Perhaps the most difficult thing for most of us to understand is the simple, and if you examine it directly, most obvious fact that there is no such thing as a solid, separate, stable entity that I can call "myself". Nouns (labels like writer, teacher, doctor, lawyer, man, woman, human being, body and so on), proper nouns (my name, your name), personal pronouns (I, me, mine, myself, etc.), often coupled with mental images of your face or your body at various ages, morphed together with various role models' faces or bodies, and anchored by muscular contractions and other physical-emotional sensations work collectively to create a fictitious mental version of "me" and "my life". It may be convincing on the surface, and there may be the security and comfort of habitual perception, but if you investigate carefully and directly, you will find nothing but insubstantial memory and fantasy edited by motive and attitude. Nowhere in any of that is there a real, verifiable "you" or "me". Before agreeing or disagreeing, before proceeding any further, take a few moments to check this out for yourself .Otherwise, the process of truth, the discovery of what is real, is trivialized and reduced to true believerism, or worse, a subtle contempt prior to investigation. If you assume, "I already know about that," no honest investigation or discovery can take place .So if you have the courage and integrity to check it out for yourself, you discover that everything you think about yourself (as well as other people, the world, life, and the universe) is neither accurate nor reliable. It is only the play of fragmented memory, and as such, it is amazingly limited. It is shockingly dishonest and appallingly narrow, shaped by what we like and dislike, what we want and don't want. It is hard to escape the rather obvious conclusion that all of the self images and concepts we so take for granted have no reality to them at all. So.............. ?
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