I Am Nothing I Am Everything: A Journey Into The Self

“The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.” – Socrates

Watching The Mind

“Mind is misery. If one wants to be blissful in the mind there is no possibility. Mind is a dis-ease, exactly a disease, a restlessness. But one can transcend mind, one need not remain in it, one can jump out of it. It is our decision whether to be in it or not.” – Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh

The Spiritual search is like walking on a razors edge. It’s very tricky because at some point you realize that the mind is the disease, but since all we have is the mind, we need to start with the mind. We need to educate the mind to help it see its limitations, and in clearly seeing its limitations, it’s possible to make the jump to go beyond itself. Meditation is the art of watching your mind, getting to know your mind, until you clearly see you are not it. How could you be it if you can observe it?

Many people who first try mediation don’t initially get it because they are trying to understand with the very thing we are trying to transcend. It’s very very subtle, but if you don’t give up, eventually something will click within you. That moment is like the sky parting and suddenly you are illumined by a ray of light. So for many people it’s important to first lay the groundwork for meditation to happen. You may need to study some theory first until you have some type of framework that gets you fully acquainted to the structure of your mind.

You use the mind to kill the mind in a certain sense. The mind created an illusion by splitting itself in two and then becoming identified to its projections. The mind is like two mirrors facing each other, a thought is introduced into your consciousness and we take the reflection to be real and forget who or what is actually perceiving it.

All our lives we have identified ourselves to a fictional “I”, the story of ourselves. When you start seeing the reality of your mind and slowly breaking your identification with it and all its conceptual understandings, you begin to open up to a much more spacious sense of being. It’s like peeling the layer of an onion layer by layer. Through negation you get to what is true. I am not my name. I am not my body. I am not my thoughts. I am not my emotions. I am not my problems. Etc. Until you get to the point that there is nothing to peel. When you reach this point it is quite a peculiar state of ‘being’.

It’s a recognition not through your usual mind. A recognition that can see beyond name and form. It’s easy to get caught up in semantics, just know these are pointers.

You feel light and free. You are just “here”, but your sense of “I” is not. It may take a while to settle into this space and for a long time you may transition back and forth from being awake and conscious to being caught up again in the minds old games. It’s like certain thoughts are like Velcro. Although you have seen the truth of things, these sticky thought patterns still catch you from time to time, because they have years of momentum behind them.

People who are not seekers who by accident momentarily experience this timeless space of pure “awareness,” through either a traumatic event or drugs, will feel very disoriented, even very scared, because it may feel like their whole world is falling apart. By not having at least some theoretical understanding they will not be prepared to go through the dissolution of their egoic mind. They will not know what is happening to them.

When you are just being simply aware your usual feelings of I am “this”, I am “that” – your whole life story with all its trials and tribulations is not there. In this space you feel yourself as nothing and everything at the same time. You’re aware of your awareness. You relax into yourself. You don’t feel as separate from your environment.

Typically when people say, “I need to relax,” “who” is actually saying that? You cannot force yourself to relax. You relax when you no longer have this inner battle going on.

Being Awake In The World

It’s like when you are asleep and dreaming you take that to be your ultimate reality. Only when you wake up you realize it was a dream because you are now in another state of consciousness that you spend 70% of your time. It is because of this contrast that we can differentiate from the two. But this is not all there is, you also need to wake up from our so-called ‘waking’ consciousness. When you become more alert and aware in the same way you saw that you were dreaming, you see how even what we call waking consciousness is not really being fully conscious, because you are still in a sort of self-hypnosis.

Each moment you are taken by the different thoughts that stream across your mind. You don’t have a permanent stable point of observation within you. Each moment it’s changing, yet we take ourselves to be the same. It’s like when you catch yourself daydreaming, that very instant that you realize you were day dreaming is a moment of pure “attention”, problem is we can’t remain in this simple state of alertness for very long. Soon we are entangled in our minds content.

If you where a fully conscious being you could see the ‘content’ of your mind and not get entangled in it. You could stand aside and just see it, you wouldn’t believe everything it thinks. This is being the master of your mind. You are not a slave to its incessant demands built on seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. When you are identified to your mind, you are a slave to it.

We suffer tremendously and unnecessarily because of this. Once you see this, you will stop at nothing to set yourself free. You see that this is the only thing that will really fulfill you and bring peace to your life.

I just could not stand not being in control of myself and my life. I didn’t want to be dominated by something that wasn’t really me. Not being the master of my mind, I could see that things in life would only accidentally happen. I would just react to life. Life would just pass me by without me really even being there to fully live it. Being awake and aware you feel truly alive and you are in a position to handle life much more intelligently.

If this resonates with your life, please don’t give up, this is the only journey that really matters. I am working on an in-depth guide for beginners on meditation and self-observation. It will be a practical approach that will address many beginners sticking points and will lay down the foundation for living a conscious life. If this interests you please sign up for my newsletter to be notified when it is released next year. Thank you so much for reading my post. Peace.

If you enjoyed this post help me out and ‘like’ our Facebook Page.