We have been discussing emptiness for the past few weeks. We looked at the emptiness of phenomenon, the emptiness of body as well as the emptiness of mind. So let’s continue with this deep subject and look at the emptiness of I today.
To explore the emptiness of I, we will go looking for that inherently existing I. Before we look for anything, we must know what it is that we are looking for. If you want to find your car keys, you need to know what they look like before you can find them. Similarly, we must first know what does inherently existing I looks like before we go searching for it.
The easiest way to see what our inherently existing I, is to go back and think about a time when we were grasping for that I. Think about a time when you were proud of yourself. May be achieved something big or you were proud of your children or whatever the case may be. Think about your state of mind and your physical expressions at the time. You were really into yourself. If you visualize yourself at your proudest moment, you have found your inherently existing I. Another place to look is to think about a time you were really frightened. Let’s a wild animal was chasing you or you were scared about losing a relationship or money or whatever that may be. Again, if you can think about your state of mind at that time or your physical state (maybe you were shaking). That is your inherently existing I. You can also look at a couple of other examples such as a time when you were in a really sad state of mind. That will also have the same effect.
So once you identify what the inherently existing I looks like, now we start searching for it. Before we go on searching though, let’s agree on what possibilities are there. We can either find our inherently existing I in our body, or our mind, or a combination of body and mind, or outside of our body and mind. That’s it there is no fifth possibility. Let’s begin.
First, we need to see if we can find our inherently existing I in our body. Similar to our contemplation of the emptiness of the body, we start searching for it. Can we find our I in our limbs? The easiest way to find out is to say what if I lose my limbs? Will your inherently existing I still be there? In other words, will you still be proud or afraid or sad at the moment you were thinking of? Of course. It would not change that at all. So we know our I is not in our limbs. Now look for it in our organs. As we discussed previously, every one of our organs is transplantable. So we can have someone else’s kidney or heart or whatever and we will still be here and our I will still be proud, afraid, sad at the moment you were thinking of. So our organs are not our I. Same applies to our skin. So now that we have established that we cannot find our inherently existing I in our body; let’s look for it in our mind.
As we discussed last week, our mind is this vast awareness that is continuing from the beginningless time. It changes from moment to moment. If it was inherently existing, it would be solid as a rock if you will. It would not be changing on a moment-to-moment basis. If it was inherently existing, we would be able to find it at any given moment. But the mind changes every moment and we cannot find this unhappy mind or happy mind because it constantly changes. The same logic applies when we look at our feelings. Our feelings are as fleeting as the wind blowing on a stormy day. They keep changing from moment to moment and we cannot find the mind that contains that feeling when we go look for it. Another way to look at this is that our mind is the possessed and we are the possessor. It is our mind. For example, I am speaking into my microphone but that does not make me the microphone. So the possessor and possessed cannot be the same. So, our mind cannot be the inherently existing I.
How about body and mind combined? Well, two things that are not me cannot be me. If we go on a drive looking for a horse. We see a goat and we say that’s not a horse. We see a cow and we say that’s not a horse. We cannot put the goat and the cow together and say that’s a horse!
So now, only one possibility is left. Maybe we find our inherently existing I somewhere outside our body and mind. How absurd does that sound? Let’s go through the exercise anyway. You are seating in one place. Where would you look for your I? Is it in the other corner of the same room? Is it outside the room? Outside the house maybe? What about in some other City? Just not possible right?
As you can see, we cannot find the inherently existing I that we so strongly grasp. This grasping is what our ego is. It is the root of almost all of our delusions. We are grasping at the thing that does not exist to create problems in our lives. If we begin to let go of that grasping just little by little, life will begin to change for the better for humanity.
In today’s meditation, as always, we will start by first settling in our hearts. Once settled we will begin to contemplate the inherent existence of our I. We will first identify the object (our I that we strongly grasp). Then we will go look for it as we just talked about. Once we realize there is no inherent existing I, we will meditate on that.