Clarification of Self via Inversion of Skies

The clarity and bliss of the union of interiority and exteriority

Clarification vs. Purification

If you jostle a cup of water with dirt in it, the water becomes cloudy, lacking in clarity. If you set that same cup down and let it be, the dirt settles, and the water becomes clear. If you have a filter, or use means such as evaporation-and-recapture, you can instead purify the water of dirt.

Purifying the water is more complex than clarifying it and also requires the water temporarily exit the cup. If the dirty water were in a sealed glass globe, purification would no longer be possible, but clarification still would.

Purification posits an ideal state, free of all impurities. Clarification posits a possibility that can be returned to at any time, where impurities are not a problem and can always be worked with if they become too obscuring for what the moment calls for.

The Skies: Fields of Experience

A traditional division of experience is into inner and outer. Each of these is a vast expanse, a sky. As starting reference points, the classic five senses that include vision, hearing, touch, taste, and smell are commonly taken as outer experience; and thought, emotion, and desires are commonly taken as inner experiences.

Here, the inner sky can be defined as all that is experienced as projection of meaning, and the outer sky as all that is experienced as taking on meaning. For example, many would consider saltiness to be of the outer sky, while preference in saltiness to be of the inner sky. Saltiness seems like a quality that is “just there” in the world, while how salty we like our food seems like our own projection of meaning on what is there.

“Projection” here is in the sense of a shadow projected on a wall when shining a light on an object. As the light moves, what appears on the wall changes, while the object does not. “Saltiness” appears as an unchanging fact about the world, while each person’s individual taste appears as a light shining on this fact from a different angle, yielding a different final pattern of experience.

Note that “projection” in this sense is always interactive: a light shining without an object does not project a shadow. An object without any light shining on it does not project a shadow. Only the combination of a light (which always has a specific brightness and directionality) and a specific object creates a specific shadow. While the light and the object can be discussed as separate conditions for the shadow, the shadow is always the interactive relationship of both.¹

Sensation and Patterning

The inner and outer skies can each be clarified.

What is the outer sky as it becomes more and more clarified of meaning? “The tree in my yard I love” becomes “The tree in my yard” becomes “the tree over there” becomes “a visual experience of brown and green”. Experiencing sensation-without-meaning is available as a contemplative experience. As meaning-making is relaxed, eventually what remains is just sensation-without-implication: fields of color, sound without meaning, textures of bodily sensation, as a single synesthetic experience without any further meaning projected onto it.

The inner sky is revealed as dependent on the outer sky: thoughts, emotions, and desires are always about something. When the outer sky is clarified to sensation, the inner sky is revealed as all projection of patterning. A pattern of object recognition is projected on a color field of brown and green, and it becomes a tree. A pattern of locational coordinates is projected on a tree, and it becomes “a tree over there”. A pattern of social ownership is projected on the tree over there and it becomes “the tree in my yard”. A pattern of relationship is projected on the tree in my yard, and it becomes “the tree in my yard I love”.

Meaning as the Sensation of the Affordances of Projected Pattern

When the inner sky is clarified, we find a potential wealth of patterning. Why a wealth? There is no action possible without a projection of patterning…one does not pick a patch of red and eat it, one picks an apple. The projection of patterning is the vision that reveals possibilities of interaction, or affordances, in a situation. Sensation itself does not have any affordances: it does not reveal any possibilities of interaction, and so is relatively impoverished.

In everyday speech, we talk of meaning. Meaning is a reflection of the inner sky in the outer sky: it is the sensation of the affordances revealed by the projection of pattern. In the outer sky, a patch of red and a felt texture of sensation is experienced. The pattern of “apple” is projected on the color field, and “hunger” on the texture. The synesthetic experience of the outer sky unites with the projection of pattern of the inner sky revealing the possible interaction of picking and eating the apple. The sensation of this possible interaction is meaning, the reflection of the inner sky in the outer sky.

Spaciousness-in-itself: being without patterning

Experiencing sensation-without-meaning is available as a contemplative experience. When there is strongly directional meaning projected on experience, then the possibilities of action are like an intersecting array of lasers, tight beams projecting in clear directions. As meaning fades, the space of possible action becomes more and more clear: the lasers become diffuse beams of light, and mix with each other, until we arrive at simple, even, undifferentiated expanse of illumination, a clear light.

When illumination is vast and without differentiation, this is spaciousness, the possibility that any coalescence of pattern could arise, prior to any such coalescence.

