Who's Living Your Life?
There is a "me" lurking inside your head. It's his/her life that is being lived. All actions are in service to him/her. All ongoing thoughts are generated as a dialogue between him and his future self or his former self. I want this or that. I didn't want this or that.
This "me" is a composite of all the thoughts about itself. The thought of "me" has become the self to which we live our lives in service to: his fears, his dreams, his desires, his god.
This "me" is like a parasite which appropriates all sense impressions to confirm his existence and sovereignty over life as an independent, self-determined separate self, in the pursuit of happiness.
Who is living your life? The little "me" which began as the first realization as a child of "I am separate from my mother" has accumulated millions of sense impressions which become grist for the mill to existentially confirm that a separate me exists, when actually they are sense impressions belonging to no one. Mind attributes these impressions to a person it imagines itself to be. There is no me to which sense impressions can attach to unless a thought is assumed to be the thought of this false "me." Thoughts occur in themes according to our interest in them. For every thought there is an implied justification of reality because similar "me" thoughts automatically arise from memory as allies.
When it is seen that the patterns of thought, and thus the conditioning which forms a psychological character which we take ourselves to be, are not who we are but who we believe (a "thought" of believing) ourselves to be, then there is no longer a mental entrapment from which we take our point of view. Instead, free from the conditioned responses to circumstances that usually arise, we as conscious beings are consciousness only, not unconscious mental characters reacting (creating more thoughts) to the ongoing stream of sense impressions which cause a particular reaction according to core beliefs about ourselves.
The grip of this mental "me" is such that even when the whole mechanism of mental conditioning is exposed, the "me" thought converts into a deceptively cooperative self for self preservation only; masquerading as an ally in trying to find its true Self! Even trying to eliminate conditioning is a form of conditioning, because even in this scenario the "me" that is trying to be free of conditioning remains - as the intact "me" without conditioning, ha! What is needed is not improved thoughts, or improved conditioning, but rather a direct seeing that the central thought of "me" is an illusion. Only then will the constellation of thoughts which support the illusion of "me" collapse into the no thing from which it arose.
The "me" is not an ally. As long as there is any iota of assumption that a separate self, a "me" exists, with its own personal history, there is no freedom to live a spontaneous, loving life, free from conditioned responses to circumstances. There is no "me" that can be free of itself! The "me" is an imposter.
The whole illusion of a "me" can be seen in an instant when there is the courage to be free of all reference points in memory and in imagination. When we imagine, aren't we imagining the me's life? When we remember the past, aren't we only remembering the me's reactions to life events? In this moment of experiencing, when the me arises as "I," aren't we forfeiting our moment of living free to an imaginary self and living in service to it?
Begin now to live without the shackles imposed upon us by our own inner conspiracy to believe life is being lived by the assumed self we take ourselves to be. Whatever impressions, assumption, opinions, perceptions, emotions we believed were ours - were not - they were the evolving stream of personal history of a mythical self which was held to be our inner self, influencing our lives and making decisions based upon past actions and impressions - the composite self which is assumed to be who we are.
The mind is like a magic spell under which we live our lives. A spell which has become the means by which a little me has appropriated our life force, consciousness, and limited it to patterns of behaviors and conditioning which we take to be ourselves, and therefore we live in service to, by always trying to find improvement ... because intrinsic to the spell of the "me" is the constant discontent the "me" engenders.
Realizing that the "play of consciousness" accords the freedom to taking on certain points of view without forgetting our true nature, without being prisoners of the mentally constructed character who poses as "me," is an aaha! realization of great magnitude.
Summation:
Our likes and dislikes, our goals and aspirations, our fears and self-evaluations of self-worth, the "whole catastrophe," is a super-imposition upon our infinite consciousness by a finite mind whose sole motivation is to impose and construct an impression of unique separateness by a unique ego, the "me."
When you are not being lived by the mental "me" life becomes unfettered by preferences and personal history.
Jyoti Masters
January 2016
