Who’s Writing All These Articles?

---

There is a space in the beginning of a yoga class that you leave open for what we call intention setting. Some teachers will begin class in a still posture and allow you to set that intention from the start. I tend to let my classes move around a bit first. In this way, they can receive valuable feedback from their body regarding where they are at today and come to a collective agreement between mind and body as to what that intention should or could be.

One of the ways that you can inspire your students to set an intention is with a mantra.

A great many teachers that I know will utilize ‘I am’ statements as examples. I am brave, I am strong, I am light, and the list goes on. I love a good ‘I am’ statement, but as always I have to put my little contradictory spin on it. The monologue in which I help students set their intention for the practice goes something like this.

“For the next sixty minutes we’ll be going through a physical practice together. And there must be a reason that you came here today. Maybe you want to be strong, maybe you want to be flexible, maybe you want to be peaceful. Take that intention into your mind and speak it to yourself in a simple statement of what you want to become through the practice. Then what I’d like you to do is get rid of the ‘I’ from that statement. ‘I’ is the ego. Next get rid of the ‘want’ from that statement. The ‘want’ is desire and leads to suffering. What you’re left with is simply ‘to be.’ So if you want to be strong, simply be strong and if you want to be flexible simply be flexible. Every posture, every movement, every transition and every breath is an opportunity for you to be your intention.”

So maybe a little long-winded but I assure you that I speak very fast. And I think that this little shout out into the void that I make in most of my classes says a lot about a certain idea that I regularly struggle to accurately verbalize to anyone I come across.

That idea is that I don’t really exist.

I promise that this won’t be an acid trip plunge into the dissolution of self, but instead I’ll take a more philosophical approach that attempts to express things that I think, things that I think that I think and maybe even a couple of things that I think that I think that I think.

Let’s first look at the word ‘I.’ ‘I’ is probably one of the most important and often used words in the English language. It denotes a certain perspective of the actions that are happening around an individual being. The question becomes what are we referring to when we say ‘I.’ We’ll first use the case of me as ‘Kevin.’ Anyone who has met me could attribute ‘Kevin’ to a person with a set of physical, mental and emotional attributes that are clearly recognizable.

If we start with the physical, let’s say that he is a taller caucasian male with a slim build and various tattoos covering his body. Simple, but recognizable. Now let’s say that I get my tattoos lasered off or apply a coverup makeup like they do in movies to hide them all. The physical attributes of ‘Kevin’ have changed but we wouldn’t say that ‘Kevin’ has changed. For that matter, if we looked back at pictures of me before I was 18 where the temple that is my body was not so artistically decorated we would still say that it is ‘Kevin,’ though that idea of what makes up ‘Kevin’ has certainly changed.

The same can be said of emotional and mental attributes. Someone who met me in high school might have said that I was a highly competitive and somewhat aggressive individual. I’d be surprised to hear if someone who met me in the past year would say the same. So this idea of ‘Kevin’ is, at best, a broad outline of things that we come to expect, but are admittedly fluid and changing all of the time.

Next we can begin to look at connections and separations. If ‘Kevin’ exists, then he certainly can be identified by separating him from the things that surround him.

The idea of a tree only exists in contrast to things that are not a tree.

In my case we could say that everything contained within the borders of my skin is ‘Kevin’ and everything outside those borders is not ‘Kevin.’ Seems easy enough, but the separations become unclear when I make statements referring to my knee, my hand, my brain and my heart. Amputees who have lost a limb and surgical patients who have lost an organ are certainly still themselves, so we are again left to question what actually is ‘Kevin’ and what is just a part of the physical body. For that matter, the verbiage of separation and connection does not do us any favors either. For if we said that my skin separates me from everything else around me, wouldn’t it also be true to say that my skin connects me to everything else as well? Both sentences are true and yet in a constant state of contradiction with each other.

When you meditate, ideas like this come and go like clouds in the sky. Once in a while, you ask yourself a good question and start to turn it over in your mind like a diamond with a million beautiful facets. As you ask the questions, you don’t get definitive answers, but rather more questions. You peel back layers and layers and layers and I wouldn’t say that things start to make sense but maybe they become a bit clearer.

The Buddha recognized this through his own meditations under the bodhi tree. When asked what happens when you die, he responded,“Who is asking the question?”

When pressed about the nature of the Buddha mind,“When I seek my mind, I cannot find it.”

And when questioned as to whether he was a God or a man,

“I am awake.”

In all three examples, the idea of self is downplayed in favor of the idea of the experience. Who or what you are doesn’t really matter. Instead, if I can be so bold as to interpret these teachings, it is what you do. It is my thought that language has betrayed us. While it offers a helpful guide to the world around us, we often take what is truly just a map or a globe and think that it is really the world itself that sits before us. All of the pronouns that I use allow me, the speaker, to communicate to you, the listener, in a way that denotes the perspective from which an experience was received.

But even that sentence shows us how flawed that way of thinking is. For if you wrote the sentence, it reads that you listened to me. If I wrote the sentence, I spoke to you. Two different statements, one whole experience.

Once again stealing small excerpts from The Midnight Gospel, the whole of existence can be viewed as a big net. We as humans tend to get focused on the knots as the important part. The knots represent individuals. The real beauty, though, is in the ropes that bridge one knot to another. These are the experiences that bind us together in one big universe. These ropes make the net useful. 

In the end, I can’t really say that any of this matters. When you argue correctly, you can never be wrong. If you wanted to disprove what I’m saying, you could certainly poke some holes in my metaphorical net argument (see what I did there?). However if you tried to prove anything at all, I could do the same. So I sit here on my little meditation cushion, gently peeling away layer after layer of self, consciously disproving the idea of my own existence.

And that’s just something that I’ve been sitting with…

Or maybe something that’s been sitting with me?

---

Did you enjoy this read?

Please leave a comment below and share the link!

---

RECENT ARTICLES

---