self relocation

I remember when I first understood that the spiritual masters, when they used the word "I", meant something different than I do. That tiny sound, for them, referred to something vast and unknowable, and that's what they took themselves to be.

It was a big event in my mind-made sense of self. A house of cards began to fall. I knew I was making a mistake whenever I used the word "I". I knew that my utterance of it, while useful for regular conversation, was also a lie I blindly believed in.

I began to question it periodically. Am I really this notion of self, that one, the next? Why do I need to assert them if they're really who I am? Doesn't the need to repeatedly assert who I am in one way or another undermine the reliability of it all?

It can be very difficult to explain what goes on when the mind-made sense of self begins giving up the ghost, or what happens after. The most you can tell people is they aren't who they think they are, and what they are is outside all their thinking.

What I like to suggest is a relocation of selfhood. Move your sense of who you are outside your mind and emotions, outside absolutely everything that comes and goes under the influence of change. Watch those things happen from your new location.

The new location is who you are, although it's not a location in the way our minds conceive of one. It's the vast and unknowable field of awareness in which everything happens. That's who you are, the same as all the spiritual masters saying "I".