Do you ever really know another person?

We talk about “other people”—falling in love with them, being in relationship with them, being in conflict with them, ending relationship with them, meeting them, understanding them, having and losing them—but do we ever really directly experience others as outside ourselves? Or is our experience of other people always inseparable from our own stories—our own thoughts, beliefs, assumptions, projections, prejudices—about them? Are “others” really “other” to us? Are they really separate from what we are?

Just as we never really experience an outside world—a world outside of present experience, as we have seen—do we ever really experience other people as “out there”? When we relate to someone, who are we actually relating to? Are we simply relating to an image we have created of them, rather than to who they really are in the moment, here and now? Do we end up missing others as they are in this moment in our attempt to hold onto our own story of them, our own version of who they are? Do we always view others through the filters of history and future, and miss what is present?

Who is your friend, partner, mother, father, brother, sister, when you see them without your story about who they are—without your story about what they believe or don’t believe, who and what they love or don’t love, what they’ve done and haven’t done, what they’ve said or haven’t said, how they’ve hurt you or praised you or ignored you—in the story of your life? What if you were to meet, here and now, beyond all of that carryover from the past? What if you were to meet them, here, for the first time, without expectation or disappointment or even hope? What if you were to meet the one who is actually here, rather than the one whom you imagine is here?

What would it mean to meet—really meet—without history, without projection, without imagination?

Now, I’m not for one moment suggesting that we get rid of our stories about each other; I’m not suggesting that we forget about the past, about the details of each other’s lives, our names, our roles, and so on. I’m suggesting that when we live solely in our stories of each other, we end up missing what’s actually here right now. In clinging tightly to my story of you; in holding tightly to memories, to prejudices, to my conditioned ideas of who you are; in viewing you as a separate character moving through time, I miss you as you are now, in this moment. I miss the one who is actually in front of me. I am so locked into a past image of you, into my ideas of who you are, into my expectations of you, into my disappointments and fears, that I don’t really see you as you are. I don’t really hear what you are saying right now. I value the past over your present-moment experience of the world. It’s as if I already know who you are, what you are going to say, what you are thinking, what you will do, what you believe, what you want, before you even open your mouth. I have literally prejudged your experience. All prejudice begins here.

The idea of our father-and-son relationship had actually gotten in the way of present-moment relating with the man in front of me. In holding up the story of our relationship, the story of father and son in space and time, we had stopped seeing each other in the here and now. In our relationship, we had stopped relating.

Beyond the story of “us,” beyond the dream, beyond all our images of each other—that is where true relating is really possible. Beyond the father story, the son story, the mother story, the daughter story, the husband story, the girlfriend story, the student story, the teacher story—that is where true intimacy lies. And the reality is, we always meet beyond the story. We always meet beyond the image. What I am, what you are, is the open space in which all images come and go. What I am, what you are, cannot be defined by any story. As consciousness, I am what you are, always. I am what you are, and that is unconditional love.

But when I relate to you not as a separate self, but as the wide-open space in which all thoughts, feelings, sensations arise and fall away—that’s where real intimacy is possible. We meet, without a history, open space to open space, and that’s the beginning of real relationship—not the relationship of one story to another story, not the meeting of two images, but the meeting of two open fields of being, open fields in which all thoughts, stories, feelings, sounds, sensations are deeply allowed to come and go. (And there aren’t really two open fields coming together, but this is useful language for the time being. Ultimately, no language can capture this intimacy. All language is only temporary, in this place beyond words. )

As a story trying to complete itself through you, seeking resolution through you, trying to come home through you, I will end up manipulating you, being dishonest with you, playing a role with you, hiding how I really feel out of fear of losing you, punishing you when I feel hurt by you. But as open space, I am free to communicate honestly and authentically with you, knowing that I am already the love I seek; knowing that I do not need you to complete me; knowing that, deep down, I cannot ever lose you. I do not need you in order to be fully who I am. I do not need you to keep my story together.

In recognizing myself as the open space in which all thoughts and feelings are allowed to come and go, and in recognizing that what I am is beyond “son” and that what I am doesn’t need “father” to complete it, I am free to engage honestly and authentically with the man in front of me. I can allow him to be fully himself, to express himself freely. I can encourage him to explore, to express his true thoughts and feelings, because finally I do not see his experience as a threat to my identity. Ultimately, even if he leaves me, it does not detract from my completeness.

It is the most loving thing in the world to say to someone, “I don’t need you. I love you, but I don’t need you.” In other words, “I don’t need you to complete me. I am complete without you. But I enjoy your company right now, and I love being around you. And if you were to leave, I would still be able to love you—even if there was pain or sadness in the experience of that.”

Real love asks nothing in return.

Feeling Vs. Being

We are at war with the opposites; we reject any opposite that doesn’t match our image of ourselves, and we don’t realize something very important: in reality, there are no opposites. Opposites are a creation of the mind. Only the mind splits reality, splits experiences into two and then seeks one of the opposites and tries to escape the other.

Here’s something that’s crucial to understand: In reality, feelings have no opposite. Energy in the body has no opposite. Life itself has no opposite.

Does this moment have an opposite? Does the presence of life here and now have an opposite? Does anything actually oppose it?
Is an ugly feeling the opposite of a beautiful feeling? Or are they two very different experiences, with different sensations, different tastes? Is a happy feeling the opposite of a sad feeling? Thought would say they are opposites, but outside of thought, can you find an opposite?

