We are all alike in that we all want a happy, satisfying life. We start businesses, create art, hike in the woods, have babies, and engage in an endless number of activities, all in the pursuit of a fulfilling experience. Another way of putting this quest for satisfaction is as the losing of something—the end of problems. The end of anxiety, worry, fear, and other bad-feeling states of mind.

At some point, we realize that this peace that we’re after has little to do with our physical situation. Our level of peace and lack of anxiety in this present moment is primarily an inner, mental experience. If you’re cold or hungry, then of course there’s a physical knot to unravel, but once you have food, shelter, and clothing taken care of, we know that an increased quantity of those things doesn’t have the power to give us less anxiety and more satisfaction in our mind.

The Buddha recognized this. He was born as a wealthy prince, so he “had it all,” but he understood that having it all wouldn’t stop his inner problems. What he discovered was that painful thoughts and emotions can be completely and permanently removed from the mind. A pretty stunning claim, since most of us accept that states of mind like anger, anxiety, and jealousy are normal and the best that you can do is manage them. But the Buddha claims that he did it, and that we can too.

He asserted that your true nature is free of these problems, and to reach that trouble-free state he prescribed cultivating love and compassion along with perceiving reality clearly, and these two things fit together in the most beautiful way. Most people don’t have a problem with giving love and compassion a go, but perceiving reality clearly sounds suspiciously like a belief system.

Compassion in Western contexts is often mixed in with the idea of sadness—that I am sad that others are suffering—but sadness is a negative, unhappy state of mind, not at all what we need to experience or develop. There is definitely an awareness of suffering in compassion, but the main thrust of this virtuous state of mind is a bright, active, positive aspiration that all beings, including me, be removed from their suffering, and thinking how wonderful it would be if I could do this for myself and others. This builds up powerful, positive energy and helps to relax and pacify our mind, which then assists us in opening up to wisdom—seeing reality clearly.

The peace and well-being that we experience from a compassionate and generous spirit line up with how things actually exist, so goodness prepares us for wisdom. Nurturing compassion puts us more in touch with the part of us that sees reality clearly, which in turn makes a very pure form of compassion a natural outgrowth of our being. You can witness this in those who have reached an advanced state of spiritual development—their very presence radiates love. I’ve been lucky enough to spend a little time around a few of these great beings, people whose only concern is others’ happiness, and in every case, an effortless, compassionate spirit is woven into the fabric of their being.

Compassion practices are framed within the idea of a relative reality in which we are separate individuals. On a conventional level, it is true that we are separate—my body/mind complex has a defining set of characteristics and qualities that distinguish it from yours, and from this relative perspective, actions and their results, or karma, function. But as we get closer to a more direct experience of reality, this separation becomes more and more ethereal, and it is this emptying out of separation which allows a more spontaneous and authentic love and compassion to take root.

Like any state of mind that is engaged in repeatedly, compassion practices are cumulative. I’m sure you’ve witnessed this in your own life, how habits can become more and more powerful the more we engage in them. And the Buddha has a special method to fortify this positive state of mind, giving it exponential repercussions: compassion generated with the intention to benefit every living being throughout existence. Making others’ well-being a conscious focus of our practice creates a powerful cause for wisdom to dawn.

The Purple Goggles and the Me

The Buddha suggested that if you take the time to really examine how your mind is functioning, you’ll discover that the way we normally think reality is operating is not only backwards, but so profoundly backwards that we almost haven’t a prayer of figuring out what’s going on. Perceiving reality correctly isn’t a belief, but rather a global shift that takes place in your mind once you know what to look for. It also isn’t rocket science; it’s just realizing something you weren’t aware of before.

Then the Buddha delivers the punch line: this misperception of reality is what causes us to think and act in ways that are painful for us. This misperception happens in how we view ourselves and other phenomena, but mostly what gets us into trouble is how we view ourselves.

In a nutshell, we innately believe that we exist as an I or a Me, a permanent, unchanging, independent, separate thing—separate from the world, separate from others. But believe isn’t a strong enough word for how we view ourselves. It’s more like we are born with a special pair of purple goggles clamped over our eyes that only allow us to see things as purple. Part of the problem is that almost everyone else has the same pair of goggles, so we’re all in agreement about how purple the world is. Then here comes the Buddha, saying that nothing is purple. Nothing at all.

The problem with believing that we exist as a permanent, unchanging, independent, separate thing is that the dominant stance of this imagined separateness is fear. When we believe that we are separate from others and from the tapestry of life, automatically there is vulnerability. This separateness induces a chronic sense of lack and an “Us versus Them” dynamic. The Me is compelled to anxiously imagine a future where things may not work out, where there won’t be enough, where it may not get what it needs to thrive. Hand in hand with fear comes anger, blame, guilt, pride, victimhood, low self-esteem, and all the rest of those anxiety-producing emotions as the Me competes with life for what it feels it needs to be whole.

