The Thought ‘I’
As the 13th-century Buddhist sage Nichiren exhorts: “If you want to escape the sufferings of birth and death you have endured through eternity, you must first understand the nature of your own life.”
As the content of thought arises from the background of beingness,
it creates the thought ‘I’.
The power of the thought ‘I’ is borrowed from the beingness from which it arose,
but it implies beingness is a separate being.
The thought ‘I’ becomes the basis of a narrative that limits beingness,
further qualifying and defining it.
But as this thought ‘I’, whose power and nature are borrowed from beingness, limits this beingness, something is instantly lost from the wholeness of beingness—
as though a drop of water were to believe it was the source of the ocean, instead of the ocean being the source of it.
Thus, the thought ‘I’ naturally seeks the wholeness of the beingness it has apparently lost by interpreting what it is through the limitation of its own thought.
The thought ‘I’ thinks of itself as a separate being that is seeking the source of its beingness—but all the time, it is beingness returning to itself.
For when the question arises: What is this ‘I’ I am thinking myself to be?
No separate being can be found, and there is only beingness.
As beingness is investigated, it is clearly seen to be without definition or boundary,
not separate, and intrinsically whole and complete as it is.
It is clearly understood and experienced that the thought ‘I’ was always pointing to this beingness, and not to a separate being.
As this is clearly seen and experienced, it becomes evident that all that appears is also appearing as forms of this beingness, inseparable from it.
This was always the true reality of the thought ‘I’.
Then, the meaning of the thought ‘I’ is divested of any belief in being a separate being.
So divested, it becomes impossible to sustain any psychological suffering that is based on the foundational belief in being a separate being—and quite naturally, this dissolves.
With love,
Freyja