In reality, there is no such thing as an opposite of a feeling or emotion. Every feeling and emotion is a complete experience in itself.

Experience itself has no opposite.

Feeling ugly is not the opposite of anything—it’s just feeling ugly. Without calling feeling ugly “negative” and feeling beautiful “positive,” without making them into opposites, we see that feeling ugly is simply an experience happening now—just a wave of experience, just something passing through. No wave is intrinsically better or worse than any other wave, because no wave is the opposite of any other wave. Every wave is equally water. Feeling ugly is not the opposite of anything —it’s just feeling ugly. It’s just life-energy moving in a particular way.

And let’s go deeper. Not only is beauty not the opposite of ugliness, but ugliness is also simply a concept in itself, and as such, it cannot capture the actual present-moment experience. In other words, without the story that what I am experiencing is ugliness, what is actually happening here?

Without the story that what I am experiencing now is failure, what is actually here?

Without the story that what I am experiencing now is pain, or grief, or boredom, or anger, or discomfort, or depression, or confusion, or even seeking, what is actually here?

Without any story about what is happening now, without labeling this experience as “failure” and comparing it with success, without labeling it “ugliness” and comparing it with beauty, without calling it “anger” or “fear” or “pain” and comparing it with its conceptual opposite, how do I know what it is that I am feeling?

As I was saying before, without the story, you have no way of knowing what you are experiencing.

Without any story, without naming the waves, life is simply raw energy moving. It is the ocean— nameless and mysterious. We try to put a label to that energy. We judge it, try to escape it, make it the negative of an opposite positive and then seek the positive.
And yet underneath all of this, we don’t really know what we are running away from in the first place. We simply call a wave “fear,” “anger,” “sadness,” “boredom,” “grief,” “joy,” or “pain” because these are the names and concepts we have learned, and then we try to escape these waves or hold onto them. But take away those labels, and what are you really trying to escape from or hold onto? Do you actually know? What happens when we drop all the labels, all the learned descriptions, and face the raw energy of life, as it is in this moment, without trying to change, escape from, or cling to it? What happens when we drop all descriptions of what this moment is or is not and deeply feel into present sensations?
This is where the real adventure of life begins.

When you go beyond the story of what you are feeling, you come to see that you never really knew what you were running away from. And you meet the raw energy of life. You stand naked in front of life—and this is true healing. It is the falling away of all ideas of how this moment should be.

life—and this is true healing. It is the falling away of all ideas of how this moment should be. It’s when we label the waves that the war begins. The moment we label a wave of experience, we set it up as the opposite of another wave, even though, in reality, waves have no opposite. In every label, there is an implicit judgment. In creating the opposites beauty and ugliness and then seeking beauty, we go to war with what we call ugly. In trying to be beautiful, in trying to feel beautiful, in trying not to feel ugly, we end up going to war with this present experience and trying to reach its opposite—even though it actually has no opposite! No wonder we suffer. We think, “This feeling of ugliness is a threat to my completeness. If I can get rid of it, if I can move from ugly to beautiful, then I’ll be complete.” And the game is on.

What images of yourself are you trying to hold up? What do you want to be seen as? Happy, beautiful, successful, peaceful, blissful, enlightened? Expert? Teacher? The one who knows? The one who has worked everything out? What don’t you want to be seen as? Sad, stressed, unpopular, ugly, unintelligent, a failure? Which images of yourself are not okay? What do you want to feel? What don’t you want to feel? Which waves are not okay in your world?
we want to be whole. We long to allow everything. In the true sense of the word—the wide-open ocean of consciousness in which every wave is deeply accepted.

Why must we hold up stories about ourselves? Why do we need any story about ourselves? Why can’t present experience just be allowed to be as it is, without us pretending it’s something that it’s not?

When you’re no longer at war with the opposites, there is enough room for all of this. All of human consciousness can pass through you. Everything we once called “negativity” is now seen to be part of the celebration of life. All waves are allowed in the ocean. Our ideas about what is negative and what is not are completely released in deep acceptance.

When you discover who you really are—the wide-open space that holds everything—you discover that failure, illness, ugliness, helplessness, uncertainty, and weakness are there to be embraced, not avoided. All waves—including the ones we fear the most, including the ones that seem most threatening to who we are—are already embraced by life’s ocean. What you are is not an image, and it cannot be threatened by any wave. Only an image can be threatened.

Taking your stand as the vast space in which everything happens, and knowing yourself as the capacity for this moment, notice that all feelings—good and bad, positive and negative—are already deeply allowed into what you are. They have been appearing all throughout your life, which is all the proof you need. This total embrace of all waves of experience is the love you have always been seeking.
-Jeff Foster
The Deepest Acceptance Radical Awakening in Ordinary Life

You!