Self as the division between Inner and Outer Sky

Above, we defined the inner sky as all that is experienced as projection of meaning, and the outer sky as all that is experienced as taking on meaning. The dividing line between inner and outer sky is what is experienced as the self. There are a number of extreme forms of self that are useful to explore in order to better understand self as this dividing line:

some-self: The ordinary self carves out a slowly changing area of sensation-and-patterning as “the way things are” vs. “me (that for which there is meaning)”. Common forms include “me-as-thoughts”, “me-as-desires”, “me-as-the-body”, “me-as-location-within-a-network-of-relationships”. Some-self is sometimes known as “fixed identity”. The self carves some part of the union of inner and outer sky into clearly separate inner and outer skies.

no-self: When patterning is relinquished to the point that all sensation occurs without meaning, then there is no-self. This is only possible transiently, in a set-aside context. The self is no part of the skies. There is only outer sky.

all-self: Conversely, all can become experienced as a projection of meaning. This form of selfing loses all sense of interactivity but could not be characterized as selfish in the common sense. Perhaps it could even be characterized as perfectly generous, as all is recognized as the self. All-self is a mystical experience that when sustained often leads to highly unconventional (but not necessarily problematic, and possibly wonderful) behavior in the eyes of others. The self is all of the skies. There is only inner sky.

fluid-self: The fluid-self is distinguished from some-self by how a new self flows into each here-and-now, constantly repartitioning the inner and outer skies, arising as no-self or all-self or endlessly different some-selves. The union of inner and outer sky becomes clear, because in the constant shift of partitioning, the partitioning becomes transparent, no longer concrete, like a patch of reflective water that constantly shifts as per weather conditions, time of day, and the exact position of the viewer: we can describe the demarcation of the reflective water as we experience it right now, with no illusion that this is something other than the exact configuration of existence at this moment, immediately passing into another configuration.

Clarification of the Self

When self is clarified, it is present, but no longer obscures by projecting a singular fixed patterning (and so creating fixed meaning). It instead becomes fluid, translucent, a self-of-the-moment that arises and then fades, bringing with it a field of meaning that is responsive to the here-and-now.

Two basic approaches to clarification of the self are clarification through spaciousness
and clarification through selfing. There is no final destination to clarification of the self, because selfing is a natural process. Just as living life will always dirty clothes, it will always stir up selfing; there is no problem in this. Just as with clothes, “clean enough works fine”, with selfing “clarified enough works fine”. To be obsessed with always having perfectly clean clothes or a perfectly clarified self is a dysfunctional attitude. Sometimes you go hiking and get your shoes really muddy, or sometimes life generates a lot of selfing. These are practical problems, not existential problems.

Clarification through spaciousness can be explored by simply sitting while relaxing patterning. As with relaxing the body in corpse pose in yoga, this may not be immediately accessible; further, new subtle tensions may endlessly be revealed by becoming more relaxed. This clarification allows selfing to settle closer to no-self.

Clarification through selfing can be explored by identifying with everything, successively: “I am that tree”, “I am my thoughts”, “I am the taste of the food I am eating”. While these are expressed here discursively in the form of affirmations, these only point to the possibility of identification as a complete reality-of-the-moment. Clarification through spaciousness is generally a prerequisite for fluid identification, because each selfing-of-the-moment must be dropped in order to allow a new identity to arise. Without spaciousness, we are fixed to our apparent identity, and there is not liberty to self in extravagant and varied ways.

Clarification of Self via Inversion of Skies

A powerful clarification of self is via inversion of skies: in basic language, experiencing sensation as “interiority”, and experiencing conventional “interiority” (thoughts, emotions, desires) as characteristics of “the external world”.

Clarification of self via inversion of skies could be expressed in succinct instruction as follows: identify as sensation, and let sensation constitute all meaning.

Consider “the tree in my yard that I love”. What follows from identifying as the color field of brown-and-green, and experiencing all the meaning as sensory characteristics of the external world?

Put another way, emphasizing the inversion of skies: take the inner sky, the projection of patterning that creates meaning, as sensation-without-meaning, i.e., as the outer sky; take the outer sky, or sensation-without-meaning, as meaning, i.e., the inner sky.

This inversion of inner and outer skies is extremely potent, and generally has as a prerequisite both clarification through spaciousness and clarification through selfing.

A particularly powerful transformation of human relationality occurs when experiencing the sensation (the visual, auditory, kinesthetic phenomenon) of other people as interiority, and emotional responses and thoughts about others as exteriority.

The Union of Inner and Outer Skies

When the self is clarified, the inner and outer skies no longer appear as separate “interiority” and “exteriority”, but as a single sky that is the union of “interiority” and “exteriority”. There is a quiet bliss in this union, a bliss of freedom from existential concern about what is happening, combined with the power of complete, clear, engagement with what is happening.

That seems like enough said.

1. Following a discussion with a reader.…what I wanted to get at is the shadow is absolutely not an aspect or detail of what is shadowed...it can reveal almost nothing about 'what-is-shadowed-in-itself'. Shadows can mix inseparably with other shadows, so you cannot separate individual object out. All you have is the appearances in all its distortion (like looking through a unrefined crystal in Dzogchen practices).