Just for a moment, set aside your story. Set aside the ‘I am this’ and ‘I am that,’ ‘This happened to me’ and ‘This didn’t happen to me.’ Set aside all of your joys and sorrows, all of your accomplishments and failures, all of your fantastic dreams and nightmares. Set everything aside that you think, feel, or perceive to somehow be connected to your identity as an individual human being. Set aside your complete personal history.

Whatever is left is who you really are:

Emptiness. Silence.

Fullness. Beauty. Grace.

No matter how convincing it appears, you are not a collection of thoughts, feelings, and sensations. How can you be that which comes and goes? You don’t come into being with the thought ‘I am’ and you don’t disappear when it melts back into nothingness.

Your unhappiness is nothing more than clinging to a negative thought or feeling. Set aside the thought or feeling and be your true self.

You can actually experience the open, peaceful and aware presence that you are when you intentionally set aside the story. Yes, it is an act of the individual self, which, as we’ve discovered, doesn’t really exist except as a phantom or shadow, but it is a loving and intuitive act of yearning for the truth, and in this act the individual self dissolves in the vanishing point of pure awareness.