What is Presence? Presence is the felt sense of being alive, of existing, here and now. The living field of I Am that has never come or gone, of which even I Am is already a translation by mind.
Thoughts, sensations, feelings, sounds, smells, all kinds of states and experiences both mundane and profound, have all come and gone in your life, but your Presence has never come or gone, appeared or disappeared. The silent unchanging backdrop to all experience, the vast ocean of You, constant and steady amidst all the arising and dissolving of the waves of the manifest world.
You, in the most intimate sense of the word. You, as you have always known yourself, closer than breathing. The You that was present when you took your first breath, that will be present when you take your last breath, that is present on every in-breath and every out-breath.
Present as you took your first steps, present as you take your last. Present on your first day of school, your wedding day, and as you held your grandfather’s hand for the last time. You, prior to even the word “you.” Unknowable by thought, unable to be conceptualized, and yet the one thing you’ve always known more deeply that you’ve known anything. The one undoubtable thing; the one thing you’ve never been able to put into words; the one thing that’s always been on the tip of your tongue; the one thing that’s not a “thing” at all.
The You that you recognize in everyone you meet. The condition by which you’ve known anything at all. Undoubtable, since even doubt is allowed to come and go.
That which you have always sought, that which has been present throughout all your seeking and suffering and longing for union.
Your true Home, your most profound sense of rest, your beloved; it was always You.

How to Fail Beautifully

Sometimes, even with the best of intentions and hard work, your life doesn’t go the way you had hoped or planned or dreamed.
Your heart is broken. Your mind is spinning, confused. You fall to the ground with disappointment, despair. An old feeling of dread comes to visit, a familiar sense of cosmic abandonment. There’s a raw, shaky, sinking feeling in the gut, a tightness in the throat, a pressure in the head. 
“I screwed up.”
In the midst of your hurt, you are tempted to turn against the world, or yourself. Blame someone. Attack someone. Seek revenge, retribution. Or attack yourself, with addictive behavior. Quick, numb the pain. Drink something, eat something, buy something, try not to feel something.
You label yourself “bad” or “wrong” or “broken.” You call yourself a “failure,” a “waste of space,” words you learned when you were young. And then your mind spins off into the future. Not only a day of failure, today, but years of failure to come. A lifetime of failure, ending in death.
You’ve abandoned the present moment and been pulled into a dualistic narrative of past and future, success and failure, right and wrong, good and bad.
But here is an invitation: Slow down. Get curious.
Invite open, curious attention to drop into the present moment. Can you allow yourself to become fascinated with the actual feeling of failure? How do you know this is failure? Where in the body do you sense it? Come back to the shaky, raw feeling, the visceral hurt that’s alive right now. Come back to the nausea, the heaviness, the pressure, the sinking feeling in the belly. Just for a moment, don’t run away or numb yourself from these movements of life. Get curious about the sensations. Give them space; let them dance, move. Don’t distract yourself from these precious parts. They simply long for loving attention right now.
You are leaving the heavy story line of “me and my failure.” You are showing up for life, connecting with yourself at a moment when you need your own tenderness more than ever.
And out of the rubble of shattered expectations, a new and different life may grow. You may be shaky, broken open, now; your heart may feel tender and raw; your certainties may have crumbled to dust; but you are alive and sensitive, and willing to feel what needs to be felt. And your greatest failure may turn out to be your greatest beginning, the time when you learned more about yourself than ever, the scene of the movie where you discovered humility, courage, and radical self-love.
Stay close; you cannot fail.

Cognitive Distortions

1. All-Or-Nothing Thinking: 

You see things in black-and-white categories. If your performance falls short of perfect, you see yourself as a total failure.

2. Overgeneralization: 
You see a single negative event as a never- ending pattern of defeat.

3. Mental Filter: 
You pick out a single negative detail and dwell on it exclusively so that your vision of all reality becomes darkened, like the drop of ink that discolors the entire beaker of water.

4. Disqualifying the Positive: 
You reject positive experiences by insisting they “don’t count” for some reason or other. In this way you can maintain a negative belief that is contradicted by your everyday experiences.

5. Jumping to Conclusions: 
You make a negative interpretation though there are no definite facts that convincingly support conclusion. 
a) Mind reading: 
You arbitrarily conclude that someone is reacting negatively to you and you don’t bother to check this out. 
b) The Fortune Teller Error: 
You anticipate that things will turn out badly, and you feel convinced that your prediction is an already-established fact.

6. Magnification (Catastrophizing) or Minimization: 
You exaggerate the importance of things (such as your goof-up or someone else’s achievement), or you inappropriately shrink things until they appear tiny (your own desirable qualities or the other fellow’s imperfections). This is also called the “binocular trick.”

7. Emotional Reasoning: 
You assume that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are: “I feel it, therefore it must be true.”

8. Should Statements: 
You try to motivate yourself with shoulds and shouldn’ts, as if you had to be whipped and punished before you could be expected to do anything. “Musts” and “oughts” are also offenders. The emotional consequence is guilt. When you direct should statements toward others, you feel anger, frustration and resentment.

9. Labeling and Mislabeling: 
This is an extreme form of overgeneralization. Instead of describing your error, you attach a negative label to yourself: “I’m a loser.” When someone else’s behavior rubs you the wrong way, you attach a negative label to him: “He’s a goddamn louse.” Mislabeling involves describing an event with language that is highly colored and emotionally loaded.

10. Personalization: 
You see yourself as the cause of some negative external event, which in fact you were not primarily responsible for.

11. Self-Worth: 
You make an arbitrary decision that in order to accept yourself as worthy, okay, or to simply, feel good about your- self, you have to perform in a certain way; usually most or all the time.

http://www.lawyerswithdepression.com/articles/thought-matters-depressions-distorted-thinking/

Book:Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind

"It is wisdom which is seeking for wisdom."

BEGINNER'S MIND 
"In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few."

RIGHT PRACTICE
Zazen practice is the direct expression of our true nature. Strictly speaking, for a human being, there is no other practice than this practice; there is no other way of life than this way of life."

