The Dhamma Eye by Thanissaro Bhikkhu.

The Dhamma Eye by Thanissaro Bhikkhu. 

Another misunderstanding about the Dhamma eye is that some people say that stream-entry is when you see that there is no self. 

But again, you have to ask: What kind of experience would give you valid grounds for saying that there is no self? 

They say: “You let go of everything, you blank out, and there’s nothing”— but that doesn’t prove anything. 

After all, there are states of concentration that the Buddha calls non-perception where you totally blank out, but they’re not noble states. 

If you happen to die while you’re in them, you go on to the state of non-percipient beings, where you’re totally unconscious. When that attainment wears off, you regain consciousness and leave that state, and then you come back to be reborn again. 

But that’s not proof of anything. In fact, if seeing that there is no self were part of stream-entry, then why did the Buddha have to give the Not-self Discourse to the five brethren after they had all become stream-enterers?

The answer comes from a passage in the Canon where a non-returner says that at his level of attainment you don’t identify around the five aggregates, even though there is still a lingering sense of self, a lingering sense of “I am.” He says it’s like the smell of a detergent used to wash clothes. You wash the clothes and you wash the detergent out— but there’s still some lingering scent. 

So, when the Buddha was teaching the five brethren the not-self-discourse, that was what he was getting at: that lingering sense of self as well the conceit “I am.”  

So, stream-entry is not simply accepting the fact of impermanence, and it’s not seeing that there is no self. It’s having an experience of the deathless. 

And you realize that you had to follow a path of practice to arrive at the threshold of the deathless, the deathless itself was nothing that you did. 

In fact, it comes at that part of the present moment where you’re not putting any intentional input in at all— not even the intention not to do anything.  

So— it hits you by surprise. When you come back from that experience, that’s when the Dhamma eye arises. 

You’ve seen something that was not originated, not subject to cessation— and from that vantage point you realize that anything you’d experienced up to that point was fabricated through the actions of the mind, yet here you’ve found something that was not fabricated in the mind. That’s why it’s so radical— because you realize that it’s also the end of suffering.  

Now, stream-entry is said to be the arising of the Dhamma eye because you see this, but you don’t fully experience it. In other words, you have your glimpse, and then it’s gone— but it has already made a big change in you.  

There’s an analogy given in the Canon: It’s like seeing water at the bottom of the well. You haven’t yet drunk the water or gone down to get immersed in the water. However, you know it’s there.

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The Dhamma Eye by Thanissaro Bhikkhu. 

https://www.dhammatalks.org/Archive/Writings/Transcripts/201107_The_Dhamma_Eye.pdf