E-mail Question from a Student

Question: Nisargadatta and Sailor Bob say that it is impossible to say, “I am NOT.” But I don’t think it’s impossible. I sometimes wonder if I am just a figure in some greater being’s dream, believing myself to be real, but only “real” as long as that being’s dream lasts. When the dreamer awakens, I will vanish. So I’m not real, or not independently real. My existence depends upon someone else being asleep. If that being wakes, poof, I’m gone. ???

Response: Ha! You are catching on! You are absolutely correct! You are a figure in some greater being’s dream. However, that deeper being is you! Not you all packaged up as who you think you are, but Unborn you. Deathless you. Omnipresent, Omniscient, Omnipotent you. Sat Chit Ananda you. Which is also me! Hi! And which right now pinpoints Its Presence, Its Reality, as the apparent you. Relatively Real/Absolutely Real. Emptiness is Form. Form is Emptiness. Not-two you.

You know all this. Perhaps you are just now realizing the implications. The ego thinks it will become enlightened. It will not. When awakening happens, the ego is recognized as a socially and evolutionarily created hallucination or trance that does not have any independent reality of its own. The “I” I think I am is just a thought connected to a whole bunch of other thoughts that like to think of themselves as “me.”

That which investigates and says, “It is possible to say, ‘I am not,’” is that “I am.”

Do I have to come over and cut your head off?

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