SELF

There Is No One Here That This Is Happening To: No One

Perhaps the feeling of being you is simply just that, a feeling.

• Like anger.

• Like elation.

• Like fear.

• Like love.

A sensation arising in the body.

Perhaps the self is simply the oldest sensation of all, an ancient contraction created by survival, giving the human animal the feeling of a center so there would be something to protect.

• Something to feed.

• Something to defend.

• Something to keep alive.

And so this strange feeling of me appeared. A kind of central in-ness.

The sense that there is someone behind the eyes, looking out at a world that exists somewhere else.

Everything seems to confirm it.

• My body.

• My thoughts.

• My memories.

• My story.

• My life.

All of these vectors point outward from an imaginary center, and because everything appears to be pointing away from something, we assume there must be someone standing there.

• But turn around.

• Look directly at the center.

• Look for the one who is looking.

• There is nothing there.

• No one.

The center was implied by everything pointing away from it.

And when the machinery of the self begins to relax, the defending, the becoming, the explaining, the searching, the desperate feeling that you need to get somewhere or find something outside yourself, the boundaries begin to dissolve.

The feeling of being a separate someone starts to diffuse.

And what remains?

• Everything.

• Not you experiencing the field.

• The actual field of consciousness. 

• The sound of the room.

• The sensation of the body.

• The light entering the eyes.

• The breath breathing itself.

Life happening without anyone in the middle managing it.

• You do not become everything.

• You simply stop imagining that you were ever separate from it.

It is a peculiar state because it feels extraordinary. Yet perhaps it is the most ordinary thing there is.

Perhaps this is simply how reality has always been before the mind divides it into me, the story and everything else.

And then comes the great cosmic joke.

The moment you notice how fascinating it is, you are back.

• I am experiencing no-self.

• There it is.

• The self has returned to claim the absence of the self.

But for one strange, silent moment, there was inner peace and abundance. 

• Nothing to defend.

• Nothing to prove.

• Nothing to become.

• Nothing to escape.

• Nothing to lose.

• Nothing to worry about.

Because there was no one here for any of it to happen to.

There was only this.

Happening.

And perhaps that is liberation.

Not the liberation of the self.

Liberation from the illusion that there was ever a self here to liberate.

There is no one here that all of this is happening to.