Self or No-Self: Finding out Who and What You Are
The goal of any genuine spiritual path or practice is to bring about a shift in identity. Even to say “bring about” is saying too much, because non-separation is already the truth of what is.
Many of us take ourselves to be this limited-human-separate-from-everything-else. The illusion of separation permeates every aspect of our lives. No wonder why we feel alienated from the World and each other! There is also trauma that contributes to this, but for the purpose of this article, let’s leave that out for now.
Here is “me” in here (points to the body) and there is (points away from the body) life out there. This is the underlying existential assumption and very “real” experience on which our lives are built.
“I” am separate from “life.” And so all my energy is now used to get my way by pushing against or grasping life - an endless conflict with life itself. No wonder why we suffer so much!
Genuine spirituality seeks to wake you up from the dream of separation where there is only the nightmare of “me and my life” to the freeing truth of non-separation and Life as a whole.
Buddhists talk about “no independent existence” when they mention emptiness. There is no “you” that is independent from everything else. There is no self-sustaining, separate “self.”
Everything co-arise and co-subside - the wholeness of What Is.
When you ask “What am I?” and turn your attention away from objects (internal or external) to the subject of your experience, you are investigating the very core of your being. The more you look, the more you find nothing.
The so-called “core” of your being is empty. This doesn’t mean there is no core. In fact it doesn’t have to mean anything! The empty core of your being is full of humanity, full of humanness.
Your humanness is more a verb than a noun. It is the ever-moving, evolving, sensing, healing, growing, expanding beautiful uniqueness and aliveness that you are!
At the level of the formless (the exclusively spiritual), you are a shimmering nothingness, an absolute nobody. You have neither a beginning nor end, just like any “thing” and any “one” else.
At the level of form, you are this magnificent human being, multi-layered in your makeup including and made out of various dimensions: The personal, relational, social, as well as the physical, the mental, the emotional, and the spiritual.
When you “forget” your spiritual essence, you are stuck in the dream of being this separate somebody, disconnected from everything and everyone else. When you cling to your spirituality, you neglect your humanity. You refuse to take form.
Your formless nature expresses itself in form. What you are spiritually and who you are as a human being don’t have to be two separate realities and in fact, they are not.
The Ocean is the Ocean and the Wave is the Wave, but nothing separates them. Edgeless.
Realize and be. Be and realize until there is no separation between these two seemingly separate movements of Life. The Ultimate Freedom is neither formless nor form-bound - the unexplainable beauty where only silence makes anything close to “sense.”
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