Being a Nobody

If you go into yourself very deeply and reflect upon the question: who am I? You will find that there is a great chasm within you, which has no central point. When you come across this vast, timeless space, your little egoic self will panic, because it does not know how to function or what it means to be without a sense of identity. At first, the sense of loneliness can be all engulfing, forcing you to feel the nothingness and be a nobody; not in the sense of the mind, but in actual fact, which is truth.

To understand this vast emptiness we have to go back to the beginning of this life. When we are born we are an empty vessel. We have no beliefs, no judgments and no opinions filling us up, and there is no conditioning which forms the individual personality. What we do have are feelings, i.e. when we feel hungry, we cry, etc. As we grow we are taught descriptive language in the form of labels and we start to store these labels into our memory banks.

Once we are able to communicate and understand basic language, we are conditioned and taught beliefs. At some point, before seven years of age, we have our first experience of pain, not necessarily physical, but also emotional or mental, and at this point of non-love, energy that would normally move fluidly through us becomes blocked by the minds reaction to the experience. This energy is now in shock and it becomes stagnant; this is known as fear. We have since lived our life trying to avoid a repeat of this pain.

Parents, carers and education also taught us about envy. We were subtly shown how to compare ourselves with others and then encouraged to strive to become successful in pursuits of sports, games, exams, etc. All of these things were cleverly drawing you away from being your real unconditioned self. This new version of you, with your beliefs, your conditioning, your striving and your envy, is known as the egoic mind – the ‘somebody’.

Once this ‘somebody’ that you have become, looks at anything with the physical eyes, all of its past conditioning floods the mind and it moves into judgment, comparison and opinion: creating pain, chaos and confusion. This manufactured ‘you’ is not who you really are, but to be free from it you have to observe it and understand it. Most people believe that this false self is the real version and they even fight and kill to defend its illusion.

The important question is: Is it possible to be the unconditioned you? Only each individual can find out for themselves, nobody can do it for you. Can you drop all of your beliefs, your expectations, your desires and your judgments? Can you drop all the labels you have about yourself and what you believe about others? Only by letting go of the illusionary you, can you step into the real you. When you are not trapped by the illusion of being something other than what you are, can you truly say that you are that vast limitless being, which has no label, no body, no where to go and nothing to achieve. It already is all that and more.

This is true empowerment of the real self, as it makes you the ruler of your own life. What will the ego do with this fact…?