Chapter 8, The Last Question

One day, she realized that she was not a person, because she was not her mind. 

 

She realized that throughout her life, there had only ever been one constant: her capacity to be aware.  She had always been able to see her mind as an object, just like another object.  When she sensed this distance between awareness and mind-things, her mind-identity collapsed.

 

She asked the last question, which arose like a koan: If everything is One, where does the ego, this concept of a separate human being, exist?

 

In the deafening silence after this question, she realized that all of her questions had not been leading to an answer, so much as her inquisitiveness had always been building up to this final question, this question that did not raise ever-more questions, but instead quieted them.

 

All of a sudden, she knew that anything that was understood through the mental lens was unreal.  And she realized that everything had been viewed through a mental lens.  All at once she realized that her entire world-view was based on thought, and that all projections were based on thought, and therefore all objects that appeared to be real were not intrinsically real.  Their reality was founded on thought only.

 

It was as if her eyes were suddenly washed clean, and for the first time she could see from a perspective that was outside the phenomenal world, a world which was created by the mind.  She reeled with excitement.  She felt like her head had opened and was filled with light.  She felt released from being just an I-person, having dimensions and thickness, mortality and struggles.

 

She realized that thinking – the entire mind – hides Reality, the One.  And that Reality was simply Existence unmediated by thought.  For the first time she knew that there was only One knower, and it wasn’t anyone in particular, certainly not her!

 

All the “me”s had dissolved into one I, the original One, and she realized that all that could be known on contact with a mental lens was a distorted knowing.  To become disassembled and become only I, was to see clearly, to see the world as it is, without distortions.  Looking around now, she no longer saw a single “me” in the “I”s!

 

And what was revealed by this new gaze was the original awareness that always was.  She knew that any thought that was held close was like a veil obstructing truly knowing oneself, as this original awareness.  She had come to know that the delusion was ended: no more time, no more space, no more identification with thought, no more identification with body.