Duncan Riach
2 min readJan 22, 2019

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Beautifully written!

Thank you.

How is this false sense of self created?

It’s not a false self. An illusion of separation seems to form in small children. How and why it happens is a mystery.

I was thinking the experience of sensation of pain happens when what appears as body is hurt.

Pain can appear. The body can seem to be hurt.

The sensation of pain doesn’t happen when a flower is plucked from a plant or a stone falls on some object within the field of awareness, but it happens only when any part of the body is hurt

This is not evidence that there is a separate being inside the body. The self claims everything that seems to be happening to be about it and for it. Just because it seems that way, it doesn’t mean that it isn’t. None of these things are personal: pain in the body, sensations in the body, emotional reactions, thoughts, feelings, movement of the body. All of these are what may seem to be happening, for no one.

Then I try to prevent hurt to any part of the body.

You don’t try to prevent anything. The body and brain will seem to avoid pain.

Of course similarly pleasure in the body, when I eat tasty food or a breeze touches me for example.

You don’t eat food. You don’t feel pleasure. A breeze does not touch you. All of these things seem to be happening, but for no one.

Then my memory creates desire to go for pleasurable feelings from their respective sources and fear to avoid unpleasant feeling from the respective sources to the body and so I form the concept of me as ‘this body’ and the other part of the awareness as world ‘out there’ where I need to safely mover around and maximize my pleasure.

Yep. This is the dream of separation. Notice how “me” is woven throughout all these impersonal happenings. It clings to them, hoping they can prove that it’s real. It’s not real.

Perhaps awareness has decided that pain or unpleasant feeling should happen when the body is hurt and pleasurable feelings should happen from other sources so that the illusion of me is formed and sustained?

There is no awareness and nothing that is deciding. There is just what seems to be happening, which is the infinite appearing effortlessly, spontaneously, and completely unconditionally as that.

But there is something very real about the feeling of pain as avoidable and feeling of pleasure as desirable and THEN we label them accordingly and act accordingly. They are not some random labelings, right?

What seems to be happening is both real and unreal, or rather neither real nor unreal. The problem for the “me” is that it thinks it’s real, so it sees everything else are real and being about it. There is no separate thing to experience anything else. There is no location in what seems to be happening for the me because it is all happening in the same place, which is nowhere.

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Duncan Riach
Duncan Riach

Written by Duncan Riach

Top Writer. Self-Revealing. Mental Health. Success. Fulfillment. Flow. MS Engineering/Technology. PhD Psychology. duncanriach.com

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