First of all, who are we?
What are we?
Can we find out before we go any further, before taking another step or drawing another breath? Who or what is reading these words? What is it that hears, thinks, and feels? Who or what is it that gets angry, afraid, happy or sad, feels alone, craves attention, approval, food, alcohol, or whatever?
Is it possible to discover who we are beyond the limits of concept and conditioning?
This is not a theoretical or philosophical question. It is an invitation to find out directly, experientially, without depending on thought and memory for an answer. This question is so essential, so absolutely vital to how we go through our lives, how we live with ourselves and one another. And yet, how many of us can truly answer, without a doubt, who or what they are?
Looking out the window right now, on a chilly January morning in Maine, I see woodsmoke curling out of my neighbor’s chimney. The floor in front of me is bright with sun and shadows. My back is stiff from yesterday’s stacking of firewood. The chair squeaks as I straighten up and stretch. There is also a subtle feeling of guilt and nervousness in the tummy that I should be doing my taxes instead of writing.
Is thought or memory really necessary to be aware of this, of the whole movement of looking up, seeing the dancing smoke, the sunshine, the snow on the roof, sensing the stiffness in the body, feeling relief in the stretching and relaxing? Despite the mind’s habit of dividing and categorizing everything, life is not actually divided into parts, is it? It is a radical departure from our habitual mode of consciousness to directly apprehend the fact that we don’t need anything extra to be whole, to be completely sufficient, just as we are.
But still, who or what sees, hears and feels? Looking closely, right this moment, with a kind of passionate curiosity, the inner eye scanning and aware-ing, no ‘doer’ or ‘practicer’ can be found anywhere. What is detected is a vast, unencumbered space with no center. This space is silent but absolutely alert. There is a sense of surprise, of wonder, that there was nothing needed to produce this marvelous space. It is simply what is here, in the absence of involvement with thought.
The mind, the brain, has become extraordinarily quiet this morning. It is the essence of silence, yet completely dynamic. Thoughts come and go without hindrance, without attachment to the content of thoughts. In this open awareness, it can be observed that thinking, unlike awareness, is a process. Thought is thoroughly dependent on conditions, upon memory and a projected future, all of it, of course, with an imagined ‘me’ in the middle. What sees the whole mechanism, however, is free. It is unconditional, undividable, ungraspable and unknowable. The idea of a ‘me’ and my story, my spiritual path, my never-ending agenda, is irrelevant to Now. To enter into this not-knowing, to go deeply into it, is true meditation.
Meditation is not an altered state nor the result of a process. It is, contrary to popular opinion, the end of seeking. It is the end of wanting. It is simply here, now, seeing, thinking, feeling, clicking away on the computer keyboard, and getting hungry for lunch. It is all-pervading formless beauty that allows everything, even our delusion, to be. The moment we try to bring it about, we lose it. The question is, can we learn to attend, without judgment, to whatever is happening, moment by moment; to relax into the wonder of not knowing. And when the mind becomes quiet and clear as a cloudless sky, ask, ‘Who am I?’.
