An experience of ‘who am I?’

Jeroen

I was experimenting with the question ‘who am I?’ while meditating yesterday. Ramana Maharshi once said,

“The question ‘who am I?’ is not meant to be answered. Instead it dissolves the questioner.”

I was in a receptive state yesterday evening where I was asking the question of everything I could perceive, listened to what came back, and eventually I lost all consciousness of the body. It was like I was in a dark tunnel leading towards a light above, but I couldn’t entirely let go of my shape, and this held me back from proceeding down the tunnel.

Later on was the point at which I understood, I am not the body. The body is more a kind of mental habit, something you get used to. But it has its own energetic life. One of the answers that I got back from asking my question told me that ‘the body energy is the legacy you leave behind when you go’, which I thought was an interesting way of looking at it.

pegembara

You are not.

“The truth is still and has no voice; things
that speak are not the truth.”

Ajahn Dtun

Once mindfulness and wisdom finally realize with
absolute clarity that all conditioned phenomena
are impermanent, the mind will naturally let go
of everything. The great meditation masters have
each called this state the ‘Dhamma-element’ or
the state of pure knowing, for it arose within their
hearts upon the complete extinction of all greed,
anger and delusion.

Shoshin1

"You can not catch hold of it, nor can you get rid of it...In not being able to get it, you get it....When you speak it's silent-When you're silent it speaks."

~Chan Poem~

pegembara

@Shoshin1 said:
"You can not catch hold of it, nor can you get rid of it...In not being able to get it, you get it....When you speak it's silent-When you're silent it speaks."

~Chan Poem~

You cannot catch it and you cannot lose it. You can only be it.

For the unified mind in accord with the Way, all self-centered striving ceases. Doubts and irresolutions vanish, and life in true faith is possible. With a single stroke we are freed from bondage; nothing clings to us and we hold to nothing. All is empty, clear, self-illuminating, with no exertion of the mind's power. Here thought, feeling, knowledge and imagination are of no value. In this world of Suchness, there is neither self nor other-than-self.

https://home.csulb.edu/~wweinste/HsinHsinMing.html?jr=on