How do you find the elusive you? How do you do it? How do you find this thing that seems to be so elusive? You? That’s the big question, right?
So much of what I talk about and what other non-duality teachers talk about is just talking in circles around finding this elusive you. When I talk about it, what I’m really trying to do is get you to understand that, first of all, it’s findable, doable, easy, simple, even. And then, second of all, that what helps is to see the craziness in your mind so that you can know that that’s the barrier between the not knowing and the knowing.
Who you are is who you’ve always been, simple, simple, undefined. You were born as this thing before you knew a single word, looking out at the world through your eyes. That’s you.
How do we get to that moment where we just stop enough to go, “Oh, I’m me”?
Well, the most successful thing I’ve done with people is to work with the idea of zero, of nothing. Because if you can see actual nothing—and I’m not talking about nothing that’s a thing.
When my teacher first told me this, I automatically turned nothing into something in my mind. “Oh, it’s nothing,” you know. But he was really talking about nothing, nothing at all.
Underneath the words is something. They seem to always be going in your mind. Underneath that is nothing. There’s nothing there. I hate to call it silence because silence is a thing easily turned into a thing. “Yeah, I’m trying to find silence, but I can’t seem to silence my mind,” right? We all know that. We know what that’s like. So forget about silence. It’s not silence; it’s nothing.
Just access this place of nothing for even one second, and then the only thing left is the observing of the nothing. It’s actually simple mathematics: take everything away, what’s left? Nothing. Non-duality—it’s not two, it’s not that, it’s not that, it’s not that, take it all away. It’s not going to hurt you, trust me. If you can stop your mind for one second, it’s gonna come back. Unless you actually have a stroke or get your head chopped off or something like that, it’ll come back. It’s implanted neurons that are there; they’re safe. It’s perfectly safe to just stop for a moment.
You eat a whole pie until there’s nothing left; what’s there? There were three sheep in a field, and now there’s no sheep. Try to actually find an actual sheep in your mind. You can see a thought of a sheep, an idea of a sheep, but there’s not an actual sheep in your mind; there’s nothing there. If there aren’t thoughts and words, there’s nothing.