No self in Mahamudra

In February 2018, I did the Pointing Out retreat with Dan Brown and something clicked. Will try and describe the shift to the best of my ability. But, first a preamble:

Dan Brown's Level 1 retreat uses the pointing out tradition to mainly follow the Mahamudra steps to enlightenment. These, as per Tashi Namgyal are (i) the one-pointed yoga, (ii) the nondiscriminatory yoga, (iii) the yoga of one taste and (iv) the yoga of non-meditation. Since Dan could not assume that we all could achieve good levels of concentration, he used the elephant path (also described by Tashi Namgyal) to build sufficient levels of concentration before embarking on the four yogas. Since we cannot expect much familiarity with any of this, I'll restrict this post to the first stage - the one-pointed yoga - and describe its benefit.

tl;dr: Practicing the one-pointed yoga moves one away from the "existential level," where awareness is unpacked as self-awareness and the self identified with it. The one-pointed yoga causes a shift wherein the self gets out of the way and awareness directly relates to phenomenal content (sensations, perceptions, emotions, cognition, visualizations). The existential depression - caused by mistaken identification of awareness as self-awareness - permanently lifts.

Here's Tashi Namgyal:

 "The meditator has realized the one-pointed yoga when he has with conscious certainty gained insight into his own inmost awareness, which is an inseparable blend of its intrinsic clarity and emptiness. Like the expanse of space, this simplicity of mind is detached from any substantive entity while manifesting itself clearly and uninterruptedly."

And here's Dan Brown:

"Determining the mind to be a nonentity is said to "cut off the root"...The misery of samsara is said to be produced by the mistaken view of a seemingly real, objective world and a self-existent, subjective sense of self, whose interaction leads to attachment, aversion and ignorance."

In the actual practice, the meditator searches for real entities underlying all phenomenal content until finally giving up. Also, the meditator searches for any real entity underlying the self and gives up when it cannot be found. For me personally (while being well aware of the irony), this caused a shift wherein there only seems to be a vast awareness and phenomenal content in each moment. The self identification with awareness finally dropped away and with it the existential depression which had gotten much much worse over the years.