Life Without Self

Life without self is, in a word, weightless. It doesn’t feel heavy the way it used to. Eventually you realize this heaviness was a feature of self, not of life. So it falls away, like so many other things that once decorated your experience. It’s a bit nostalgic to think about, like remembering a great war. Only the enemies that were conquered don’t really feel like enemies, they feel like ignorance. Perhaps it’s hard to conceive of anything internal as an enemy in the absence of self. There are no sides because it’s all one thing. For that matter, even in external conflict the “enemies” don’t feel like enemies. Without a self nothing can be taken personally.

It’s a great irony that the thing we spend so much of our life obsessing over turns out not to exist. We suffer over something that was never there to begin with. And because enlightenment is the disappearance of something that was never truly there, it doesn’t look all that different from what it looked like prior to enlightenment. It’s more that the looking has changed, rather than the thing being looked at. People think that somehow, in some mysterious way, life will be different after enlightenment. But it won’t be. You’ll just live it differently. And that’s enough.