POSTURE 
"These forms are not the means of obtaining the right state of mind. To take this posture is itself to have the right state of mind. There is no need to obtain some special state of mind."

BREATHING 
"What we call 'I' is just a swinging door which moves when we inhale and when we exhale."

CONTROL 
"To give your sheep or cow a large, spacious meadow is the way to control him."

MIND WAVES 
"Because we enjoy all aspects of life as an unfolding of big mind, we do not care for any excessive joy. So we have imperturbable composure."

MIND WEEDS 
"You should rather be grateful for the weeds you have in jour mind, because eventually they will enrich your practice."

THE MARROW OF ZEN 
"In the zazen posture, your mind and body have, great power to accept things as they are, whether agreeable or disagreeable."

NO DUALISM 
"To stop your mind does not mean to stop the activities of mind. It means your mind pervades your whole body. With your full mind joujorm the mudra in your hands."

BOWING 
"Bowing is a very serious practice. You should be prepared to bow, even in jour last moment. Even though it is impossible to get rid of our self-centered desires, we have to do it. Our true nature wants us to."

NOTHING SPECIAL 
"If you continue this simple practice every day, you will obtain some wonderful power. Before you attain it, it is something wonderful, but after you attain it, it is nothing special."

RIGHT ATTITUDE
"The point we emphasize is strong confidence in our original nature."

SINGLE-MINDED WAY 
"Even if the sun were to rise from the west, the Bodhisattva has only one way."

REPETITION 
"If you lose the spirit of repetition, jour practice will become quite difficult."

ZEN AND EXCITEMENT 
"Zen is not some kind of excitement, but concentration on our usual everyday routine."

RIGHT EFFORT 
"If your practice is good, you may become proud of it. What you do is good, but something more is added to it. Pride is extra. Right effort is to get rid of something extra."

NO TRACE 
"When you do something, you should burn yourself completely, like a good bonfire, leaving no trace of yourself."

GOD GIVING 
"'To give is non-attachment,' that is; just not to attach to anything is to give."

MISTAKES IN PRACTICE 
"It is when your practice is rather greedy that you become discouraged with it. So you should he grateful that you have a sign or warning signal to show you the weak point in your practice."

LIMITING YOUR ACTIVITY 
"Usually when someone believes in a particular religion, his attitude becomes more and more a sharp angle pointing away from himself. In our way the point of the angle is always towards ourselves."

STUDY YOURSELF 
"To have some deep feeling about Buddhism is not the point; we just do what we should do, like eating supper and going to bed. This is Buddhism."

TO POLISH A TILE 
"When you become you, Zen becomes Zen. When you are you, you see things as they are, and you become one with your surroundings."

CONSTANCY 
"People who know the state of emptiness will always be able to dissolve their problems by constancy."

COMMUNICATION 
"Without any intentional, fancy way of adjusting yourself, to express yourself as you are is the most important thing."

NEGATIVE AND POSITIVE 
"Big mind is something to express, not something to figure out. Big mind is something you have, not something to seek for."

NIRVANA, THE WATERFALL 
"Our life and death are the same thing. When we realize this fact, we have no fear of death anymore, nor actual difficulty in our life."

RIGHT UNDERSTANDING
"Our understanding of Buddhism is not just an intellectual understanding. True understanding is actual practice itself."

TRADITIONAL ZEN SPIRIT 
"If you are trying to attain enlightenment, you are creating and being driven by karma, and you are wasting your time on your black cushion."

TRANSIENCY 
"We should find perfect existence through imperfect existence."

THE QUALITY OF BEING 
"When you do something, if you fix your mind on the activity with some confidence, the quality of your state of mind is the activity itself. When you are concentrated on the quality of your being, you are prepared for the activity."

NATURALNESS 
"Moment after moment, everyone comes out from nothingness. This is the true joy of life."

EMPTINESS 
"When you study Buddhism you should have a general house cleaning of your mind."

READINESS, MINDFULNESS 
"It is the readiness of the mind that is wisdom."

BELIEVING IN NOTHING 
"In our everyday life our thinking is ninety-nine percent self-centered. 'Why do I have suffering? Why do I have trouble?'

ATTACHMENT, NON-ATTACHMENT 
"That we are attached to some beauty is also Buddha's activity."

CALMNESS
"For Zen students a weed is a treasure."

EXPERIENCE, NOT PHILOSOPHY
"There is something blasphemous in talking about how Buddhism is perfect as a philosophy or teaching without knowing what it actually is."

ORIGINAL BUDDHISM 
"Actually, we are not the Soto school at all. We are just Buddhists. We are not even Zen Buddhists. If we understand this point, we are truly Buddhists."

BEYOND CONSCIOUSNESS 
"To realize pure mind in your delusion is practice, If you try to expel the delusion it will only persist the more. Just say, 'Oh, this is just delusion,' and do not be bothered by it."

BUDDHA'S ENLIGHTENMENT 
"If you take pride in your attainment or become discouraged because of your idealistic effort, your practice will confine you by a thick wall."

Are you the image you project and relate to each other?

STANDING IN YOUR OWN AUTHORITY

Nobody told us that what we are is a point of awareness, or pure spirit. This isn’t something we’re taught. Rather, what we were taught was to identify with our name. We were taught to identify with our birth date. We were taught to identify with the next thought that we have. We were taught to identify with all the memories our mind collects about the past. But all that was just teaching; all that was just more thinking. When you stand in your own authority, based in your own direct experience, you meet that ultimate mystery that you are. Even though it may be at first unsettling to look into your own no-thingness, you do it anyway. Why? Because you no longer want to suffer. Because you’re willing to be disturbed. You’re willing to be amazed. You’re willing to be surprised. You’re willing to realize that maybe everything you’ve ever thought about yourself really isn’t true.

