Our essential nature is pure consciousness. You can’t see it, you can’t hear it, you can’t even think it, it’s just is. We may call it presence, we may call it awareness, but of course, these are just words. It’s at our very essence we aren’t, but this essence is clouded over, and we take ourselves to be somebody.
The ‘I’ Image, who I take myself to be a particular person, a particular man or a woman, born here, belonging to which nationalities, these cloud over our real nature. The vastness that we are, instead we enclose ourselves in a psychological me, bound by past and always looking to the future, that psychological me is rarely, simply present here.
It is always looking for a hold, something to grasp onto, something to give it security, that ‘I’ image lives through objects, through experiences, it cannot just be whole happy at this moment for no reason whatsoever. We find it very difficult not to objectify ourselves, because our mind is orientated towards objects and the senses, in the same way, objectifies who I think I am. So, when we take ourselves to be somebody, a psychological ‘me’, we also live in a psychological time-bound by our past, bound by patterns.
We collect bags of luggage and we carry that luggage with us. And so, when we come to act, we are not really acting from the moment, we are acting out of patterns of our past or we can also say that we are merely reacting. So, we don’t know ourselves in silence, in other words, we know ourselves through images, through objects. We forget that we are the image that comes up, before the object manifests itself, so we identify with the periphery, a ‘thing’.
At the same time, we make other human beings into objects, an object of perception. In silence, in awareness, in presence, we are. There is no notion of being somebody, it is very beautiful to be nobody. It’s not for the ego, of course, the ego needs constantly to look for something to be and to become because it’s insecure.
Even the silent moments that occur in our lives, our identity always wants to feel these moments. The ego, the ‘I’ image needs something to hold onto. Without it, who am I? So, one needs to see in daily life, how we project an image of ourselves. We need to see it at the moment. It’s not just some theory, we need to see how we’re always enclosing ourselves in the image something from the past, always looking for hold and when you really see it, like really see it and feel it, you are actually outside the part. You see it and you are not anymore enclosed in it, there’s been standing back.
There’s been a sense of space between awareness and this image that is in awareness, this psychological me. At that moment is a glimpse of peace, a spaciousness, when you are no longer locked in this image that you have of yourself and that’s all it is. That image in your silence doesn’t exist but we constantly create it. This ‘I’ image is always looking, for something to hold on to, to give it happiness but it doesn’t realize that happiness is inside it, happiness is causeless.
So, it thinks happiness can be obtained by looking for things for experiences and of course these things and experiences do make us happy for a little while but tomorrow, I would need something else, and tomorrow I would need something else again. It’s an endless process that is filling up a deep hole that is the ego. But when we realize finally that nothing makes us happy ultimately that outer search that accumulation of things, that wanting thing that whole extraversion dies by itself.
Doyle Further Speaks
When you realize that nothing on this planet is ever going to give me anything that I am ultimately looking for, now that’s a very important moment in one’s search that nothing you are looking for is ultimately going to answer your question. And then what happens, and then I would say, you become available for something that is beyond the mind, you begin to understand that mind can never understand reality.
When you begin to understand that the mind cannot understand, at that moment innocence arises, you come to the feeling ‘I don’t know’, ‘I don’t know’. In not knowing I would say, you become open, you become available, you become available for that you cannot think that is beyond the mind, but that which is that is our very heart, which I would say is the most obvious thing there is.
Your being, your presence that’s here now every moment but we overlook it. We are so hypnotized by the world, that we forget, what at our very heart, and what the world comes from. We can never grasp reality with our mind, it is not the right tool, there is no tool. But when you begin to understand, what you are not, that I am not the image, that I am not the body that I am not my thoughts, I am not something, then you become available what’s beyond the mind.
So, what is beyond the mind? It’s the vastness of being its what you are here now, but superimposed on it, is our own individual image, the past. So, we don’t let awareness, our consciousness flourish. It’s often when we come to a crisis in ourselves or deep suffering, that we really see, how I am so identified with this psychosomatic entity and it makes us really stand back and see it out there and realize I am not this, I am not that. I would say you’re the Noah of this and that, but the problem is, we take ourselves to be the known. The Noah you can never know, it is not an object to be known, you can only be it.
“Let’s just spend one minute quietly in silence. Remember, don’t look for silence, silence is looking for you.”
The aforementioned excerpt was taken and transcribed from one of Billy Doyle’s discourses on, Who am I? What is my real nature?
You can watch the video here: