Seeing no-other (consequence of seeing no-self) doesn’t mean we stop experiencing others.
“There are no others” means there are no separate selves — not in any body. But the experience of bodies remains the same.
Bodies exhibit patterns and tendencies — we could call that character. But these are not created by a self. They’re spontaneous expressions of complex organic systems.
Having seen no-self, it’s obvious there’s no volition, authorship, or doership controlling any aspect of the body.
There’s no entity in there running the show.
There’s just the show — no matter how many beliefs there are about a self running it.
We could say a cat has a personality: it has specific behavioral patterns. But no matter how much personality we see in the cat, we know there’s no person inside, no self willing its thoughts, no volition over its actions.
Seeing no-self, human bodies are experienced as the cat: as conditioned patterns of behavior.
These body-behavior patterns interact with other bodies, sometimes smoothly, sometimes not so much.
The experience of relating is the same, except:
Making other bodies guilty becomes impossible as there’s no one responsible.
Other bodies are always forgiven as there’s no one to forgive.
One BEING, billions of bodies.
So light, yet so deep.
When I read:There’s no one to forgive, because no one ever did wrong
I felt touched by a layer of formless breath,
where Being is one,
and all blame dissolves into the void.
Thank you for writing with a depth that needs no proof
those who’ve touched “no-self” will simply recognize it.
A rare presence
like a clear spring in the realm of words.
🙏🏻 “One BEING, billions of bodies.”, and where they interact, with each other and with the rest of reality, the cosmos continues its journey of becoming.