I can understand that sometimes people feel alienated or
distant, but I think that's just how they are feeling. Feelings
come and go and IMO are too flippant to reflect truth or reality.
That said, regardless of such feelings I don't suppose people, when
they do reflect during their sober moments, will separate
their experiences from their very beings i.e. self.
Re the point about experiencing at-oneness with everything. I
think what needs to be established is really whether we are one
with everything, some kind of monism? I think that sometimes some
people do claim that they are experience "the moment" in time when
everything seems to be "one" but again these would be
personal-to-holder experiences. It's hard to quibble with
experiences, if you know what I mean.
I guess what I am trying to say is that feelings are not a good
basis to judge the truth of a claim or belief.
No.. you are misunderstanding what I said.
By the 'feeling' - actually feeling isn't a good term - I mean
the experience. The experience is that of no subject-object
division and no sense of self. There is no sense of a perceiver
behind a perception. There is just a perception, and there is no
sense of a center, no sense of separation, no sense of division, no
sense of distance. Perception is being experienced where it is
without any sense of a vantage point [an example of a commonly
experienced vantage point would be to experience 'things' as a
person inside the head that is the looker, looking outwards, just
like in the standard diagram of cartesian dualism]. This is the
experience.
However, the experience is not the realization. Even
athletes or ordinary people can have certain similar peak
experiences where self-consciousness is temporarily suspended or
transcended in an act of seeing something wonderful or doing
something intense and concentrative.
What I'm talking about is the realization of Anatta,
the realization of no-self. It is about realizing the
nature of reality as having always already been the case.
Because of this act of realization [not experience], the false view
or delusion fabricating the sense of self pretty much stops
arising. Therefore, after this realization, the 'experience' as
described above becomes almost perpetual and after full
actualization of view and realization, the experience does become
perpetual. A perpetual state of direct, gapless and self-releasing
experience from moment to moment.
As I wrote long time ago:
First I do not see Anatta as merely a freeing from personality
sort of experience as you mentioned; I see it as that a self/agent,
a doer, a thinker, a watcher, etc, cannot be found apart from the
moment to moment flow of manifestation or as its commonly expressed
as ‘the observer is the observed’; there is no self apart from
arising and passing. A very important point here is that
Anatta/No-Self is a Dharma Seal, it is the nature of Reality all
the time -- and not merely as a state free from personality, ego or
the ‘small self’ or a stage to attain. This means that it does not
depend on the level of achievement of a practitioner to experience
anatta but Reality has always been Anatta and what
is important here is the intuitive insight into it as the nature,
characteristic, of phenomenon (dharma seal).
To put further emphasis on the importance of this point, I would
like to borrow from the Bahiya Sutta (http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/kn/ud/ud.1.10.irel.html)
that ‘in the seeing, there is just the seen, no seer’, ‘in the
hearing, there is just the heard, no hearer’ as an illustration.
When a person says that I have gone beyond the experiences from ‘I
hear sound’ to a stage of ‘becoming sound’, he is mistaken. When it
is taken to be a stage, it is illusory. For in actual case, there
is and always is only sound when hearing; never was there a hearer
to begin with. Nothing attained for it is always so. This is the
seal of no-self. Therefore to a non dualist, the practice is in
understanding the illusionary views of the sense of self and the
split. Before the awakening of prajna wisdom, there will always be
an unknowing attempt to maintain a purest state of 'presence'. This
purest presence is the 'how' of a dualistic mind -- its dualistic
attempt to provide a solution due to its lack of clarity of the
spontaneous nature of the unconditioned. It is critical to note
here that both the doubts/confusions/searches and the solutions
that are created for these doubts/confusions/searches actually
derive from the same cause -- our karmic propensities of ever
seeing things dualistically.
Usually I don't talk about subjects like anatta/no-self, or
emptiness, to people who are new to Buddhism, and I apologise if
any of these sounds too deep or confusing due to my inability to
express very clearly or simply. It is one of the more profound
topics in Buddhism, though it is certainly a subject that is
understandable and experiencable and realizable as your
understanding and practice of the dharma matures.
Realization and experience should be delineated.
Realization does not arise out of mere feelings/experience
but by penetrating the nature of experience in wisdom-awareness.
However the experience [of having no sense of self] does become
effortless after realization.
In summary:
1) realization of anatta (no self) is not the same as a mere
[peak] experience of transcending the sense of self, rather it is
discovering that anatta is always already the case as the nature of
reality
2) however, the experience of transcending the sense of self
becomes effortless and later perpetual after the realization. Why?
Sense of self is constructed/fabricated due to ignorance, so it is
the arising of wisdom/realization --> removal of ignorance
--> no more fabricating of sense of self in daily life