Transcript

On the path of spiritual seeking, a moment inevitably comes when all efforts seem to reach a dead end. One sincerely seeks awakening. He practices, attempts to halt his internal dialog, disidentify from his thoughts, and time after time asks what seems to be the deepest and most correct question: Who am I? Yet the very question of who, who is thinking, who is observing, is the primary obstacle towards seeing reality precisely as it is.

This question is not born of the depths of awareness; it is simply a consequence of the mechanics of habitual human thought. Our mind is so programmed that it automatically seeks an author for any action. In our world view, there can be no doing without a doer to perform it. If water flows, the mind calls it a river that flows, as though there were some object distinct from the flow itself performing this action, and whilst we can still understand that in the case of natural phenomena, this is merely a linguistic convention, when it comes to ourselves, we immerse ourselves in this illusion entirely.