When you’re open to all that, then and only then can you stand in your own authority, on your own two feet. Only then can you really look for yourself underneath the mind and into the space between the next thoughts, to see clearly that what we are exists before we think about it. What you are exists before you name it. What you are exists before you even call it “male” or “female.” What you are exists before we say “good” or “bad,” “worthy” or “unworthy.” What you are is more fundamental than what you say you are. What you really are is quite a surprise when you see it for the first time, when you feel it. You can start to feel your own transparency. You begin to recognize that it’s possible that you really aren’t a “someone” after all, even though the thoughts of a “someone” arise, even though in your life you often act as if you’re someone. It’s the way you get along in life. You respond to your name, you go to work, you do your job, you call yourself a husband or a wife or a sister or a brother. All of these are names we give to each other. All of these are labels. All of them are fine. There is nothing wrong with any one of them, until you actually believe they’re true. As soon as you believe that a label you’ve put on yourself is true, you’ve limited something that is literally limitless, you’ve limited who you are into nothing more than a thought.

IMAGINING OURSELVES AND OTHERS

Let’s look at how we form an image of ourselves out of nothing, because that’s actually what we’re doing. Out of this vast inner space of quiet and awareness, we form an image of ourselves, an idea of ourselves, a collection of thoughts about ourselves—this is something that we’re taught to do when we’re very young. We’re given a name, we’re given a gender. We acquire experience as we go through life, as we go through the ups and downs of what it is to be a human being; with each event that happens, the ideas we have about ourselves change. Bit by bit, we accumulate ideas of who we imagine ourselves to be. In a rather short time, by the time we’re five or six years old, we have the rudimentary building blocks of a self-image. Image is something that, in our culture, we value very highly. We pamper our image, we clothe our image, we try to imagine ourselves to be more or better or sometimes even less than we really are. In short, we live in a culture in which the image we project to ourselves and to others is held as a very high value.

I remember when I was studying psychology in college and one of the topics was the importance of a good, healthy self-image. I was fascinated by the subject, and one day it occurred to me: “Image? Good image, bad image, it’s just an image!” I realized that what we were being taught was to go from having a negative image of ourselves to a good image of ourselves. Of course, if we’re going to stay in the realm of images, of believing that we’re an idea or an image, then it’s better to have a good image of ourselves than it is to have a negative image of ourselves. But if we’re beginning to look at the core and the root of suffering, we start to see that an image is just that: It’s an image. It’s an idea. A set of thoughts. It’s literally a product of imagination. It’s who we imagine ourselves to be. We end up putting so much attention onto our image that we remain in a continuous state of protecting or improving our image in order to control how others see us.

So in effect, we are all walking around presenting an image to each other, and we’re relating to each other as images. Whoever we think somebody else is, it’s just an image we have in our mind. When we relate to each other from the standpoint of image, we’re not relating to who each other is, we’re just relating to our imagination of who each other is. Then we wonder why we don’t relate so well, why we get into arguments, and why we misunderstand each other so deeply.

Everybody knows how painful it is and how much suffering it causes to walk around with a bad self-image. Almost all of us, either consciously or unconsciously, are in some process of trying to feel better about ourselves. It’s very common that once you get through the façade of most human beings, what you find at the core is a feeling that the image they have of themselves is insufficient and not good enough. It’s an image that seems in some way wounded—and it can never quite capture the essence of that person.

But there’s something deeper going on here; there’s a possibility of looking at image in a whole new way, from an entirely different vantage point. Allow yourself to see that your self-image is just an image—not reality, not the truth, not who we really are. We can think we’re pretty good, or we can think we’re really not so worthy, but either way, both of those conclusions are based on an image we have in our minds, which is something that we’ve inherited and created based on influences from our society, our culture, our friends, our parents, anyone with whom we’ve ever engaged. As we grow up, we gain the ability to re-create this self-image, but when we’re young, society, parents, and culture condition us with an image of ourselves. When we transition out of childhood, we try to change our image—because we decide it doesn’t fit, it doesn’t feel quite right. It is like an old piece of clothing that we don’t want to wear anymore. So we try something else on; we create new images, new illusions of who we imagine ourselves to be. But whatever this image is, when we look deep down in the core of all images, there is this feeling that we’re faking it, this sense that we hope we don’t get caught, because we’re not really being who we are, that we really don’t know who we are.

When I was quite young and I looked out at the world around me, I remember thinking, “Hey, everybody else seems to know who they are.” Whether it was my friends or my parents, whether it was people whom I met as I went through life, I had this feeling that everybody seemed to know who they were, and they seemed to know what they were doing, with a fair amount of certainty. But as for myself, I felt like I was faking it. What I didn’t realize was that everybody else was faking it, too! It looked like almost nobody else was faking it but me. But really, when I began to talk to more people about it, when I began to listen to what people said and how they said it, I began to realize that more people were faking being themselves than I had ever imagined.

