The Antibody Network ·The Clearing
Course II · The Self 5 lessons · About a week, one sitting per day.

Who Is Asking

Five teachings on the one who was doing the looking.

A word before we begin

The first course said the ground is one. Before going any further, it is worth turning around and asking who received that sentence. There was someone reading. Someone nodding, or not. Someone who has been calling itself I all day without ever checking what the word refers to.

This course is five teachings on that check. The traditions are unusually blunt about it: the self you take yourself to be is a construction, worn so long it feels like skin, and the instruction is not to improve it but to look at it directly until it does what constructions do under direct attention. We begin with a method, from a man who found it at sixteen, and end with a Zen master saying the whole path in three sentences. Nothing here asks you to believe you are not real. It asks you to find out what you are.

  1. II.1
    The question that turns back
    Ramana Maharshi gives the shortest instruction on the Map: ask who is asking.
    Nan Yar — Who Am I · Ramana Maharshi, Nan Yar (Who Am I?), c. 1902
  2. II.2
    The mask
    Jung borrows the word for a Greek actor’s mask and names what you have been wearing.
    The Persona · Carl Jung, drawing on Greek theatrical tradition; also Erving Goffman (1956)
  3. II.3
    The bag of skin
    Alan Watts, in a letter to his children, names the hallucination and the taboo that protects it.
    The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are · Alan Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966)
  4. II.4
    No one watching
    Krishnamurti says the observer and the observed are not two, and that watching for it makes it vanish.
    The Observer Is the Observed · J. Krishnamurti, The First and Last Freedom (1954) / various talks
  5. II.5
    To forget the self
    Dogen, thirteenth-century Zen master, says the whole path in three sentences.
    To Forget the Self · Dogen Zenji, Genjokoan (1233)
When you reach the end

Five readings, and the self that started the course is somewhat harder to locate than it was. That is the intended result. None of these teachers thought you were nothing. They thought the I was a smaller and a stranger thing than you had assumed, and that most of the suffering in a life comes from defending it.

The next course is about what else stands in the way, because the self is only the nearest obstacle, not the only one. Take a day off between them if you like. The question from the first reading will keep asking itself either way.

If you'd like, next
Course III. What Gets in the Way
Once you have seen the mask, the next course is about what else is in the way.
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