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-Who are you? Really? When we are born we are given a name, a made up name, the reflection of our parent's dream and desires. At an early age we develop a series of understandings and reactions, often as a defense or way of making sense of our parents, family and neighbors. This is called our personality, our character. It is a mixture of wants, experiences, memories, reactions, and the conclusions we drew. Our self image grows from this and serves as both an understanding and a shield, to which we have an intense emotional bonding.  

-As children we look externally for validation and definition. We believe it is people “outside” that we bond with, but it is really our internal reaction and feelings to which we connect. The external validation is really an internal demand, an interaction with ourselves and the judgments we have of what is “out there.” We live internally with our understandings and our personality, holding this as who we are or as our being.  

-For most people our self image defines our suffering, success, what we must overcome or submit to. We measure our growth or stagnation through it. For each this personality is of supreme importance, yet it is simply your memory of experiences, reactions, and responses you took as true at a young age. Different experiences, different personality.  

-As we grow older our relationship to our early training changes. Most stay within the framework of it but adapt and make variations to feel they have changed. At their core they have the same image. Some rearrange the impacts of youth, learning to feel calm, accepting of emotional scars. Others become healed person, no longer a hurt person. People who were never hurt simply developed a better self image. This is all translating experiences within ones central beliefs. We eventually age and have our names, our memories, our thoughts. And then what? After living within ones image, many of us lose our perceptions and thoughts.  

-I almost died twice. As I faded this personality evaporated. The name, the lessons, the awareness gained, fizzled away like thin smoke, their importance meaningless without the self absorption of my personality.  Even the “I” experienced as a central ‘me’ evaporated. This ‘me’ was also an assumption developed at a young age, a central clearing certainty that there was a ‘me’ learning something. It too drifted away into the mist. No me. No lessons. No goals or losses. Everything I had lived in terms of, evaporated. Yet there was something, a little speck of awareness, a speck that had always been there, forgotten in the bustle of the internal conversation. While the being of internal conversation discussed its grand designs with itself, fancying itself as eternal and important, this other part of me that existed without “I” was still there. I was here, the being of conversation was gone.

-This personality, this self agreement that attracts our energy and attention, is merely a  series of endlessly repeated thoughts, the same conversations, year after year. Some even give their life, their only real gift, to support their conversation. We do everything in terms of this internal conversation because it thinks us as this conversation, grabbing most of our attention. Yet are we it?  

-What are these thoughts in your mind, variations of thoughts you always had, the same thoughts everyone else is having. We are like millions of awareness' floating within a sea of similar thoughts. I suggest that these are not your thoughts. What you hear in your mind is a function of this place, this level of existence. The thoughts are like a greeter at a party. It welcomes you at birth, shows you around the place, describes what you see and how to perceive it, and all your life you float within its sea of perceptions as you live in whatever this is that is around / within us. This greeter convinces you of what to do, whom to like, what to hate, how to judge others. Everyone does this. These are not your thoughts. They are not who you are. They are a force of this place keeping your awareness focused on this place. That is what it wants, to have you focused here.  These thoughts are not the one listening to the thoughts.  

-What we are is something quit indescribable. This shield of thoughts is useful in that it forms and protects while we are here, but is not who we are. If you can silence the thoughts for brief periods of time, the “other part” will surface, and joined the two is astonishing.

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