You are free to be who you want to be. You do not have to follow the character description and script that has been written. The script that has been reinforced by family, friends, school, work, beliefs about who you are, preferences, aversions, learned neuroses, attitudes...every day in every way. Tear it up and throw it out. Release yourself from the bounds of a fixed and known 'self'. It's all a fiction.
The desire to define a self comes from fear. Fear of non-existence. If I say I am an artist, or a writer, a daughter, sister, lover, friend; these are all labels assigned that are readily accepted without question. We are not what we do or whatever socially constructed roles we fit into. It's all human-invented. These are all what you are not. New-Age labels; being an Aquarius or a Libra, a number 5, a tiger or dragon in Chinese astrology - all are further descriptions of what you are not.
Escape isn't achieved through taking a spiritual path either. The so-called 'spiritual path' is a furphy. There is no path and there is no one to walk it. You are that which you seek. You are already enlightened. Of course enlightenment is another invented concept that does not exist. It's dualistic and based on the assumption that there is a someone to reach a something.
Where is this 'self', this 'I'? Try to point to him or her. Go on. Where is the finger aimed? Chest, head? Then that's what's been pointed at: a chest or a head. Where does the 'I' reside? In the brain? The heart? The big toe? There is no little box inside the body that houses the 'I'. So there is a thought that says it's all 'me': the body, the brain. How can that be? What is it that makes that particular body/brain organism a 'you', and this one here a 'me'? Where is the 'I' that is housed in each of these beings? Surely it must be the same 'I'? Just suppose it is for a moment, the same 'I'. How could this be? What is it that is common in both humans? In all humans and all other species?
Consciousness.
This is prior to thought and emotion. The mind behind the mind. The objective essential awareness. This is the absolute. The non-dual existence that is consciousness. Objective seeing. It is all there is. Everything else has been assigned to each living human organism. Thoughts are not owned. The thought 'I' is just that: a thought. The 'I', the so-called 'personality', can not be located.
So what does this mean? How does this effect your life? If there is no self, then everything must be an invention right? Constructed identify would indicate that all meaning is subjectively given. It is changeable and fluid. No fixed self, no fixed meaning. Academics would call this a post-modernist agenda. Yet this too is an invention. Post-modernism is a form of literary criticism that posits all meaning as being polyvalent and fluid, so therefore there is no fixed meaning. It emerged from others: post-structuralism/deconstruction, structuralism/semiotics, formalism etc etc... The various ways of analysing a text - different movements of thought by people who set themselves up as experts and believe that what they posit as truth is the only truth. These are people who do not know who/what they are. Lost in the dream. Making sense of things employing literary strategies is a metaphor for the way we all try to make sense of the vagaries and vicissitudes of our lives, by deconstructing and inventing meaning for everything.
There is no meaning. The universe is empty. The house is haunted.
It's not something people want to know about: this bottomless nothingness, the void, the empty hole where no one exists and nothing has any meaning. My advice would be to ignore everything I am saying. Just get on with your life. Save yourself from the inevitable fall if you pursue this. The panicked grasping onto the slippery sides of the dark hole down which the conceptualised ego falls. To get to the place of truly seeing that you are essentially free and that the relative world is a well-constructed story in which you are merely a character, that has been written in to the movie of your life, in which you have the leading role, is an agonised letting go into meaningless nothingness.
But really nothing changes - you still live your life. The only difference is you see that there is no separate 'you'. You still love your spouse and children, still go to work and play. Still feel and think and do. All that is different is that seeing happens: seeing that it's all fiction and that meaning is made. It is felt it in your cells: this non-separation, this flow with all that exists.
When I paint a picture, there is no painter. There is hand-brush-paint-canvas-stroke-seeing-concentrating-touch-sight-movement : flow. That is all there is. Digging a garden there is no gardener. There are hands, shovel, breathing, feeling warmth of the sun, soil, weeds, sweat, aching muscles: sight, sound, touch, movement...
Consciousness is what lies behind, underneath, above and beyond the invention of ego-self. It is the flow, the essential eternal (eternal meaning 'no time', not endless time), being-ness. It is felt at a cellular level - this engine of survival is merged with everything - no separateness - it is all one.
You ARE essentially free. Yet the paradox is that there is no one to be free. The 'you' of which I speak is that which exists and always has existed, that which all members of all species share: consciousness. It is all you are and all you have always been. And always will be.
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- Mountain Daughter
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