"To know is to be.
Being nothing, I am all.
Everything is me."
--Nisargadatta
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Don't go spouting out an answer, just be the answer. Be It."
--Adyashanti
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"The only way to find it is to be it."
--Alan Watts
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"Verb: words that show an action (sing) or state of being (exist)"
--Merriam Webster
Here at Mind-Tickler headquarters we’ve talk a lot about no-self.
9 times since 2016 actually, discussing the self we’re not.* Much less often about what we are.
So today we'll try to balance that just a bit.
Here I am watching my cat clean herself in the window.
Cat, over there. Me, owner and seer of said cat, over here.
I'm definitely not the kitty; she's something other than me. After all, 4 sentences up I call her "my" cat, and one can’t be both owner and also the object owned.
Plus, I see her. So I'm not the cat- I'm what's looking at her.
That makes 2 things, me and cat.
And now I begin to notice I'm watching me watch kitty. I’m aware of me being aware of her.
Awareness (thing) looking back at me (thing) from outside (thing).
Wait, how many things is that now?
Judy, cat, outside, watcher, awareness.
Naturally there are plenty more things too- such as consciousness, enlightenment, body, thought, mind, ego, personality, self, feeling.
Things. Objects. Nouns.
Lots of them.
Language has formed the world into nouns since before we were two, forcing us to think in terms of distinct and separate things.
The main building block of mind and understanding and thought is words. And words favor nouns.
So it is very difficult- almost impossible- to see the world any way other than in terms of self, others, and awareness as things.
Because language insists.
“With what am I aware of my experience?” --Anonymous
Can you see that this question as worded makes finding an answer unlikely? “With what" makes awareness a thing. “My experience,” creates an owner, and also makes experience a thing owned.
This is partly why so many seekers never come to an actual lived understanding, settling instead for intellectual parroting.
Perhaps, if we really want to get this no-self business, or to see and think differently,
We might consider verbing.
Instead of focusing on, “What sees it?” (2 nouns,)
Or instead of trying to figure out if we’re awareness, or the thing that’s aware of awareness,
We could instead play with BEING.
Being experience rather than experiencing being.
Being experience rather than experience-er.
Being everything.
Literally.
BEing the cat. BEing, very literally, both eyeballs and the colors landing on them. Being every sound. Being every thought. Being every sensation, feeling, and sense.
Fluid. Uncentered. Changing one millisecond after the other.
Of course there’s no guidebook for doing this, no method, no rule. And it’s certainly not going to come naturally.
Language won’t let it.
So this is entirely just for fun. None of it is serious or important.
We can notice though, that we’re either verbing or we’re not.
Because if we're verbing, then we're everything.
And everything makes for no exceptions.
No “outside of me” ownership. And no owner at all.
In fact, no thing at all.
Not even one.
And then it might be fun to see - what happens to the precious and feels-so-real self exactly, when it’s not a thing?
That seemingly strong sense of a Me might just dissipate, dissolving into the everything it is.
Ok fine. Yeah yeah. Why bother?
And of course there's absolutely no reason or need. Ever.
It’s just that nouning hurts.
Verbing cannot.
Because it involves no thing.
So there’s no thing to lose.
No thing to gain.
And no thing
to be
any thing more
than everything.
Click here to get your Mind-Tickled every week.
“Only words and conventions
can isolate us from the entirely
undefinable something
which is everything."
– Alan Watts
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"The observer spends a lifetime
In conflict with the observed.
This is resolved when
The observer is also the observed and
The two dissolve into the observing."
--wu'hsin
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"Make me nothing and from nothing, make me everything."
--Rumi