Looking with great curiosity and openness at your mind…you will find that there is no such entity as a “mind”. Look from all angles, at different times, and under different situations, always seeing if you have such a thing. What color is your mind, what does it feel like, what is its energy, how big is it and where does it live?

We believe that there is a single entity called the “body”. In reality, your body is a conglomeration of made-up entities with names like eyes, nose, fingers, tongue, teeth, stomach, intestines, blood, and cells. Because it moves around as a single unit from place to place, we believe that it is a single entity… we find it made up of smaller and smaller entities, and eventually just a mass of a huge number of cells, fluids, and strange disconnected particles of all types.

“Mind” is just a convenient term assigned to something that is really an aggregation of pieces. If you analyze carefully what the mind is, it is just a continually changing array of unrelated strings of thoughts. It is just thoughts. As Thich Nhat Hahn has observed, a piece of paper is not made from “paper”, but from many different strands of “non-paper”; mind is likewise only an apparent reality made from thoughts.

When the I disappears, limitless Awareness is there. When you realize that the I is a mere phantom, it loses its grip and falls away, but it is not replaced with oblivion or blank nothingness. This is the great fear that the I uses to sustain its apparent identity and maintain apparent control. What does appear wonderfully and instantly in its place is a pregnant presence, limitless and complete that has always been there, always…

This limitless, full presence is always there, as it is what you have always been. It is not going anywhere. It cannot leave you, as it is you.