Before desire and before knowing, how can I say I am? Consider. Dissolve in the beauty.
- The ego is not pre-existing – it crystallizes each time you identify with a ripple (a thought or a desire). With no ripple to grab, the I-sense has no raw material and cannot form.
- Before desire / before knowing – sit silently and note each arising thought or desire: at first aloud (‘a car passed, the mind called it beautiful, now a desire to possess has arisen’), which creates distance and steps you outside it; once efficient, note silently. Buddha’s formula: ‘a thought is arising… a thought has arisen… a thought is disappearing’ – pure noting, not becoming. Noting blocks identification, so the I cannot assemble.
- Between any two thoughts (or desires) there is an interval, and in that interval there is no I. Note a thought, watch it dissolve, and the gap shows – tiny at first. The gaps are your real being; thoughts are clouds crossing you. You are the white paper, the words are black dots: shift the gestalt – stop attending to the dots, attend to the white.
- Consider – contemplate that the desire came and went while you stayed unchanged: undisturbed, unscarred, present before it arrived and after it left. Seeing your own continuity across the ripple is the ‘considering.’
- Dissolve in the beauty – the interval is the deepest experience of beauty, and of truth and good simultaneously, not three separate things. Don’t watch the gap from outside; fall into it and be it. ‘In the gap you are.’
- (Q&A) The gap is the unknown itself – already full; nothing needs to descend to fill it. Waiting or hoping for ‘an unknown force to descend’ is itself a desire that re-occupies the gap, so you are never empty. Pitfall: the instant the silence is felt, the mind says ‘this is emptiness, now something will happen’ – a subtle secondary thought that destroys it. Don’t verbalize or label it; simply wait – not for anything – and stay silent.
- (Q&A) The ego hijacks meditation to collect EXPERIENCES (kundalini, bliss, new thrills); each goes stale and demands a newer one. Test: if you are confused whether your search is authentic, it is an ego-trip – an authentic search carries its own certainty and needs no certificate. The ego asks ‘what happens?’; true search asks ‘to WHOM does it happen?’ Meditation is not a new experience but the stopping of experience – only the experiencer, consciousness without content, remains. That experiencer is who lives in the gap.