THE DISCOVERY OF NO-IMAGE

If we’re living from the standpoint of a self-image of who we think we are, who we imagine ourselves to be, this also creates an emotional environment. For example, if we think we’re good and worthy, we’ll create good and worthy emotions. But if we think we’re unworthy, then we’ll create negative emotions. So we can have a good or bad self-image, a self-image that feels emotionally either better or worse, but no matter what it is, if we look deeply at the core of all our images, there is this feeling of not being authentic, not being real. There’s a reason for this. It’s because as long as we’re taking ourselves to be an image in our minds, we can’t ever feel completely sufficient. We can’t feel completely worthy. Even if the image is positive, we don’t feel completely enlivened.

If we’re willing to look in a deep way underneath the appearances, what we expect to discover—or perhaps hope to discover—is some great, shining image. Most people, deep in their unconscious, want to find an idea of themselves, an image of themselves, that’s really good, quite wonderful, quite worthy of admiration and approval. Yet, when we start to peer underneath our image, we find something quite surprising—maybe even a bit disturbing at first. We begin to find no image. If you look right at this moment, underneath your idea of yourself, and you don’t insert another idea or another image, but if you just look under however you define yourself and you see it’s just an image, it’s just an idea, and you peer underneath it, what you find is no image, no idea of yourself. Not a better image, not a worse image, but no image. Because this is so unexpected, most people will move away from it almost instinctively. They’ll move right back into a more positive image. But if we really want to know who we are, if we want to get to the bottom of this particular way in which we suffer, arising from believing ourselves to be something we’re not, then we have to be willing to look underneath the image, underneath the idea that we have of each other, and most specifically of ourselves.

What is the experience of feeling and knowing yourself as no image, no idea, no notion at all? At first, it might be disorienting or confusing. Your mind might think, “But there’s got to be an image! I have to have a mask to wear. I’ve got to present myself as somebody or something, or in some particular way.” But of course, that’s just the mind, that’s just conditioned thinking. It’s really just the incarnation of fear, because there is a fear of knowing what we really are. Because when we look into what we really are—underneath our ideas, underneath our images—there’s nothing. There’s no image at all.

There’s a Zen koan—a riddle that you can’t answer with your mind, but that you can only answer through looking directly for yourself—that says, “What was your true face before your parents were born?” So of course, if your parents weren’t born yet, then you weren’t born yet, and if you weren’t born, then you didn’t have a body, you didn’t have a mind. So if you weren’t born, you couldn’t conceive of an image for yourself. It’s a way, in a riddle, of asking: What are you, really, when you look beyond all images and all ideas about yourself, when you look absolutely directly, right here and right now, when you stand completely within yourself and look underneath the mind, underneath the ideas, underneath the images? Are you willing to enter that space, the place that casts no image, no idea? Are you really willing and ready to be that free and that open?

Technique:What or Who am I?

Before we actually find out what we are, we must first find out what we are not. Otherwise our assumptions will continue to contaminate the whole investigation. We could call this the way of subtraction. In the Christian tradition, they call this the Via Negativa, the negative path. In the Hindu tradition of Vedanta, they call this Neti-neti, which means “not this, not that.” These are all paths of subtraction, ways of finding out what we are by finding out what we are not.

We start by looking at the assumptions we have about who we are. We all have many, many assumptions that we don’t even realize we have. And so we start to look at the simplest things about ourselves. For example, we look at our minds and we notice that there are thoughts. Clearly there is something or someone that is noticing the thoughts. You may not know what it is, but you know it’s there. Thoughts come and go, but that which is witnessing the thoughts remains.

If thoughts come and go, then they aren’t really what you are. Starting to realize that you are not your thoughts is very significant, since most people assume they are what they think. They believe they are their thoughts. Yet a simple look into your own experience reveals that you are the witness of your thoughts. Whatever thoughts you have about yourself aren’t who and what you are. There is something more primary that is watching the thoughts.

In the same way, there are feelings. We all have emotional feelings: happiness, sadness, anxiety, joy, peace. We have feelings in the body, be they feelings of energy—a contraction here, an openness there—or just an itch on your toe. There are various feelings, and then there is the witness of those feelings. Something is witnessing or taking note of every feeling you have. So you have feelings, and you have the awareness of feelings. Feelings come and go, but the awareness of feelings remains. And although we need not deny any feeling we experience, it is important to notice that our deepest and truest identity is not a feeling. It cannot be, because there is something more primary before feelings arise: awareness of feelings.

The same is true for beliefs. We have many beliefs, and we have the awareness of those beliefs. They may be spiritual beliefs, beliefs about your neighbor, beliefs about your parents, beliefs about yourself (which are usually the most damaging), beliefs about a whole variety of things. Beliefs are thoughts that we assume to be true. We can all see that our beliefs have changed as we’ve grown, as we move through a lifetime. Beliefs come and go, but the awareness of beliefs stands before the beliefs; it is more primary. It is easy to see, then, that we cannot be our beliefs. Beliefs are something we witness, something we watch, something we notice. But beliefs do not tell us who the watcher is; they do not tell us who the noticer is. The watcher or the noticer, the witness, stands before the beliefs.

The same thing goes for our ego-personality. Everybody has an ego, and everybody has a personality. We tend to think that we are our egos, that we are our personalities. And yet, just as with thoughts, feelings, and beliefs, we can come to see that there is a witness to our ego-personality. There’s an ego-personality called “you” and then there is a watching of the ego-personality, an awareness of the ego-personality. The awareness of the ego-personality stands before the personality; it is noticing it, without judging, without condemning.

