Are ‘You’ Really You? Exploring Nonduality Through Analogy
Perhaps the reason we can’t find the self in the brain is because it isn’t there.
— Chris Niebauer, No Self, No Problem: How Neuropsychology Is Catching Up to Buddhism
If you’re exploring the essence of reality and wondering what reality’s nondual nature might be like, this post is for you. Although the truth of reality — what you most intimately are — is impossible to convey through writing or speaking, this post might serve as a pointer to direct your curiosity and help you consider some of the assumptions that underlie your dualistic enchantment.
One of many ways to articulate the nature of reality, your nature, or the truth is this: All there is is beginningless, timeless, self-sustaining and undivided awareness or beingness — and nothing else. All is it, and can only be it, because there is nothing else to be. With nothing else to be, you are that only ‘thing’ — not as in ‘you, too, are like that thing,’ but as in ‘you literally are that, all of it.’
Even this articulation is too much to say and at the same time says nothing. What you are is inaccessible to conceptual knowing or sense-making. Yet, what you are is freely and directly available as your own being — as both the infinite everything and as fathomless nothing. If this raises eyebrows, you can read more here on how everything is also nothing. In this post, we will focus on the ‘everything’ aspect of you as awareness.
You might wonder how exactly you are this awareness that is everything there is, when what you perceive as you and around you suggests otherwise — here is me, and there is everything else that is not me. Let’s dive in.
The Illusion of Personhood as Self
The dualistic way you experience yourself as a person confined to a body with a brain and separate from the rest of the world is not the complete truth about you. What you perceive as truth is relative truth — the kind that exists only through comparisons. What you believe yourself to be — an autonomous, separate person possessing free will — is possible only when you define and compare ‘yourself’ to what you define as ‘not yourself.’ This dualism is merely an illusion, no matter how intensely it feels like the only reality.
Although the story of your reality suggests you are a product of your body and brain, separate from what you are aware of, there is no separate awareness confined within your brain that then interacts with and processes the external world for you. Who is this ‘you’ that declares ‘my awareness, my body, my brain?’ If you are merely a sum of these forms, who exactly is the ‘you’ that possesses them? In truth, your ‘having a brain that produces awareness’ is just one way that awareness — the real you — expresses and experiences itself, similar to how it expresses as everything else you are aware of.
Compared to the habitual sense of personhood living in a tangible world, this may seem wildly fantastical. You might wonder, if it’s true, why you are not aware of it? How can there be no ‘me’ as a separate person? I have a body. I am clearly this body living in a world that is outside of me and not me. Isn’t it so obvious that questioning it seems ridiculous? How could it possibly be any different?
And how exactly am I not exercising free will? I think and I act — although sometimes not in that order. I can raise my arm when I choose, grab an apple, eat it, or decide against it. I control what I do, how, and when I do it. Isn’t that true?
It is true that all this is your experience. But what is actually going on? When you are perception itself, to what extent does perception bother to notice itself while concepts and forms in their wild diversity stage an enchanting show?
Let’s dive into an analogy to make what may seem like abstract philosophising more tangible. This analogy, while a far cry from capturing the nondual reality, might help shed light on some of its aspects. Keep in mind that applying this analogy to how you experience yourself and the world may be challenging, and may require you to pause and reflect.
The Water Analogy
There is a well-known analogy that illustrates the struggle to notice omnipresent awareness — that of the fish in the water that has heard about this thing called ‘water’ and is now having a hard time finding it because it is the very medium of the fish’s existence. The fish cannot conceptually differentiate the water, rendering it an unnoticeable ‘no-thing.’
Let’s explore a similar analogy that could be a more effective pointer to nondual awareness. In this analogy, we continue using water to represent awareness, but we’ll get rid of the fish to tone down on dualism. Instead, water itself will play the role of the fish — as a current (made, obviously, of water) living among other currents, and looking for water, as if there could be such a thing as non-water.
Nothing but water exists and can exist in this analogy, not even in the imagination. In fact, everything in this analogy, including the current’s imagination, thoughts, including memories, body sensations, sight, hearing, smell, feelings and emotions, is made of water.
Let’s agree that space ‘outside’ the current — what the current sees as an ocean — is also made of water. There is nothing that is not water. It’s only water all the way, infinitely. It’s boundless wholeness undefined by anything.
Because there is nothing but water, it is water ‘pretending’ that it is just a current looking for water. To fully embrace this role, water ‘forgets’ its true nature and becomes the seeker and the sought — the ouroboros in pursuit of its own tail — just like awareness plays.
Being everything, and everything being made of it, water – busy playing all these forms and shapes and dynamics – doesn't notice itself. It has a full immersion experience as being the current with all its thoughts, doubts, hopes for the future, the experience of possessing free will, a story of its childhood, a job and what not, all of which is water.
Thus, water remains ‘hidden’ from itself in plain view for as long as it pleases. And only water decides when it’s time to reveal itself as the game of hide and seek. Its revelation to itself is entirely its own business.
So then, if water identifies itself solely as the current, separate from the rest of water, the rest of itself, then it perceives the rest of itself as an ocean full of other currents and things – external and alien.
