7th Fetter
The Formless Curriculum

Form in Formlessness vs. Understand the Illusion

Creating “Something” from Nothing

The Seventh Fetter pairs with the Sixth Fetter, and it builds on the realizations that have come from questioning fundamental aspects of our reality, such as distance, subjecthood, and an inside and outside to experience.

The Seventh Fetter is where we recognize that we are constantly creating things from nothing. The world, and all of its supposed objects that we interact with on a daily basis, do exist in one manner of speaking, all on their own. But they do not exist the way we interpret them with names, functions, judgments about them, memories and stories about their history, or relation to me and my story. This is how we go from experiencing a constantly changing panorama of shapes, colors, sounds, scents, and other sensations, to experiencing a concrete world where we can place and name every object in it. And this includes those aspects of what we take to be an enduring self, our personality, and our interactions with others. This is the mechanism that lead to believing that the self existed, because a collection of thoughts and physical sensations were continuously being turned from fleeting appearances into a seemingly stable form.

But this process is subtle, and it is easier to see it in action once the individual self is no longer believed in.

Even though we have felt that there is no subject inside of a body with the Sixth Fetter, it might still feel like there is something that is not the raw sensations themselves. It can feel like there is still perception happening. It might no longer feel like a “you” who is seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and feeling the world, but it is in the Seventh where it becomes completely clear that all senses are self-illuminating. There is no such process as perception in the first place. That too was another assumption based on misunderstood evidence.

Lastly, because again, the Seventh is about creating form (something) out of nothing, this is where we start to encounter the malleable, and often arbitrary, nature of our experience of Time.

Time is not simply the unbroken arrow, moving at a steady rate, and aimed in a single immutable direction that it sometimes feels that it is.

We might have some sense of whether a memory is about an event that happened seconds, hours, months, or decades ago. But as strong as that feeling might be, we have no way of knowing with certainty whether that sense is accurate or not.

The appearance of the memory is always happening right in this one and only present moment now.

Your feeling of time passing is often unreliable, and subject to a host of factors that can be easily tricked and manipulated to give incorrect estimates of how long it has been since a specific event occurred.

In short, seeing through the Seventh Fetter is when you realize that whatever you assume, evaluate, judge and interpret about yourself, about others, about the world, and even about your past, was all nothing more than thought labels pasted upon thought labels.

7th Fetter

Exercise:

Notice during your day how many thoughts, feelings, situations, conversations, experiences and assumptions are based on making “something out of nothing”.

That is the extent of the 7th Fetter.

Enjoy.

Full playlist for the Formless Curriculum

Explore the 8th Fetter.

See Through The Self Delusion Course

We are so happy that there is now a full course for you to see through the identification of the self!

This course is like a practical handbook of all of the different angles that you need to be aware of when you are investigating identification in your direct experience. We hope that it will be equally useful to people who are absolute beginners on this awakening path, as it will be to seasoned seekers who believe they have seen through the sense of self and are currently working with the higher fetters. We believe that everyone will find things in the course that will help them to deepen their insights regardless of whichever stage of awakening they feel they are in.

Take your time with this course! It is quite comprehensive. Through it we will be discussing many aspects of awakening, some of which tend to be overlooked by those on the path. We stress the importance of integrating awakening into our daily lives, so we spend a lot of time helping to bridge the gap between the spiritual world and the relative mundane one in which we all live.

In this course we will go into detail about meditation practices, discerning thought from “reality”, how to approach long-held trauma, how to investigate and manage our fear of death, practices to stimulate deep non-dual insights, and how to avoid many different pitfalls and egoic traps that you might encounter on the awakening path.

For those who are familiar with our The Awakening Curriculum and Unfettered Mindfulness YouTube channels, you might have already seen many of these videos. But they have been assembled in a practical sequence that allows progressive insights and practice, and they have been expanded with 50,000 words of written summaries, extrapolations, further inquiry and meditation practices, and more. It’s effectively like having a whole book integrated into the video material. Even if you have already watched the videos, we hope that these written lessons will help to deepen and expand your understanding of the material, and provide you new directions to take your practice.

To get the most out of this course, we recommend watching each video in sequence, and taking lots of time to actively do every inquiry at least once. It can help to do the same inquiry multiple times before moving on. It’s always recommended to rewatch lessons, if not immediately, then come back to them weeks or months later to see if you now hear something that you missed the first time, or that now makes sense to you in a way that you couldn’t access previously.

It should be emphasized, you might accumulate a lot of new concepts from this course, but that will be of comparatively little benefit next to the insights that you glean from putting everything you hear into practice.

You are likely here, doing this course, in order to experience some sort of transformation of experience. But concepts have limited ability to do this. At least not in terms of creating long-term transformation.

For that, you need to have an experiential understanding of what we are pointing to. So relax, settle in, take a deep breath, and allow the experience to unfold all on its own.

No one knows what will happen on the other side of any practice. So remain curious, open, and remember to have fun.

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