We can observe what we actually long for by noticing the kinds of activities we are drawn to where we lose ourselves. When we temporarily lose the separate Me in a gripping book or an engrossing movie, the natural peace at our core has a chance to rise to the surface. When someone forgets themselves in their work, their art, or in nature, they enter a timeless now where they feel at ease, a brief respite from the tyranny of the Me. This is also why we get drunk, high, or even contemplate suicide in an attempt to escape from the Me that can’t cut us a break and can’t let go of the pain of anger, inadequacy, blame, resentment, depression, and guilt.

Chaos results when we’re unaware of this dynamic, because in its attempt to correct these problems, the sense of being a separate Me causes us to be attached to things and outcomes that this Me wants, or angry at things and outcomes that this Me doesn’t want—both of which cause pain and reinforce the existence of the imagined Me.

Attachment, Anger, and Samsara

I used to think that the attachment the Buddha was talking about meant a morally wrong attitude—that we’re bad for wanting something that we shouldn’t want so much, such as a new car, more money, a bigger house, or an attractive mate. But there is nothing moralistic about attachment. Attachment is simply an attitude we hold when we are not perceiving reality clearly. It’s the strongly grasped notion that objects (things, people, and situations) have a magical quality about them, a fixed, inherent power that can grant us happiness, security, and peace, when in reality they have no such power. To achieve the peace we seek, attachment forces us to repeatedly return to these objects over and over again, thinking that this time will be different.

It’s tricky, because there is nothing wrong with enjoying a sumptuous meal, winning the lottery, thrilling to a beautiful piece of music, or basking in great sex. The problem is the innate belief that these will permanently remove our anxiety. No one taught us this belief; it’s the purple goggles—ignorance—which creates samsara, the cycles of uncontrolled experience driven by karma and delusion about how things exist.

When we obtain an object that the Me desires, there is a brief absence of attachment or grasping for that thing, and our anxiety abates for a bit, allowing the natural peace within us to rise to the surface and giving us temporary relief.

A subtler level of attachment is a belief in the magical quality of outcomes—that future situations we desire will deliver the peace and security we’re after. If only my mate would X. If only the government would Y. If only I had enough money for Z. Again, I’m using the word belief here, but it’s more profound than that; it’s an imprint on our mind that projects this quality without any intention to do so. It’s automatic.

But as we’ve all experienced, getting our way doesn’t have the ability to remove our pain and anxiety either. If we have a little wealth or power, for a while we can seem to control outcomes, but if we’ve pinned our hopes on outcomes, one day no amount of money or power will be able to deliver the result we’re after.

The flip side of attachment is anger. In the same way that attachment embellishes things with qualities they don’t possess, anger does this as well. The separate Me believes that if it can only get rid of the undesirable object or outcome, peace will somehow follow. And just like with attachment, when we do happen to have success in stopping an unwanted outcome, a brief reduction of anxiety does occur, so anger can appear to be effective at times.

A forceful or protective response can be appropriate when someone is in danger, but this is different from the afflictive anger that the Buddha advises us to abandon. The same could be said of appropriate fear, like the fear of getting too close to the edge of a cliff or a poisonous snake. Those kinds of healthy self-preservation you wouldn’t want to get rid of, as opposed to their more debilitating cousins—those deeply held insecurities, grudges, and anxieties that only act to keep the feelings of peace and security at bay.

It makes us feel better when we take actions to reduce our negative thoughts, and this can go a long way towards a more peaceful life, but because attachment and anger are only symptoms of the belief in a separate Me, seeing through that central myth allows us to cut off those problems at the root.

The Dream Analogy

To this end, the Buddha suggests that the solution is to clearly understand that we are in a situation that is very similar to a dream, and to become aware of the way things actually are. Understanding the way things are is what the Buddha calls true wisdom, and he asserts that this is the key to dissolving our pain.

When we fall asleep at night and dream, we imagine ourselves to exist in much the same way that the Me story plays out in our waking state. When we dream, we experience ourselves as an individual character in a dream world. As the dream character, we have a body, thoughts, feelings, sensations, and perceptions that appear “inside” our character, while “outside” our character there is a world made up of places, things, and people that appear to be separate from us.

In the dream story, we are a subject in a world full of objects. There is time and space, experiences, pleasure and pain, all sewn together into a very real and tangible yarn. But when we awaken, it becomes apparent that in a dream, everything is literally made of the dreaming mind. The story, people, and situations we encountered, which all seemed to have a wholly independent, inherent, and concrete existence, turned out to be made of nothing more than our dreaming mind.

The experience of the Me in our waking life is very similar. The waking-Me appears to be a separate character, a subject living out an elaborate tale within a concrete world of separate objects, time, and space. But the waking-Me story, like its dream-Me counterpart, is colored by a misperception of ourselves, others, and the world as having a separate, solid, permanent, and inherent existence. On a gut level, we sense this misperception,, and our Me character longs to wake up—never suspecting that waking up means realizing that the Me we thought we were doesn’t exist and never did.

The Three-Legged Stool and Dependent Arising

Let’s do an exercise. Imagine for a moment a three-legged stool: a flat round platform held up by three sticks. It’s clear that this object functions perfectly as a stool, giving us a place to sit, but where is the stool? Where does this thing called stool reside? Is stool in the flat round thing? In the sticks?

