Neither the body, nor the mind

Your body has been changing ever since its conception. Only some of its cells last a lifetime. Do you identify yourself as just those cells and not the others?

You may consider that the brain defines who you are. Yet there are parts of the brain which seem to operate like a machine, empty of experience. So what you call "me" would have have to be defined as a subset of the brain; as certain networks that are in constant flux, at times active and then dormant. Yet you seem to be stable amongst the fluctuation of brain activity. Isn't it pleasant to lose yourself completely in activity? Don’t you wake up every morning to a continuity of being that is there prior to memory or thought?

The fact is that the body, as you know it, only exists in your mind. The sensations, sights, sounds, and abstract concepts that define it, are all amongst the contents of your mind. These passing phenomena cannot be you.

There are layers to your mind, shifting and changing. What was unnoticed one moment, comes into focus the next. Memories are made and lost. The things you desire and fear change, opinions and beliefs shift, even who you love the most may change. Through all this flux, there is but one level at which you are unchanging; the sense of being; the undeniable sense that ‘I am’. This is not the small sense of self, of being this or that, but just pure being.

This sense of being does not rely on the contents of your mind. It is the foundation. It is ever-present; the calm of the deep ocean, underlying the turbulent surface of the mind. It is this ocean that allows the waves of experience to take shape.

For any experience to appear, you must first be. The experience itself is shaped by the body and mind, but the body and mind depend on your being. From this essence life takes root, and this essence is not only yours, but shared by all living beings. Because what is ever-present and unchanging must be an aspect of nature itself.

So know yourself; detach from the transient and sink into pure being, till you reach that loving sense of oneness with all that lives, and even that which seems inert. For even the ground we walk on is part of the same universe, obeying the same laws; a transient form taken up by the same underlying reality. A reality whose most intimate aspects are life, love and being.

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