' The Subconscious Mind '...

Much of our emotional and cognitive landscape is projected into consciousness from subconscious dynamics driven by stimulus/response conditioning, as is our dreams at night.

Our personality is shaped by past experiences and conditioning. Our thoughts and actions are driven by embedded patterns that remained fixed in subconscious memory due to prior mental impressions.

For instance, a girl who was sexually molested when very young may have problems with sexual intimacy for her entire life. Or a child who almost drowned when a baby, may have a lifetime fear of water and swimming.

All fixed preferences have become subconscious patterns that the mind doesn't even have to think about during a moment of "choosing". "You" don't choose, the mental process does.

The most important of the various fixed patterns in the subconscious is the well-defined "sense of self identity". This sense of self then becomes a somewhat permanent filter over the lens of all experience and a kind of movie director. The mind then believes this bundle of conditioning to be it's actual "self". It's the feeling and thought of "me". But it's no more real than an identity in last night's dream.

It is only this mentally created personality dynamic that is seeking enlightenment and liberation from its suffering. It is only this personality dynamic that gets attached to a teaching tradition and teacher as well as believing that various practices will be beneficial. But we must ask "beneficial for whom?". Remember, the personal self, the seeker, is ONLY a bundle of concepts and emotional feelings as a subconscious mental construction.

So fundamentally the problem isn't the problem; rather the one who owns the problem is the only problem, and that "owner" doesn't exist.

This is why I always ask "who" is seeking or who is suffering or who is there to do a practice or who is there to attain enlightenment. It's obvious here that that "who" is afigment of conditioned imagination only.

Here, when that cessation of subconscious selfing happened suddenly, the self-identity just vanished due to some subconscious shift. There no longer was anyone as a personal self with a personal story present. The personal self disappeared, like waking from a dream.

The concepts of death and suffering no longer had meaning because there was no longer anyone there to die or to suffer. It was an amazing freedom in a realm of infinite and vast, empty Beingness that belonged to no one.

It is only this moment of complete personal absence that has true meaning. This is what the Buddha experienced that he called anatta or no self. This is the liberation in which the one seeking liberation vanishes.


-Jackson Peterson