One day, when I was a teenager, I caught myself creating a self. I was sitting in a balcony in my flat in Kyiv when it suddenly hit me that I had to take on some personal qualities to become 'a someone'. I didn't know WHY I had to be that particular someone. Everybody seemed to be doing it - and the only alternative to that was "being noone", and I didn't want that. The curious part was, deep down, I didn't feel like any of the qualities I could assume would describe me truthfully. I knew that every quality would be a lie or an act, but I had to do that anyway, because it was the only game in town. I wasn't conscious back then of the real reasons why I was doing it. I didn't question who I really was at that point. Today I was contemplating "Why did I feel compelled to create and maintain a sense of being a particular self in the first place?", and this memory came up. So I decided to share it because I thought it was interesting.

„You can‘t explain consciousness.“

I had to share this image. For me it sums up the transformative effects of putting our attention on the objective world. Moving from self-absorbed, conceptually-dominated myopia to upright, direct-relating Rabbit Reality. I think I might just about be the second guy!

Hello everybody, In the spirit of this week's assignment, I've begun to contemplate my self in relationship to my suffering. The main thing is, how much attention is given to this, and how that detracts from freedom and happiness. I don't know how to describe it, but it feels almost as if the self's whole thing is manipulation. Not happiness or "be-"ing. Like it's for the manipulation of circumstances. If someone else enters the room, there can be a sense of needing to present something in a fashion that will produce a desired outcome. Even when someone else isn't present, it can seem many of us are still driven in some part at least by a little bit of social urges. A desire to be seen a certain way, like being a good person, or successful, "spiritually" attained, be a good martial artist, a lover, financially well-off, etc. Anything, really. Largely, it seems we evaluate how our life is going based on how we may percieve others and whether we meet our desired goals. Yet, why do they seem to matter? I think it's in large part based off of that self aspect, but really it's our own mind. We're driven to "do this job" so hard that other things are neglected. Be a "good person." Be a "champion," smart, sexy, etc. I think the suffering that comes from this is because we can feel it's not really true. That it's a manipulation. We can feel that we're not REALLY being ourselves in some kind of way. So an assumption I seem to have that limits freedom and happiness is that I NEED to continue with all these shenanigans. That I have to always run around and maintain this and that. That I can't just "be." Anyway, there's a contribution for this week's weekly