You

Who are you? You must be real. You certainly sense that something is real here, and that gives you enough confidence to proclaim your “self” as real. But is that the truth of it?

There is only one reality, and reality is all there is. Can you be anything other than that? Reality is all that ever existed, the essence, eternally this. It is what is. Try to name something that is not reality. Whatever you name, that is “it,” also. Only reality. One. You are just this. You can’t be anything else.

But you look around, and with a brain that is made for this sort of thing, you divide up the one reality into a million things, label the things you’ve divided it into, and then make up stories about how those things interact with each other. Voilà! The world. 

But reality was never divided until you divided it. In essence, there is no division, there are no separate pieces of the one reality. There never was anything separate from the one reality until you divided it with your mind. Your mind? – where did that come from? It doesn’t exist.

You and your mind do not exist as separate pieces of reality: there are no separate pieces of reality. Where you see a person and a mind, reality sees only itself. Reality does not see your mind, and did not create your mind. Reality is all one thing, and it doesn’t create or label any part of itself – like you and your mind – separate. And your mind did not create itself: it simply labeled itself separate. It never was.

Likewise, a self is never created. A self did not invent itself, or create itself, because there simply is no such thing as a self. In order to be “something,” the self would have to have an independent existence from the entire remainder of reality! It would have to be, in a sense, not real – outside of reality. Nothing is unreal. So the mind, and the self, are simply not. 

Then all the imaginings of the mind are false. Then the entire personality and life history remembered by the mind are false. The current story of suffering and seeking is false. The childhood trauma is false – it never happened – because there was never a separate “you” for those things to happen to. The story of “you” is false now, and it has always been false. You were never anything but essence, untouched by invention of self or mind.

And as essence, there is nothing to do or achieve. There is nothing to take personally, no way to take ownership of any circumstance. Nothing is personal. You float freely, without a center. Nothing can find you, nothing can cling to you. Feelings are poems written in disappearing ink, tributes to some vaguely remembered past. Thoughts are insects stumbling over each other on a patch of grass in the warm sun. Life happens, and it is you. Free falling, surprised every moment at being alive, never knowing or caring what happens next, this is you, and it’s all you’ve ever been. The story was all a dream.