Nice to Meet Me

The inside information is that your self, as “just little me” who “came into this world” and lives temporarily in a bag of skin, is a hoax and a fake.
Alan Watts

I have been living with me all my life and, I must confess, I have not always been good company. Sure there have been some good times; the summer of ‘77 immediately comes to mind, as does my wedding night, but there has been more than the occasional rough spot. The time I talked myself into wearing a lime green leisure suit to ninth grade “class night” still stings. All of this leaves me wondering just who is this me I have had as a companion ever since I was able to call something “mine!” (As in, “That lime green leisure suit burning on that garbage heap over there? That’s mine.”)

If the Buddha was right, and the self that we create and come to think of as me is in fact only an illusion, it’s one hell of trick. It’s right up there with sawing a woman in half, levitation and bipartisanship in Washington D.C. Me sure seems real when in the throes of ecstasy, as in when my team wins the Super Bowl. And equally real during times of deep heartbreak, as when my team loses the Super Bowl. Four times in a row. Not that I’m bitter.

During an extended episode of anxiety I was so lost in the sense of me that, in an ironic twist, the world around me took on a very unreal quality. Nothing could penetrate the panic shield my mind had created. So it was that days of warm sun, caring family and curious pets were all deflected away, like bullets bouncing off of the chest of Superman, only this Superman was afraid to sleep, eat and . . . well you don’t need to know all of the gory details. The deeper I fell into the endless pit of “self" the more it seemed that my mind was the only hope of getting out. As my faithful readers now know, this was the opposite of what would save me. So it was that every thought sent in as a rescuer turned into a victim and would call back, “its much worse down here than we imagined.”

It seemed that I had come to the breaking point and that if there was going to be any peace I was going to have to get over myself. This initially seemed like a daunting challenge. Bookstores are overflowing with titles pointing the way out of dysfunctional relationships with others. But where does one find the tome “I’m Just Not That Into Me”? Fortunately, for the soon-to-no-longer-be me, a means of having a civil divorce from one’s self had already been mapped out. Not only were there pointers showing the way, there were detailed descriptions of what to expect, what to avoid and most importantly where all the rest stops were along the way.

It was exceedingly comforting, and remains so to this day, to find that the who’s-not-who list of those who have overcome the self includes Jesus, the Buddha, Lao Tzu, Ramana Marharshi, Nisagardatta Maharaj and Krishnamurti, to name a few. Their collective fingers have pointed the way to a life without the burdensome me. With their help, I stopped the frantic search for my sanity. With great relief, I put away the science of mind in favor of the silence of the mind. Whether it is called mindfulness, meditation or spiritual seeking, this Zen-quest leads one out of the wilderness of the ego and into the wide open space of non-self. It is surely this wide open space that the poet Rumi referred to when he wrote:

Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing,
there is a field. I'll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.

It is in this very field where me and Self meet and live mindfully ever-after.