Trying to find your self?

Have you ever lost your car keys? You know they are somewhere, but everywhere you look you don't find them. The act of not finding your keys perpetuates the cycle of looking, until eventually, hopefully, you find your keys.

What about when we look for a self?

When you look for the self as an independent, truly existing identity, you don't find it. The self is dependent and conditioned by the world around us. Keep looking.

When you look for the self as an agent or actor, you don't find it. Every intention and choice is predicated on something else, there is no agent who functions autonomously independent of the environment or situations. Keep looking.

When you look for the self as the experiencer or witness behind the continuum of your life, you don't find it. The subjective experiencer must experience some thing, so by its very nature experience is compounded and dependent. Keep looking.

When you look for the self as the awareness that knows oneself, you don't find it. Awareness isn't a thing, there is no location, no essential beingness, nothing to hold onto. Self-knowing awareness doesn't find a self, what it finds is selflessness. There is no ground of awareness, awareness is empty yet luminous cognizance.

Search for the self until you don't find it. When you don't find the self, you discover selflessness.  Stabilize that experience of finding empty but luminous cognizance, which opens the door to the path of meditation.

.   .   .   .   .

Still time to register for the Meditation Workshop this weekend.

Hope to see you on the cushion!

The actor caught acting in the act.

Worse than not recognizing the play of the mind is the fact that we get caught up in it. 

We become ensnared in what is happening. It determines our choices and actions.  We get caught up in the story-line, wrapped up in our identity which isn't even real.

We are blind to it, continually perpetuating the charade that plays itself out again and again in endless loops. 

We long for freedom, for it to stop.  But how?

What happens if the actor drops everything?