Last night after work I was sitting the chair I like to “meditate” in. What I call meditation is really just doing nothing. That is, as close to nothing as I can manage: letting the senses sense, the thoughts think, and so forth. For example, hearing happens effortlessly: none of us have to go to hearing class in order to have a perception of sounds. It just happens. Likewise we see things without effort. Seeing happens. Sensing our body happens. Now, you can seemingly direct your attention to different places, such as listening to sounds, or feeling where your butt is on the chair, or to what your eyes are looking at. But the sensing, feeling, thinking and perceiving in general happen by themselves. So my meditation is as much as possible letting it all happen. At other times, when not meditating, we may be under the impression that we are doing things and making things happen. We may be focusing our attention on tasks, such as at work. So meditation is a chance to relax the attention and let it open out to a wider aperture setting as it were. We then see everything is just happening in this “space”. The word “space” is a metaphor for the silent no-thing-ness that sees all things. Words fall short…

In any case, I was doing (this not-doing), and suddenly, imperceptibly, went into a “fugue” state: somewhat like the sense of starting to drift off to sleep, yet one is aware, but aware in a different way than normal waking awareness. You have access to a sense of self outside of, or rather dissociated shall we say, from the normal sense of self.

I suddenly saw the image of being in space, just beyond Earth, while at the same time my body was down in the chair. I was in both places at once. It was a nice feeling sense of detachment.

Here’s the insight I had: It’s funny how we talk about “connecting” with others, when the fact is there is no separation in the first place. No others. No thing to connect with. Connecting can only happen between objects.

You can prove to yourself you are not a body and not separate:
Imagine your body is like a plastic toy that has segments. Detach the lower part of your leg. Now is it your leg, or not? If you re-attach it, does it become you, magically? You could take your whole body apart. Where is “you”?

The point is, either it’s all you or none of it. Either the entire universe is you or none of it. Which is saying the same thing.
It’s self-evident “I” am not the body.

Then there is this sound in what we call the mind that sounds like “I” that we also associate with “me”. Listen to this sound. Watch it. What is it’s shape? Color? Where does it exist? I had assumed it moved through time, this sound, but if you watch it very closely you will see it’s very hard to pin down. What is it exactly, in actual experience? It has no consistent, solid, persistent, thingness about it other than any other sounds from outside or inside: it happens, then doesn’t happen, happens and doesn’t happen. It’s always in consciousness and the supposed line of time – the idea that time flows along a linear timeline – was only another image, a concept.

I hear birds singing and I hear the sound “I” which is like “eye”, and it’s supposedly some important designator, yet I can’t even find who is saying it, although “I” seems to choose to say “I” to “myself”.

This “I” that is the personal me just seems to be a myth, in “my own mind”, from nowhere built on nothing.