Imagine if one day you found out that you had been switched at birth and that the family and background you came from was not where you belonged. You found out that your rightful inheritance was beyond all your expectations of possibilities for you. Everything you thought was true about where you came from, your heritage, your ancestors, was all wrong and was never true – that nothing about you was true. Imagine the shock to your system to find that your name was not true and your family was not yours. Everything that you had created in your mind because of what you thought was your family story was not true. It would not be easy to accept. Part of you would insist, “that was my family that raised me and I belonged to them.” To find out such a thing was not true would be disorienting and would shake your worldview. The things you thought you knew would be questionable. And yet, that is the truth about you in another way.
When you say, I am, what are you referring to? For most of us, the automatic reaction to I am is that we are the person who has the story of where we came from, how we grew up, what we have been doing, and where we live. Yet none of that is who we are. Consider who you are referring to when you say I am. Ask yourself now, who am I? If you meet someone on the street and they ask you who you are, what do you say? Consider the list of things that you would tell somebody, where you’re from, where you live, what you do, what church you go to, what school you went to.
Can you imagine if somebody asks you who you are and you answer by saying nobody and meaning it? The story is what has to be released. The idea that who you are is somebody. You may be hoping that you will find enlightenment before you have to give that up – before you have to live and be nobody. That is what keeps you being somebody – the unwillingness, fear, and reluctance of being nobody. We are not somebody because it was forced on us by some external force. We are somebody because we would rather be somebody than nobody. We never give up the idea that we will make this somebody something that works, something that is successful, peaceful, or good at something. The truly strange, bizarre, and sad thing is that we are nobody no matter how much faith we invest in being somebody and it is never true or real. It is only happening in our mind – its not happening in some world where we are living a life of being somebody. It is a dream. We are already nobody and always have been and always will be. Nobody means no body. What we are has nothing to do with our body. Who we are exists in timelessness and infinity – eternity. These are not qualities of the body. There is no space and no location.
We will come to see that the world is a dream, a product of our imagination, created in the mind. The physical reality is an idea happening in consciousness. Consciousness is not happening in the world. The world is happening in consciousness. In consciousness there is no time or space. The world has been one momentary idea just like when we dream and can live for days, months, weeks or years, but we wake up after being asleep for only an hour.
The physical reality is a dream. But who is the dreamer? It is not your body. It is not consciousness. Who is dreaming the world? It is the mind that believes in separation. It is the mind that has created duality, and believes it is alone. It is the mind that has willfully separated itself believing in its own existence as a separate entity. It is the mind that has not awakened, that is asleep. The mind does not want to open its eyes and find that the world it has created is not real. In its separation it has come to believe that its world is preferable to reality. It is addicted to the reality cloaking distractions of its world.
We can see the lengths the mind will go to to insist the world is real, to insist that we are ‘somebody’. And yet it is apparent that we aren’t. To be ‘nobody’ carries is a negative connotation – ‘no body’ means death and ‘nobody’ means insignificant. The mind that creates the world cannot grasp a world where there is no such thing as significance, no such thing as death, no such thing as time and space.
We cannot leave the decision of what is real up to this mind. It only knows what is not real – not what is real. We ask what other mind is there – I only know this mind? The answer is that there is only One mind. Everything happens in that One mind. Everything is of and in that One mind. There is nothing outside of it. That’s impossible because there is no ‘outside’ of it. There is no time. We are already of that One mind. We always were and always will be. We cannot bring that One mind into our dream. The One mind knows nothing of time and space. We can bring our dream to the One mind where it is revealed for what it is – nothing. How do we bring the dream to the One mind? We do it when we see the dream for what it is. We see how we have been distracted and misled by our own ideas. When we become clear in our own minds that we are not somebody, that this world is not reality, and our thoughts, beliefs and ideas are not the truth – and we are willing to accept there is only One mind, only one truth – then we are free.