Courage
It will also cause other strange artefacts but generally the fear of insanity theme seems to be common in 90% of cases. The way to dissolve this one is simply to acknowledge that all you are doing is looking for the truth. Can the truth really affect your sanity, or is this just a story related to a self that you have not discovered yet?
If there is no self, then you are entitled to ask “How come this happens?”
As discussed, experience is real and hence the appearance of thoughts is also a real appearance and we obviously cannot reject the appearance of thoughts in our experience. The illusion of self arises from the myriad of thoughts and projections about an entity being in control of thinking and having agency over the body.
As far as the mind is concerned, there is no problem and everything is working fine. The idea of no self is a disturbance to the equilibrium and I'm sure when you first heard about the idea there was, and certainly still is, a degree of resistance. Basically, the brain filters the incoming sense data through its model of reality. If you believe there is a self, everything that comes in to the brain is in terms of this model of the world.
On an evolutionary level this makes perfect sense, as the brain needs to form a working model of reality in order for it to be able to judge the appropriate action to be taken in a wide variety of situations. As an example, take a look at this picture:
Do you see a six of spades?
Look again
It is actually a red six of spades. As we know the six of spades is black, therefore, this card does not exist. As you have never seen a red six of spades before, the brain filtered the incoming sense data in terms of its model of reality. Therefore, we can conclude that our brains model of the world actually influences our perception of it. It also follows then, that our beliefs and preconceptions can potentially obscure what is really going on in reality.
This is literally what is happening through the illusion of self. It warps reality in terms of an illusory entity being responsible for thoughts and actions. If we think about this in terms of confirmation bias, we are prone to interpreting data in terms of our entrenched beliefs. What is happening, to put it simply, is that we are fighting against our own confirmation bias to try and discover the truth.
This is why some seekers in the Ruthless Truth and Truth Strike days could not even muster a shred of courage or honesty.
Hence the reason why we thought people actually needed harpooning and lancing, and why we aggressively tried to tear a persons ego to shreds.
The whole point of those endeavours was to smash apart their reality bubble in the hope they could see that they needed to look honestly instead of arguing from a set of preconceptions they had never tested. But that's another story, I digress.
At every step of the way in an investigation we are disrupting our equilibrium to try and search for information that might contradict our model of reality. Naturally, the brain does not want to do this and hence we might experience mild emotional turmoil, all the way to more intense physical ailments. For me, I had a migraine. For others, they experienced a little fear when looking.
The scariest thing about liberating people during the Truth Strike and Ruthless Truth saga was discovering the degree to which people deceived themselves. Watching people slither out of uncomfortable questions was one of the ways in which we highlighted to people the circular logic they were utilising. Quite often this helped folks hone in.
Other people used to fight to protect the integrity of the illusion and delude themselves that they were not arguing against the idea of no self, when they clearly were. In this sense the inability to face up to difficulties for their story or the contradictions they were faced with was indicative of a degree of cowardice.
In this sense, it was those who were brave and cared about the truth who managed to push their way through to the other side of the gate.
Remember being brave also entails being afraid.
It is not so much a special quality that only tougher people have but it is the courage to keep going, no matter what uncomfortable truths you might find, that will serve you well on this journey. One of my good friends who was a fellow administrator at Truth Strike came out with a great quote.
'The opposite of truth is not a lie, it is cowardice', (Stepvhen 2011)
To this day I realise the profundity of this statement and you need to realise that we lie to ourselves and weave intricate stories for the sake of avoiding suffering. Now, if we weaved ourselves a story about god and heaven, what we have is a paradigm example of the most putrid form of cowardice. Religion is merely taking on an ontology that avoids the fear of death and tells us that our suffering is a virtue.
All of us have weaved complex mental fictions in some way or another, however, it is on us to untangle the mess and find out what is true - Or else we are simply wrapped up in a vacuous story and our humanity is suppressed.
If you believe religion actually encourages our humanity you need to realise that that it is actually self serving. It is done within the context of trying to curry favour on the day of judgement as such, and any supposedly 'selfless act' in this context has, at its core, the vile stench of ego.
Of course, one weaves a story of how they are a 'good' and 'just' person, but this is just one of the ways that the deceit, in which they are suckered in to, is rationalised in to a narrative that can be rote learned and parroted ad nauseam. You have to grow a pair, metaphorically speaking, and challenge everything - even things you never even dreamed of questioning.
An Introduction To Dishonesty >
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