Hunting the "I"

This is a letter I wrote to someone who keeps returning to the mind, looking for answers to an infinite number of questions, rather than looking into the main issue: Who is the questioner? He wanted yet more answers, and I responded:

There is nothing I can say to you right now. At some point, this quest has to become intensely personal, and where you have to go, no one can go with you.

I’ve been repeatedly asking you to inquire into what “I” means. That’s all I’m ever going to say, because nothing besides that is needed – nothing besides that will show you reality. None of the concepts that you’ve written about here are worth talking about, because nowhere in there have you begun to ask “Who is doing all this? Who is the doer?”

Virtually all your statements begin with “I” or contain “I” in them somewhere (not just you – everybody does it). So because you don’t know what “I” means, every statement you make to yourself or others has no meaning to you! Can you stand that?

Well, maybe you think you know what “I” is. You assume it is the body, the guy named [---] with his particular history, his traits, his problems. And that’s why you stop there and go off asking me all this other stuff: because you think this is what you are.

So I keep reminding you – and I’ll keep doing that as many times as necessary – that all the questions you have dissolve into nothingness when the “I” is seen for what it is. I can hear you now trying to ask yourself if I mean the personal “I” or the greater “I AM.” It doesn’t matter. Just ask, “Who am I?” Because it’s all the same thing, ultimately.

I can’t tell you how to do this. You have to be your own Buddha, you have to sit under your own bodhi tree, until you have looked and seen what you are and what you are not. Another person can’t do this for you, and you can’t do it with reading or satsangs or asking more questions. This introspection period is the crux. You have to have your own forty days in the wilderness.

This has to be intensely personal, and it hasn’t become intensely personal for you yet. It becomes intensely personal when one is being driven crazy by the demands of the entity. It can’t be just wanting to know how this stuff works, or wanting a better life. It comes from a bursting at the seams because the entity you think you are has become intolerable to live with, and the only way to relieve the pain is to discover whether that entity is real.

You do have intensity, but your intensity is about wanting something. The intensity has to switch to being sick of the wanting and the wanter. The whole wanter and wanting must be intensely nauseating to you. When it is, you will go after the wanter and kill it.

It’s the call of Self. It’s “I I I I I what the hell is this I?????” It’s constantly demanding, constantly unhappy, chronically angry, never satisfied – well, what is it? and having to get to the bottom of that. This is how it becomes personal. Not just someone telling you “Inquire into the I,” not driven by someone else’s words, but by your own inner need. That’s why I can’t help you. You’re not sick of yourself yet.

This was what happened to Eckhart Tolle. He was being driven crazy by this whiny, demanding “self,” and he finally wanted to know – what is this whiny thing that is driving me crazy? You have to find out what that bundle of whiny demands is made of. There is no way for me or anyone else to show you. Just look at it.

Your next thought will probably be an “I” statement, like “I don’t know how to do that,” or something. Take any thought, and stop there. Before you go any further, find out if you have any idea what you mean by that. Do you know the meaning of “I” in that statement? If not, how can you go around saying stuff like that? You don’t even know what it means!

Find out what “I” is. You want to experience what I experience, or you want to experience a life free of suffering. Well, turn your attention to that wanter. Find out what the wanter is made of. What is this one who wants, who desires, who fears, who suffers, who feels guilty and inadequate, who complains? What is that? Do you want to live with that complainer? Find out if he is real or not.

If you find out he is not real, then all the suffering and complaints and pain and fear go right down the drain – they just evaporate in a puff of smoke – because the “sufferer” turns out not to be real. Then where was any of that suffering? Where is it now? Was it ever real?

So any statement you make, any thought you have, STOP. Don’t go another step with any content of that thought. Simply look at the first word: “I.” And before you go on with the rest of the thought, ask yourself what you mean by “I.”

“I want to be happy.” Who is this wanter? Is this wanter a real, separate thing that needs something, like happiness, or anything else? Or is this just some thoughts, some habitual ideas strung together at this moment in time, and the result is a thought that says, something is needed here? Is anything really needed? What is here to need anything? Can you define this “needer”? What is a needer made of?

Look at this and only this. Look at the one who fears, the one who feels guilty, the one who worries, the one who wants enlightenment, and ask what EXACTLY it is that worries. What wants enlightenment? What wants to stop feeling inadequate? Is this demanding, chronically unhappy wanter real? That’s all you need to look at. Nothing else.

I’m tying to remind you – and I will over and over – that the wanter is the problem. No matter what the desire, nothing will be fixed by having it fulfilled. Nothing. Having a want fulfilled only leads to more wants – anything we get, we want to keep, which leads right back to fear. The wanter has to be seen through as unreal. That’s the only way. And no answer from me or any teacher or any book can transmit that "seeing through" to you; it has to come from inside you.

Look into the “I” that constantly wants and needs. Look into the wanter and find it to be unreal. Let the next “I” thought be your springboard for delving into this question. STOP as soon as you get to “I,” look and see how dissatisfied this “I” is always telling you that it is, and challenge its very existence.

Let me know how this goes.