Awakening. Edward Music

Once I returned from my morning walk, which was very cheerful that day, and took a shower.

I felt unusually relaxed, and I wanted to get under the warm water.

Feeling the wonderful touch of water on my back, I looked inward, into the inner void of consciousness, trying to see if there was someone there who was touching the touch of water.

I have made such observations thousands of times, in thousands of different situations, in search of the "I", the one who is experiencing this experience - and never found, and at the same time, I continued to cling to these concepts of "myself", about personality.

This time, as always, there was nothing there, only an endless inner void containing everything: the kinesthetics of the sensations of moving arms, muscles of the back and neck, touch of water, the noise of the soul and a few thoughts - but by and large there was only silent silence, inspiring and complete.

There was no one or something, neither thing, nor I. There was nothing at all, as usual, for the ten thousandth time, but today, God knows why, everything was different.

The reality of "no one" has flooded!

There was no person or anyone else perceiving the touch of water.

Nobody was at home, so to speak.

There was only a touch of water, the feeling of my feet standing on the shower floor.

My hands touched my neck and back, lathering them, but there was no one to relive it. There was only a certain experience occurring in awareness.

For a moment I felt intense fear.

The fear was: “And who is watching over the shop?”

I felt, or rather, had a sense of insecurity, because there was nobody to control and protect.

All that was - it is only an experience occurring in the mind. It was as if all the air had been kicked out of my lungs, and I relaxed.

Years of tension flowed from me. It seemed that I had not breathed for several minutes.

There was no need for breathing. There was no me, there was no “I” to inhale, so my body just relaxed and deflated. My mind (or rather, just the mind, because I was not) became completely calm.

Neither thoughts, nor any special attention to any particular thing, just a great, silent, all-encompassing emptiness, illuminated by the inner light of consciousness, containing everything experienced.

My mind is gone. I felt too weak to stand, so I dried myself with a towel and lay on the sofa in order to examine this inner content from the point of view of the discovery that I have no “I”, no me, no self of mine.

Along with this perfect mental silence, “my” consciousness swung open and filled the void that was everywhere, instead of remaining attached to the mental chatter that usually serves this “I”.

And this is what I discovered: there was no “I”. There was no central core giving life to me as an individual.

There was never any self.

Moreover, there was never even an idea that there was a “me,” a doer and a worrier - even this disappeared.

What I thought of as myself was actually “I AM” - a feeling of presence, of existence.

But this self-consciousness, consciousness, did not contain any "I" in itself and it always has been.

“I” was only a conviction, a very highly guarded idea that created an apparent experience of me as a separate person. When the idea of “I” died, the whole dimension of conceptualizations changed, everything became clear.

All other ideas depended on the belief in a separate self, existing independently of the rest of the perceived world, and when this duality was recognized as a fantasy, the same thing happened with other concepts that depend on the duality of Self-Everything Else.

Inside, this Self-Being, the presence that I called consciousness, as if it had a center or source near the heart (of my imaginary body); it seemed as if consciousness arose and flowed from this center.

At the same time, this heart center was only something that happened in the mind and had nothing to do with the belief in the self, as in someone doing or experiencing.

I Am - the feeling of presence, permeating all internal and external emptiness and all experience, has no "I". Edward Music.

(Robert's Apprentice)