I’m not saying things (and the self) exists. That’s why the onus isn’t on me to prove anything. I’m saying nothing exists. The center of the circle if you will. “Things” are just circles drawn out of thin air – pure imagination.

The self is the ground of existence. There is nothing else, and there can be nothing else, because what could trump nothing? What could stop it? What limits it?

Nothing actually doesn’t require justification. It’s the stance that something exists that needs justification: where does it come from, what could have caused it (and what caused that and so on), what circumstances were made (by what?) in order for something to be? If anything is confused, it’s this view that something somehow came out of nowhere (which doesn’t exist and can’t possess the property of being able to cause anything).

You’re saying there is something – a world – but somehow, in that world, there are beings who don’t exist who are tricked into thinking they are by a false copy of something that doesn’t exist, which begs the question how it can be copied.

Yeah. That makes sense.

The absence of a thing there doesn’t mean that the center doesn’t exist. You’re looking right at it. It’s just nothing.

we actually appear to be in agreement that ‘I’ am not in my experience, which means it’s *not* some self-evident phenomena. so why help yourself to the ‘basic’ assumption that it exists anyway? I think, rather, that this conclusion implies some conceptual gymnastics to sucessfully infer the existence of the self, which is what I do not think we can actually do (on some robust defintion of ‘self’ as some fundamentally seperate and autonomous source of agency, not some just some narrative convenience or roundabout way of referencing the bodymind, both of which your own position seem to rule out anyway)

so I think you’re either confused about what you’re trying to say, or you’re simply assuming what is at issue in the discussion. if it’s the former, and you’re not simply trying for bad faith provocation, I suppose we could try to sort out the confusion, in which case the ball’s in your court to clarify what you mean. if it’s the latter, I’m not really interested in arguing about fundamental axioms, since there is scant basis for coming to rational conclusions about such things, and you also seem confused about what might actually be fundamental to your own view in the first place.

” ‘I’ am this set of sensations which appears to be aware of/in control of all this other stuff, but that set of sensations seems to exist in some kind of inseparable codependant [sic] relationship with all this other stuff which I am clearly not always aware of or controlling.”

Where did you get this idea? I’ve certainly never taken myself to be a set of sensations; I am the self standing beyond all experience, experiencing it. I’m not in my experience. This is so fundamental it’s baffling how anyone could make such a pig’s ear of it.

You are you. Everyone knows this, it seems, except for non-dualists. Taking the most basic thing ever — I am — and convincing yourself that you don’t exist is quite impressive.

And how can the most basic thing of all, the very “I-ness” of experience, be an illusion? How can we (who don’t exist) be tricked by a simulacrum of something that has never existed? If there is no real thing to make a simulacrum of, why would we mistake the simulacrum for the real thing? And if there is no “real thing”, who’s to say that the so-called illusion isn’t the real thing?