What is Life? Who am I?

What is this thing called life?

When I look at what I experience … what do I see?

Things and people I interact with? …. actually, colours and shapes and sounds that arise in experience.

When I look for them ….these people and things … where are they?

Nowhere. Only shapes and colours, and sounds ….

When I look for these shapes and colours and sounds …. where are they?

Nowhere. Nowhere that I can be certain of, anyway. I can’t say they are outside, or inside of me …where is this thing I call experience taking place? Where is the world?

As I look for it …. it melts away. Nothing I try to focus on is stable and can be found for certain.

My life, the world, reality, whatever you wish to call it .. experience … nowhere to be found … and yet it’s there!!! really there! bang your head on the wall there! .. but nowhere to be found.

Like a dream …. I seem to inhabit this life, this world, with things that cannot be found … that seem utterly real … yet do they exist in the way I think they do? .. no … like a dream. Dreamlike …. a dream. An illusion. As if … like this ….

Regard all Phenomena as Dreams

from the Seven Points of Mind Training

So if life is a dream …. then who am I who experiences this dream?

What is experiencing the dream?

I ask that question, and watch.

A space opens out … no thinking, no labelling, no analysing … but a knowing. A knowing of what is ……. who am I?

Nothing.

There’s nothing there.

Where is this me …. the body … sensations that appear to arise and cease .. yet they are nowhere to found. Where do they come from … these sensations of body? Nowhere. Where do they go? Nowhere. Nowhere to be found, coming from nowhere and going nowhere.

Hmm …..

I think about that …. thoughts!

Where are they? ….

Nowhere. Seemingly arising .. yet not actually there …. and not coming from anywhere I can find, or going anywhere I can find ….. like a dream, these sensations of body …. these thoughts.

Emotions too .. memories … all that I think of as me … like a dream .. nowhere to be found. I not that … so what I am ….

What of awareness …. this that is aware of all that seems to arise?

Is that me?

Where is it …. I turn to it .. and watch …..

Seemingly there … seemingly.

When I experience a sound … seemingly awareness is there as I experience it.

But what is there beyond the sound … the seeming experience itself? Nothing lying behind it … beneath it … beyond it? … Nothing that I can find.

What is there of me then, if awareness arises … as experience arises … and seemingly goes again … to where, I don’t know?

Am I not stable .. continuous?

Dreams that come and go .. seemingly.

Awareness that comes and go … seemingly.

What is this I then ….. but seeming illusions …. that I can’t pin down.

This awareness .. this awareness/experience-ness … that arises together … simultaneously, co-existently .. where is it?

I can’t find it.

Where did it come from?

I can find an answer …..

Where does it go?

I don’t know … it doesn’t seem to go anywhere.

Not existing, no coming from anywhere, not going anywhere …. I am not.

Yet I am. I experience this life, this dream … I bang my head on the wall …. I experience it!

I am nothing … yet I seem to experience the dream …

Examine the Nature of the Unborn Mind

from the Seven Points of Mind Training

What is Life?

Who am I?

Nobody dreaming.