The Divine Play of Personhood
Awareness, being completely free, centreless (identityless) and creative, engages in this game of personhood living in a world, in an attempt to know itself as something, to explore and experience itself as all of it. It arises as you (a Mary or a John), and freely, willingly and lovingly collapses its self-awareness into intimate identity with its form as you, ‘alienating’ the rest of itself as an external world to provide for the theatre of your existence.
Awareness has ‘become’ you living in a world, just like water has ‘become’ a current living in the ocean. Yet water has never ceased to be water. It has simply ‘forgotten’ itself as water to truly and fully embrace being the current.
Isn’t it ironic that while you may regard nondual realisation as the ultimate ‘attainment,’ infinity not only wants to be you but is you as its ultimate and most precious attainment.
The ‘Unseen’ Player: Infinite Centreless Intelligence
Awareness is infinite intelligence, and so the game it plays is equally infinitely intelligent. Its intelligence is not a product of any specific mechanism or activity, such as smartness centred in a localised brain and then projected outwards onto the world. Intelligence is the very nature of awareness — awareness is intelligence, and intelligence is awareness.
In other words, it is not just you, or other sentient beings, who get to be intelligent, deciding for yourself and acting independently upon the external and unintelligent world defined by random laws of physics. Everything is intelligence, and intelligence is everything.
Awareness expresses and experiences itself as a pattern of infinite complexity that appears as multiplicity with just as infinitely complex relationships. This infinitely intelligent wholeness, self-organises in every part of itself, and is fully and uniformly intelligent across all of itself.
Intelligence doesn’t require a central command from which to run its infinite-intelligence operations. There is no need in such controlling agency within wholeness. Divine intelligence is as infinite in a tiny drop as it is throughout the rest of creation. Water is as infinitely water in a drop as it is across the entire ocean.
The person you believe you are and everything else in existence are one you, dancing as seamless unity, just like the currents and the ocean dance as seamless unity of water. It cannot be otherwise. Nothing but wholeness is possible, and wholeness is inherently and invariably consistent with itself. There is nothing that could create disagreement.
My thoughts of writing these lines, writing them, your seeing these lines and reading them, and any thoughts and actions that arise ‘in response’ is one seamless dance of you.
Implications: There Is No ‘You’
Because all of the countless currents in the ocean are nothing but water, it’s clear that the current is in no way independent of the ocean, since both are one — water — and only water orchestrates the dance. The ocean that seems to push and twist the current, where the current appears to be struggling by working its elbows against the ocean, is also entirely of water’s doing.
There is no current as an independent decision-maker separate from the rest of the ocean. Your ‘decisions’ are made by the wholeness, the pattern, and you merely express and reflect that pattern as an integral part of it. Your every thought, every doubt, every feeling and sensation, and every single little thing about you is the play of wholeness and is summoned by wholeness.
‘You’ exist as an experience ‘within’ the awareness that you are. ‘You’ is a vibe if you will. And this experience doesn’t have to disappear even when awareness recognises itself as awareness, that is to say when you wake up.
Implications: Free Will and Autonomy
Because awareness freely and willingly collapses its self-awareness into intimate identity with its form as you, it experiences itself solely as you — a seemingly separate, autonomous being possessing independent free will. What in truth is spontaneous arising (a thought or an action) is taken for doership tied to personhood, an ‘I.’
Every thought and action is presumed to be the result of your own free will, arising in response to the world you live in. You talk to a friend and on listening, say, ‘Oh, this is an interesting idea.’ You are unaware that you can’t really distinguish their talking from your understanding, that you can’t experience one without the other, and that it’s really one awareness doing it all.
You remain unaware that you are the seeing, the hearing, the thinking and everything at either ‘end’ — you and your world. You are awareness ‘dreaming’ being you and the world around you. And, as is typical in dreams, one rarely questions their reality.
The only true free will here is that of awareness that dances as the entire pattern, as wholeness. Just like the flame dances as wholeness regardless of how independently from the rest of the flame its prongs may seem to move. So, no, your every thought right now is not of your making.
Implications: Spontaneity and Time
‘Within’ this wholeness and as wholeness, it’s a single unity where it’s impossible to say that anything is truly separate from anything else. The dance of creation, as the dance of the entire ocean is but a single move. Wholeness moves spontaneously and thus freely. It’s not even bound by time, the illusion of cause and effect.
What seems to be time, or time-bound sequential causality, is also just an illusion. All your billions of years of the universe’s history, all your yesterdays by which you explain your today, and all your countless tomorrows, trillions of them, exist only as an arising now.
Awareness, in its freedom and spontaneity, is not bound by ‘past.’ It is not bound to the logic of past events, as there are no past events — only its own arisings within and as the now. Wholeness arises at once, including as the logic of the past connected to the now, as thoughts (including memories), impressions and all senses and actions. What you consider proof of time and causality is merely one arising referring to another, existing solely within the immutable now.
What’s the Upshot of All This?
Why is all of this even important? It’s not. It’s just truth. You may ask, ‘then what’s the point of looking for truth when there is no me and I don’t decide when and how I find it?’ And the answer is you’re not doing the searching, and you’re not doing the finding. If you feel the curiosity about the truth of being and you follow it, it is awareness as you dancing back to remembering itself in this playful way, the final chords of hide and seek.
It also means that although you don’t get to decide when it happens, you are also free from having to spend decades in meditation to become what you already are, but you may take that precious experience, if you want to, to quiet down the enchantment and notice what you already are.