Look for yourself and tell me what you find.
Stumble through every layer of your experience:
Body — not me. Thoughts — not me. Feelings — not me. Sensations — not me. Anything that can be observed — not me.
You seek and search and scour.
But everything you perceive isn’t you and yet, seems to have the flavor of you.
Everywhere you turn you can’t find yourself. But it seems like you’ve been here, just a fraction of a second ago, right before you looked.
Like entering public places and finding notes scribbled on the wall saying, “So and so has been here.” Or like standing with your back to a mirror and trying to turn around quickly enough to see the back of your head.
No matter how often you try, you can’t outmaneuver yourself.
Are you playing a sadistic game of hide-and-seek with yourself?
After a while of this game, a thought might creep in:
What if I’m, like, nothing?
That would explain why I can’t find myself, right?
Nothing can’t be found because there is no thing to find.
So you follow that inquiry.
You look at thought and wonder what exactly it is. You do the same with feeling. Then you check your senses.
What is any of it?
Like what’s the essence, the substance?
There seems to be something there. But you can’t grasp it, hold it, pin it down.
Until, eventually, the obviousness of it all smacks you in the face.
The substance is no-substance. This is the emptiness all these wise folks speak and spoke about.
And this no-substance has something in common with you — it’s ubiquitous.
No matter what and where, it’s always right in the middle of it.
What if you are this no-substance?
Could it be? How could it not?
It’s been staring you in the face: you are nothing in particular.
“I am nothing. I am nothing. I am nothing,” you sing.
But this realization is followed by another one.
Obviously, something is. There isn’t nothing because nothing is non-existent, per definition.
So you take one more look. And only now do things revolve into clarity.
This no thing appears as every thing.
Body — there I am. Thoughts — there I am. Feelings — there I am. Sensations — there I am. Anything that can be observed — there I am.
The essence I have tried to find is I.
Not ‘I’ as another object. ‘I’ as the linguistic expression of non-conceptual being.
You failed to find yourself because you looked in the wrong direction.
Now you do a 180 and you can’t fail to find yourself.
Everywhere you look, there you are, as the looking itself, as the light shining it all into existence.
It’s so simple. It has been so simple all along.
Looking for something specific, you are nothing at all. Looking for something general, you are it all.
Luka
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