We have thoughts. Lots and lots of thoughts. About all sorts of great stuff. And about all sorts of bad stuff. Lots of beliefs and opinions and stories and yarns and fairy tales.
And we believe them. They're real to us. We identify with them. You could say we worship them. We attach to them. We pick them up. All ways of saying the same thing. We get involved with these thoughts of ours. We say they mean something.
The most persistent thought we have is about this thing we've constructed called "I." Constructed it? Out of what? Out of our thoughts about it.
There is a body. And we gradually learn, as a baby, through the gradual formation of concepts—thinking—to separate out objects, usually starting with Mommy and Daddy or like that, and then the big "Ahaa!" when one day we put together the concept that there's an "I," a separate self.
Through thinking, we come to believe that there's a personal doer, a somebody who we think of as "I" or "myself" or "me." Through the feedback we get from others, we make up an image about an apparent someone.
Then we feed and worship this self-image. We're always trying to defend it, enhance it, make it more beautiful and satisfactory, make "me" more beautiful and satisfying.
But deep down inside, we know the truth. We're inadequate. Deep down inside we know that we're not quite doing it right. How do we know? Because we keep experiencing pain from time to time. And we all have this experience, and we all think that we're not doing something right, because otherwise there wouldn't be this pain and loss and suffering from time to time.
Because something about life is not quite right, we undertake a journey. We decide to follow a path of some sort in order to get where we want, that is, a place where we'll feel happy, but truly happy, all the time. And since we don't ever quite get there, we conclude that something's wrong.
So we undertake this process, this growth and seeking to find something that's missing. To find heaven or happiness or nirvana or wealth or power or knowledge or beauty or however we define being more perfect and satisfied than we are now.
We're going to attain something. We're going to make something of ourselves. We're going to become special and unique, to make this "I" shine, to have this self-identity appreciated and recognised.
And then we're going to, when we finally succeed, pass into some sort of personal heaven, or personal enlightenment. This "I" that we have is going to have some experience that transports it to a place where things are just bliss forever.
And it never happens and can't happen because it can never happen to an "I." And so we keep searching.
When we realise deeply that there is no "I," there is no imaginary somebody that's doing something, then freedom is born, that which has always been there already. But then there's nobody around to be realizing this or taking credit for it. It's just there; it just is.
Why doesn't the personal "I" exist? Because there's only one. There's only the infinite. There's only the ungraspable. There is nothing but that. Everything is that. Everything whatsoever is that, all the time, always. There's only that. We're meeting it all the time, we're swimming in it all the time, we are it all the time.
This human circuitry is the infinite's way of appreciating itself. When the "I" realises that it doesn't exist as a separate thing—more accurately, when the infinite awakens to itself through the human circuitry—the infinite awakens to the realization of itself. Only the non-locatable is existent and there is nothing but that and "you" and "I" and the "maple tree" are only that.
It's this human circuitry through which the inexpressible falls in love with itself. And the love of the infinite for itself is indescribably beautiful, this universe as the undulations of the eternal, waking up and loving itself everywhere as everything, hopelessly in love, hopelessly, hopelessly, hopelessly in love.
—jim sloman, 12/09/00 for Dec 9
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