Thank you for taking the time to write this substantive response, JulianGiulio.
This dialog describes an error we make when we materialize conceptualized things that we then take to be something real. We do this when what we were trying to capture is an absence — something missing, thus, not a thing. Instead, because of our error, we end up with a different thing — a presence once again. Literally, “emptiness” is a conceptual understanding of the absence of an intrinsic self, and that understanding is something that we can hang onto! Something understood by someone understanding it. In trying to explain emptiness, we have filled up our head with more things to worry at, instead of less.
We are, in that way, our own political commissar, ensuring our adherence to the objective materialism that is the only rational (i.e., acceptable) ideology today. The relative truth that Buddhism speaks of, is very much that — the accepted understanding of reality.
This article, though, is also the third in a sequence of three on the subject of “No Inherent Self.” There was a link back to the TOC just below the main image in this article. The three are a continuous dialog on this subject.
Your specific objection — that you experience that there is no separate self — is actually covered in a sequence of 7 articles on the subject of “This Visceral Feeling Of Self,” that just precedes this sequence.
These 10 articles encompass most of the explanations that I am sharing on the visceral feeling of being a separate individual, and how that arises. And although you are correct that it is difficult to discuss such things without falling into error, my attempt has been to point that out, point the way forward, while being clearer about where the visceral feeling comes from — which is completely obfuscated in objective materialism, i.e. modern “relative truth,” and completely ignored in Buddha’s teachings, although it can be discovered in the most advanced teachings in modern Buddhism.
These 2 sequences are part of a book called “Tranquillity’s Secret” that I am publishing on Medium.
Finally, I’ve read that the Buddha never took a position on metaphysical questions because his singular concern — that which he was engaged in actually teaching — was how to end suffering. And yet, he taught “emptiness,” as the quote from the Suñña Sutta, that I included in this dialog, shows.
And as an aside, Asanga (circa 300 AD) delineated 18 major vows for actions to be abandoned in the “Bodhisattvabhumi” section of the Yogācārabhūmi Śāstra, the eleventh of which states: “teaching emptiness to those whose minds are unprepared,” and yet Emptiness teachings by authentic lamas are well-attended today by the general public.
Times change.