Here we’ve started to move into something more intimate. Most people believe they are their egos and their personalities. But a simple willingness to look into your experience reveals that there is personality, and then there is the witness of personality. Therefore your essential, deepest nature cannot be your personality. Your ego-personality is being watched by something more primary; it is being witnessed by awareness.

With that, we arrive at awareness itself. We notice that there is awareness. Everybody has awareness. If you are reading these words right now, it is awareness that is actually taking this in. You are aware of what you think. You are aware of how you feel. So awareness is clearly present. It is not something that needs to be cultivated. Awareness is not something that needs to be manufactured. Awareness simply is. It is that which makes it possible to know, to experience what is happening.

Who Is Aware?

Generally we think, unconsciously, that “I am aware,” that I am the one that is awareness, that awareness is something that belongs to me. We presume there is some entity called “me” who is aware. Yet when we start to investigate this meditatively, quietly, simply, we start to see that while there is awareness, we can’t actually find the “I” or the “me” who is aware. We start to see that this is an assumption that the mind has been taught to make, that “I” am the one who is aware. When you turn inside and look for who’s aware, what is aware, you can’t find an “it.” There’s just more awareness. There isn’t a “me” or an “I” who is aware.

In this way we are still subtracting our identity through this deep investigation. Through looking at what we are not, we are actually pulling our identity out of thought, feeling, persona, ego, body, mind. We are pulling our identity back out of the exterior elements of our experience into its essential nature. No sooner do we get back to awareness itself than we encounter the primary assumption that “I am the one who is aware.” So we investigate that assumption. As we investigate it, through our experience, we discover time and time again that we cannot find out who it is that is aware. Where is this “I” that is aware? It is at this precise moment—the moment when we realize that we cannot find an entity called “me” who owns or possesses awareness—that it starts to dawn on us that maybe we ourselves are awareness itself. Awareness isn’t something we own; awareness isn’t something we possess. Awareness is actually what we are.

Now for some people—for most people—this will sound radical. This is because we are so used to identifying ourselves with our thoughts, with our feelings, with our beliefs, with our egos, with our bodies, and with our minds. We are actually taught to identify with these things. Yet through our investigation we start to see that something stands before thought, before personality, before beliefs—something that we are calling awareness itself. It can flash upon us through this investigation that we are awareness itself.

This does not mean that there are not thoughts. It doesn’t mean that there’s not a body. We’re not in denial of ego or personality or belief or anything else. This is not a denial of all these exterior elements of our human self. We’re simply discovering our essential nature. Bodies and minds and beliefs and feelings are like clothing that awareness puts on, and we are finding out what is underneath this clothing. It can be quite transformative to realize that you are not what you thought you were, that you are not your beliefs, that you are not your personality, that you are not your ego. You are something other than that, something that resides on the inside, at the innermost core of your being. For the moment we are calling that something “awareness” itself. The radical nature of this insight is not that awareness is something you possess, or that you need discipline or need to learn how to do. Awareness is actually what you are; it’s the essence of your being. And not only is awareness what you are, it is also what everyone else is, too.

That’s why we call this a transcendent recognition, a transcendent revelation. It’s actually our identity waking up from the prison of separation to its true state.

No matter how old or young you are, notice that throughout your life things have changed: your body has changed, your mind has changed, your ego has changed, your beliefs have changed, your personality has changed. All of it has been in a state of flux over many years. But all along, from the time you attained language, you always referred back to yourself as “I”: “I am this. I think that. I believe this. I believe that. I want this. I want that.” While everything else has changed and continues to change, the “I” that you refer to has always been there. When you say “I,” it is the same “I” now as when you were a little child. The exteriors have changed. The thoughts have changed. The body has changed. The feelings have changed. But the “I” has not. On the level of intuition, there is a knowing that remains the same as it ever was, and you refer to it every time you say “I.” Without you even recognizing it, that’s the part of you that’s divine. That’s the sacred part. That’s your essential nature. But that “I” has no form and no shape. It is of the nature of awareness and spirit. And so anybody can notice for themselves and within themselves that this sense of “I” has been there all along.

The great twentieth-century Indian sage Ramana Maharshi had a saying, “Let what comes come; let what goes go. Find out what remains.” Meditative self-inquiry is a way of finding out what remains, what has always been.

Technique:Fire of Truth

When you listen deeply, feel intimately, and allow yourself to experience this moment exactly as it is, the emotional and energetic bodies soften. Take a few minutes now to just listen to and become aware of your surroundings. As you let the sounds become known, also become aware of the scent and the feel of the space around you in and outside of the room so that your feeling sense isn't confined to your skin and bones. Give yourself an opportunity to be open to the environment of sound and a sense of the space outside your body.

Notice that the more you relax, these sounds and experiences penetrate you and flow into you without defense. You will feel yourself softening and opening. Invite yourself into this openness. You may find that the sense of a barrier between the outside world and what's happening inside your skin becomes very transparent, or you may feel as if you can't find the boundary between inside and outside. Experiences of outside noise and what is happening in your body become of the same quality. A feeling in your body isn't really different than the sound of a car driving by or a bird in the trees. A feeling in your body is not really any more yours than the feeling of the space in the room where you sit. Notice that if you begin to take ownership of any experience, this starts to divide the world into inner and outer, mine and theirs, an outside sound and me. But essentially it's all just experience, inside or outside, the same. Not mine and not other than mine.

