I hear you on the ‘Hard Problem.’ You’re asking: If the ‘I’ is an illusion, why is there a ‘feeling’ of being alive at all?
Think of a rainbow.
A rainbow isn’t a solid thing hanging in the sky. It’s what happens when you have three ingredients: sun, rain, and a specific angle of light. If you take away the rain, the rainbow is gone. It doesn’t go to a ‘metaphysical void’—it just ceases to happen because the ingredients (the aggregates) aren’t together anymore.
The ‘Hard Problem’ only feels hard because we assume there has to be a ‘Self’ inside us to catch the light. But I’m saying the experience is the event. There isn’t a person ‘having’ the experience; the experience is what we mistakenly call the person.
"What is a tree? It’s just a label we give to a huge process of roots, sunlight, water, and soil. We see a ‘solid object’ called a tree, but if you look closer, the tree never stops moving and changing. It doesn’t have a ‘self’—it’s just a tree-ing event.
The ‘I’ is the same thing. I’m not ‘ignoring’ the hard problem; I’m saying the ‘Hard Problem’ is just another label we put on the flow of life. If a tree doesn’t need a soul to grow, and a rainbow doesn’t need a viewer to shine, why do we insist we need an ‘I’ to exist?
I’ll leave you with the same question: Where is the boundary of the mind? If you can’t find the edge of the tree, and you can’t find the edge of the thought, then you can’t find a ‘you’ that is separate from the rest of it. Existence is… that’s it."