keeps circulating. Your ego, your sense of self (little "s") works during the day and many times during dreams. But there is no ego in deep sleep, supposedly there is no thinking in deep sleep, there is neither time nor space in deep sleep. So you know that you are not the ego because it doesn't operate during dreams (for the most part) and is non-existent during deep sleep. You know that you believe the reality of the dream state as a reality, but you are not always conscious that you are dreaming. Therefore that self is not the Self. The Buddha and most mystics say that they were conscious even during deep sleep. Deep sleep is the closest idea of the Self. It is just life without identification.

Yes and no. Maybe it is the Self which is causing you to seek enlightenment. It has been said (by UG Krishnamurti) that if you really knew what Enlightenment was and what it would entail (the extinction of the ego-self) then you wouldn't want to touch it with a ten foot pole.

Everything is attachment so long as there is an emotional investment, a thought-desire associated with it. If you can desire without regard to outcome then there is no attachment. It would be like dropping a stone into the ocean and not caring to see if it strikes. The ocean is the Self.

 

I'm no Buddhist (so Buddhists correct me if I'm wrong), but I think I've gathered enough insight into the Buddhist perspective to shed some light on these questions.

In the west, we're used to thinking that a worthwhile theory or religion has to be right first and foremost - that is, it has to be consistent and logical. This is not to say that Buddhism or any eastern religion is wrong, just that its correctness is less important than whether the practice actually works. You see, Buddhism is more a path to follow, one that is believed to lead to happiness and enlightenment, rather than a theory about how reality works. Part of the path, at least in the beginning, involves belief in the doctrine on a theoretical level, and if one follows the path, then the belief coupled with the practice has an effect on one's mind and one's life. This effect occurs regardless of whether the initial belief is correct or not, whether it's logically sound or not.

I guess the best analogy to use is the placebo effect. The placebo effect was proven to be a real psychological effect in experiments in which a group of people were given what they were told was a mood enhancer, but really was nothing but a tablet of sugar (the placebo). They were told that if they took the pill, they would become happy. Even though the pill was just sugar, the great majority of subjects actually became happy. So the lesson here is that it's the belief, even if it's wrong, that has the effect of making one happy.

 

lol actually I think most Buddhists probably wouldn't equate our practice with the placebo effect.



Buddhists are often (especially in Zen) very skeptical of "beliefs", because a belief can always be wrong, it isn't something we know. So our practice is a practice of experience, it's not something we believe, it's something we do. That practice is grounded within a philosophical context, but primarily, yes, we follow it because it is effective.

Metaphysical questions aren't important to us, because knowing the answer to metaphysical questions doesn't lead to freedom from suffering.
If there is an element of Buddhism people find hard to grasp, they should just put it on the back-burner till they either find it true or false for themselves, buddhism doesn't require strict adherence to an orthodoxy of dogma before you can practice.

But we're not quite "postmodern" in our approach either, which you seem to have us slightly mixed up with. What you described sounds a bit more like Bokononism than Buddhism

 

Thanks for clarifying, Bonsai.

So what do you mean by "postmodern"? And what is Bokonomism?

 

The postmodern movement tends to support highly subjective interpretations of morality and reality, denying absolute truths outright, which is not quite true of Buddhism, which does have systems of ethics and specific teachings concerning the world and our place in it.

Bokononism was a parody religion created by Kurt Vonnegut in his novel Cat's Cradle.
It's chief doctrine is a belief in foma, harmless untruths that make people happy.

"Live by the foma that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy."
-- Bokonon

http://bernd.wechner.info/Bokononism/quotes.html

 

Lots of Buddhists think rightness is the key to liberation as if one looks to karma then one can produce something superlative. And in this vein the foremost producer of karma is ones attitude. Thus mental training is the adoption of right motivation. But that is based in wisdom, no?! So a positive mental training system will look to all these things, wisdom, karma, and so on working from the within - out. True positive attitude is typified in the Mahayana paramitas. Of which generosity is the first far reaching attitude. Don't worry about other's attitudes but worry about ones own is the key to generate positive karma and the peace that it brings.

And then to answer the threads question, illusion of a self, a self, either way, one trains in ability to not be continually recursive about themselves but to just be plain and present. If there is a notion of oneself that is substituting for simple natural presence then that is some chaff of reflectiveness which will come and go like a cloud. Buddhism may discuss issues like self - no self, but it doesn't do so at the expense of direct perception of ones own nature as still greatly alive and present.

No words quite describe that basic sentience. So stop thinking about it, and just be it. Be yourself.

Don't worry, be happy is some ways the very key.

 

That would definitely be the way to end mental confusion.