Nothing Personal

"When you say, ‘I know myself,’ what do you mean? You know the story, the memories, the experience, the conditioning, the knowledge, the tradition, the past… all that you think is you. But all that is not you."

Jiddu Krishnamurti

A name, a body, a gender, a date of birth, an education, a cultural background, a unique life history, an inner world, memories and projections about the future, a specific mix of likes and dislikes, desires and aversions, life goals and ultimate fears.

In other words, a person, a “me”: the idea that “I am this and not that.” This is what human beings typically refer to as self—a bundle of sensations, images, memories, and conceptual references with the idea of a “me” at its center.

While this set of references may hold value and make sense from various points of view, there’s another side to this coin that we rarely, if ever, pay attention to. And as it turns out, that other side of the coin happens to be so much more relevant and profound that it may completely change the game once you become aware of it.

What is on the other side of the coin? First, when we’re trying to talk about the essence of reality an important aspect should be kept in mind: We should always remember that the word is not the thing it is trying to point to. Truth can never be captured in words, concepts, or images. Secondly, and for the same reasons, it’s often better approached in a negative way, by discarding the false.

In reality, you aren’t a person. You were never born and will never die. In fact, there isn’t even a 'you' in the way we typically imagine. What you are is not a separate body-mind organism—you are far vaster than anything you could ever conceive. What you truly are transcends form and concept, existing entirely beyond space and time. In reality, time, space, and all the qualities of the phenomenal world exist within you. You, the formless, the timeless, the absolute.

Concepts like 'individual,' 'separate self,' 'mine,' 'yours,' or 'his' may serve various practical purposes in human society and even help the organism maintaining its integrity. But this doesn’t mean they should be regarded as capable of reflecting reality as it truly is.

At the deepest, most fundamental level, you are limitless, boundless, formless, universal. You are Being itself—which also means you are no-thing in particular. You aren’t a thing. You aren’t anything describable and finite. You aren’t a subject in a world of objects. 

Adjectives like boundless, formless, and universal clearly contradict the concept of an individual self—in other words, something one could call their own. The self, as we commonly understand it, is tied to the idea of a separate entity, with distinct qualities and characteristics. But the kind of self we’re pointing to here isn’t a persona; it is of an entirely different nature. No description can accurately capture it.

In this moment, existence is, experience is, Life is. We assume there must be someone—an individual entity—who exists, experiences reality, and lives something called 'my life.' The suggestion here is that, despite our most fundamental beliefs as human beings,  this isn’t true. In reality, there is no one truly living a life; there is only life, or beingness, or existence, or the source—whatever one chooses to call it. The person is, and always has been, merely an abstraction, an extrapolation, an unverified and unverifiable assumption.

All names can only be misleading. “That” which we truly are eludes all forms of description. “That” cannot be seen, understood, or experienced in any way, because “That” is the seeing, the understanding, and the experiencing itself. And at the same time, it is beyond all of those things.

Seeing is happening. The mind projects all sorts of ideas, concepts and interpretations onto this seeing, but none of them can truly grasp or define what seeing truly is in essence. It is a truly mind-blowing paradox that normally gets completely overlooked: seeing only sees and can never be seen, yet it is present in all things seen, as the seeing itself.

Words will fall short every single time because they are built on knowledge. Knowledge is confusion. Taking words and concepts as a path to clarity is the surest way to get lost. Looking beyond them means stepping onto the pathless path.

Although your fundamental nature is obvious at all times, hidden by nothing—not even beliefs—you can’t 'know' it, as it is unknowable, and there is no 'you' to know it. What lies beyond the subject-object duality cannot be seen or known.

Consider the Sun: how could it ever witness its own radiance directly? It can only perceive its light in the countless objects that mirror it back. This beautiful truth is here at all times. It is hidden in plain sight, in some kind of apparent blind spot, even though all there ever is, is truth.

What seems like a paradox isn’t really one. We fall for the belief that there must be something to be understood, known or achieved, and that’s the source of all confusion, because ultimately there isn’t. This becomes clear only once the known is seen for what it is, an illusion, and transcended in its totality. Reality is unknowable. And it is already perfect. In that perfection lies true freedom. We are no-thing, in which everything is allowed to be what it is, naturally.

IMF, La Cathédrale verte, 8th of November 2024