The presence of stillness opens the body and soaks into you like a sponge, if you allow it. A silent understanding happens that is not in words but is the direct experience of what is. Allow yourself the great gift of not looking for some alternate experience. Without thinking about it, without the movement of a single thought, what is it that experiences this? What is it that experiences?

Recognize that there is nothing that experiences this moment, but even that nothing is known and experienced. There is something mysterious that knows, something mysterious that experiences in this moment, but you can't say what it is because, when you say what it is, it's not that. It's closer, more immediate. As soon as you think about it, you see it's not that thought. It's before the thought. No description is necessary, so just rest on the edge, on the precipice, on the direct experience, directly feeling as though you do not exist and yet knowing that you do.

One thought about this mystery sets apart heaven and hell. Thought rips the unity into pieces to be analyzed by the mind. But silence unifies. The experience of this moment is present but ungraspable, known but not definable. This that is awake cannot be caught. You can sacrifice that vain attempt to define and grasp it, and instead just let it go. Maybe you are not you after all. Maybe you are this that is awake inside of this very moment of experience. Find a willingness to be it, rather than know it. As the body opens, sounds still flow through silence. What in you knows itself as silence? This is undefinable. If you lose your way, listen again to the sounds. They will point back to the silence, which will point back to that which knows both silence and sound. Don't get lost in thought or you miss your life. Just simply relax, and relax, and relax. It's the simplest act of faith and trust.

This awakeness that is awake within you knows itself. The mind does not know it, the body does not know it, and emotions do not know it. This awakeness only knows itself as itself. This truth is simple, beyond all comprehension. It is immediate, before all seeking. It is ever present, displaying itself as every single facet of this experience right now.

The Radiant Core - Openness

Sometimes people ask me, "If I realize that I as a separate identity don't really exist as I thought I did, then who is going to live this life?" Once you touch upon this radiant heart of emptiness, then you know what is living this life, what has always lived it, and what is going to live it from this moment on. You realize that you are not living this life; this radiant heart is what is actually living this life—along with this radiant, empty mind. When you give up being who you thought you were and let yourself be who you really are, then this radiant heart lives your life. Then no-thingness becomes your reality, and nondual awareness is what you are.

A great way to think about and explain the true nature of every person (which is all the concept of enlightenment is ever really pointing to) is to say that when true nature is birthed into full consciousness, your mind is open as far as it can go. It doesn't mean your thoughts expand into the cosmos, it means your mind is so open that there are no edges to it. You notice that as soon as you grasp a thought and believe it, the mind closes down onto that thought. So the natural mind is an open mind, and the natural heart is open, come what may. That's the shock of our natural condition—the mind and heart are naturally open and do not know how to close under any conditions at any time. And at the same time, you are beyond even the open mind and heart. Everything is contained within what you are.

The conditioned mind is always taking on God's job, wondering what people are doing and why they do it. But that is none of your business, none of your concern. You can just start walking through life with this natural openness to what is and be that way under all conditions at all times. That's what the true Self has been doing all along. When your true nature is realized, it is not as if you will have some amazing experience, and after that you say, "Okay world, I'm ready." The deepest experience is when you realize that this open, radiant, empty mind and open, radiant heart have always been open. They don't need to open; they are not going to open; openness has always been here. You no longer see two, you see the One in and as everything.

People feel so vulnerable and put up defenses. But putting up defenses is like walking out into the starry night and trying to wrap a little coat around vast infinite space. The vastness just flies out through the arms and the hood. You have this silly little coat out in the vast space and protect yourself inside it and think maybe someday you will open the buttons and be spiritually liberated. Probably not. It's more likely that someday you will stop identifying with the silly little coat. Free yourself of all limiting identities and embrace the infinite.

What allows this opening to take place at a great depth is to realize we are already the openness into which we are opening. If we keep identifying with the human aspect of ourselves, we think, "My God, I am opening into something too big for me." When we really let go and fall into this open silence, we can't find any end to it. It has been eternally here from before the beginning and, in that, our humanness finds a welcoming to open itself. This is so because we are not opening ourselves into a mystery that is alien, or foreign, or different, but into what we have always been.

If you touch the sacred quality of winter inside yourself—that quality of everything returning to its most essential form—you find yourself falling off the end of the mind and into openness. You will start to experience this by not resisting the wintertime and just going with it as it opens you. It can be tremendously revealing, tremendously liberating to just return, return, return. It takes courage to do this. You want to ask, "Who will I be? Will it all be okay?" But just return to the essential. When you find the courage to allow yourself to return to the essential, you are actually returning to the very root of your own self. That's the fullness that the winter has to offer.

It's as if you return all the way to the seed, and only there do you see that the seed contained the whole truth. When you reach the core of your own being, then you realize that the seed, which seemed very empty when you opened it, is full of the potential of everything that is. Like the seed of a tree, everything that the tree will ever become is contained in that seed. Only in the full return does a full springtime become possible.

These are not ideals I speak about, not goals or potentials. This openness is actually the core of who everybody is. Stop waiting to let go of everything, and then your true nature is realized. When it is realized, then live it. When the living of it happens, life happens spontaneously. Then finally, for once in our lives, we can say with honesty and integrity that it is the most amazing mystery. It is unfathomable. You cannot know it. You can only be it, either consciously or unconsciously. But to be it consciously is a whole lot easier than to be it unconsciously. Realize yourself and be free.

-Adyashanti, Emptiness Dancing