The experience of "Anatta"

[josephzizys]

@Farid

In Buddhism, there is an “X” state where the “I” is experienced as a momentary continuum.

a “momentary” “continuum” is a contradiction in terms. a thing cannot be momentary or instantaneous at the same time as being continuous or extended.

the idea that “dhammas” are “momentary” is a Theravadin and therefore sectarian position.

the actual position in the EBT, best articulated at DN1 DN2 and DN9 is that there cannot be an “experience” of anatta, as “anatta” is a property (or if you would rather an absence of a property) of any given phenomena of experience.

any experience must be dependent on the phenomena experienced. and liberation or independence from phenomena cannot itself depend on phenomena for it’s realization, as again this would be a contradiction.

However it must be possible to have knowledge of liberation, otherwise how could the Buddha have worked it out?

therefore an epistemology that does not make appeal to the status or otherwise of anything “outside” phenomena, but nevertheless grounds and warrants assertions about the impossibility of suffering without phenomena is implied if Buddhism is true.

That there may be conceptual difficulties to explore and explain with such a picture is borne out by the history of Buddhism, especially in the Mahayana literature.

However the Buddhist claim is that there can be knowledge of the nature of phenomena that can be experienced, by the observation of phenomena themselves, without appeal to anything “outside” phenomena, which we cannot know, and cannot have experience of, and therefore cannot say anything about.

The “witness” in this case is not problematic, as the experience of “witnessing” or “having witnessed” is not posited as something that is happening “outside” the collection of experiential phenomena.

If it were possible to “experience” something that is not existent, i.e if we could experience a NOT self, then there would BE a “not-self” and this contradicts the abayakata.

for further discussion see :

TO BE OR NOT TO BE, the undeclared points in the 4 principle Nikayas:

TO BE OR NOT TO BE (or both, or neither) The undeclared points in the 4 principle Nikayas. The undeclared points are a number of questions, typically ten, but sometimes as few as two, as at SN44.10, and sometimes as many as 11, as at AN10.95, and often 4, as at SN12.17. This essay focuses on the standard set of ten, and looks at the differing explanations given for the Buddha’s silence in the different suttas. We first see the undeclared points introduced at DN1 and DN2, where they are used to…

The EBT, and especially the parts outlined above , outline a sophisticated philosophy reminiscent of Zeno and Parmenides, the later glosses that make solipsistic and ridiculously philosophically naïve claims that reify anatta and posit an “experience” of it as a metaphysical reality completely miss the point and fail to honor the depth and brilliance of the original articulation in the EBT.

The idea that the (false) “self” literally IS the 5 aggregates is perhaps the most egregious misreading of the early material imaginable, other than the even worse revisionism of claiming that Buddhism is a disguised Hinduism and that there is a (non-phenomenological) “self” that grounds the identity of “reals”

Hope that helps.