Do I actually exist, or am I imagined by a brain that chooses to be someone special rather than someone with no illusions? Am I anything more than a false identity, a character created and sustained by a brain that doesn’t question its commitment to imagining itself?
Why does the brain feel compelled to be someone imagined rather than being who/what one actually is from moment to moment? Could it be because being what one actually is means owning nothing but one’s actions, one’s behavior?
Who am I?
Krishnamurti: “I am nothing.” (The ‘I’ is the mind free of psychological conditioning.)
I know what K meant, but I wouldn’t call an illusion “nothing”…especially when it is the cause of everything awful about our species.
I think the issue is that so long as the movement of the ego is maintained - the ego being the thoughts and feelings with which our brain is currently identified - we are unable to discover the truth of this nothingness that K points to. But if we can have an insight into this egoic movement (of time-thought), or - through meditation - drop down into our mind to a place beyond thinking and feeling, we may discover that we are in fact nothing, but that this nothing is not something terrible.
I have decided to break my promise not to post anything to reflect on this issue, because I think it is our fear of being nothing which may lie behind so much of our thinking and feeling - when being nothing may not be the horrifying thing that we project it as being.
Yes. I don’t see what else it could be. I fear losing the certainty that I am what I think/believe I am because I am my thoughts/beliefs. Without my psychological thoughts, I am nothing but awareness and capacity for practical thought.
When I put it like that, I see nothing to fear, dread, or resist. But until/unless I actually see it, I am fear, dread and resistance to being what I can’t imagine, i.e., nothing.
This is the issue for all of us.
So the question, for me, is:
Can we die (psychologically) before we die (physically)?
Can we die to the ‘I’?
Can the ego be negated?
Which, in different words, is the same question as:
Can we die to a hurt we have (with the self-image which has been hurt)?
Can we die to the need to be right about something (even if we are factually right about it)?
Can we meet a fear, or a hurt, or our loneliness, and face it with complete openness and vulnerability (without running away to something comforting)?
And to find out if there is “another side” which exists - i.e. on the other side of feeling fear/hurt/loneliness/being right or wrong, etc…
What is it exactly that needs to die? If the brain was as aware of I as it is of actualities, would it see that I is imagined, a character in a story it is writing from moment to moment?
Like any story worth following, the story of I has twists and turns, moments of pleasure and of pain, ups and downs, surprises, shocks, thrills, terrors, revelations, illuminations, insights, darkness, fear, hope, despair, etc., but unlike any story, it cannot end until it is seen for the fabrication it is; until it is seen as the substitute, the stand-in, for actuality that it is.