No Center, No Separation
Sin centro, sin separación
A reflection on how the sense of "I" loses its position as a fixed center and becomes just another appearance within experience.
No Center, No Separation
A reflection on how the sense of "I" loses its position as a fixed center and becomes just another appearance within experience.
If I look above the screen to the pillow, there isn't a pillow and an "I." When what I'm describing as the pillow and the "I" appear, when I think about it and invoke it, that too is experienced in the same way. It is known as thought appearing. It never takes the place of "I," of that which is knowing it.
The image of "I" as just another appearance
Another, simpler way to describe it, and perhaps a more common way, is that there isn't anything or anyone here. What is here is all of experience. And so that is fully intimate. Even the image of "I," because it is known that that is not "I," does not appear as a center.
The only difference from before is that the image of "I" was always believed to be the center. Now it is just something that comes and goes. It goes, and it's not there. It comes, and it's there. But it is never in the center. It becomes more and more just functional, arising in conversation or in relationship to something in a purely functional sense.