Can you sense this object’s stool-ness—its stool-essence, if you will—that appears to belong to this particular object? When you look at this object, a sort of stool-ness appears to spring out from the side of this object, announcing its stool-ness. Where is that stool-ness exactly?

If you go looking for the essence of any object or thing—in this case, a stool and its inherent, independent “stool-ness”—it can’t be found. It seems to be there when you casually look at the object, but when you stop and really try to identify where this essence is, it’s like trying to grab a handful of air.

The Buddha helps us along by defining all objects we perceive—both we ourselves and all other phenomena—as dependent arisings: the perceived, independent separateness of things which arises or exists in dependence on other things. A stool’s stool-ness arises in dependence on a variety of other factors; it doesn’t exist on its own.

On a gross level, this object’s stool-ness depends on causes and conditions: the carpenter who built it, the tree that supplied the wood, the tools that were used, and so on. Its stool-ness also depends on its parts: the round disk and three sticks. This particular configuration of these parts adds up to a stool. Take away any one of these, or pile them all in a heap, and it’s no longer a stool. But most subtly, this object’s stool-ness depends on the image/concept of stool in our mind, which embellishes this particular object with a sense of its meaning, significance, and realness.

And because it arises in dependence on other things, it is not independent. Stool-ness does not inherently exist out there, on its own, independent of anything else, which is the way we innately view it. We put it together that objects are discrete, independent things, out there, separate from us. But when you stop and try to find this independent thing that you’re so certain is so solidly there, it can’t be found.

The idea of dependence suggests that we and other phenomena do exist, but only in dependence on many other things. And because things depend, they are not independent and separate; dependence and independence are mutually exclusive. This approach strikes a balance between existence and non-existence.

The Buddha taught that when we look at a stool, our visual consciousness, which is non-conceptual, perceives the stool directly, but on top of that, a conceptual mental image made of memory is mixed in with that, and we grasp at this mixture as the real stool. We innately feel that an object and its independent thing-ness are mixed in with each other, that they are one. Our image/concept of stool appears to belong to the object, to come from the object itself, to actually emanate out from the side of the object, independent of the mind perceiving it. In this mistaken perception, we believe that we have no role in perceiving objects, thinking that they exist out there without our participation. But in reality, the image/concept of all objects and their object-ness is coming from the opposite direction—our mind. The only way we can speak of “separate things” at all is through the image/concepts which our mind imputes on dependent appearances.

A stool has a lack of being stool from its own side; it possesses an absence or emptiness of stool-ness. It’s totally empty of what we thought was there, and we ourselves and all phenomena are like this. When examined carefully, we find that there are no inherently separate things; everything exists in this way, as part of a vast, infinitely complex interdependence.

The False Me

Just like this stool, we innately view all objects, and especially ourselves, as fixed, separate, discrete things, each possessing its own individual thing-ness which we believe belongs to the thing itself, when it is actually our mind which applies this separateness to objects. This is not a theory or belief system—this is an experiential phenomenon that you can observe and confirm for yourself.

It’s not that we don’t exist. There is obviously a person reading this—a small-m, in-name-only me that conventionally exists, who answers when their name is called, pays the bills, cooks dinner, thinks thoughts—but there is not a Me that stands as a permanent, separate, independent, concrete Thing, above and apart from the body/mind complex, which is how we normally view it.

The Buddha maintained that at our core, we are free, pure, and have infinite good qualities. But there is an extra layer of confusion, a Me-hallucination that our thinking mind applies on top of that purity, and difficulties arise when we identify with that confused outlook. When we so utterly identify with this Me-identity, we unknowingly back ourselves into a corner of our own making, causing us enormous anxiety. That feeling which sometimes arises of never being enough, of being a fraud, put upon, taken advantage of, or always looking for that final answer to our problems is the factory setting of the Me.

The sense of Me believes, in its separateness, that what it lacks is to be found in another person, or a better job, or any number of objects, states, or achievements—even so-called spiritual achievements. It demands that peace and happiness come from these objects, and when they don’t, there is anger towards that object. This experience is the Me hopelessly trying to fill the isolation and separateness it always feels.

If I believe I am separate and therefore limited, then I am afraid, because there is the possibility that I won’t get what I need to be fulfilled, that others will get more than me, or that any happiness I do have will end. Even though at the moment I may have more than enough of the good things in life, the Me is secretly frightened that this will all come to a screeching halt.

If I believe I am separate, then comparing myself to others becomes pretty important. Otherwise, how can I know how I’m doing? If I’m not rich, smart, good-looking, accomplished, or spiritually advanced enough, then I’m doomed to the exhausting and Sisyphean task of shoring up this imagined inadequacy. The Me is convinced that more money, more stuff, more achievements, friends, or power will fix the problem, and we can distract ourselves for a lifetime trying to fill this void. Plugging this hole works for a while. Then gradually, that itch returns, and we look for something else that we believe will satisfy.

Another interesting aspect of the Me is that it exists in time; it actually constructs time. The present moment is never a possibility for the Me, which has its sights set on an imagined future where it is banking that things will be better than they are right now. The false Me believes itself into existence by repeatedly picturing itself anywhere but now, beating itself up about the past and fearing the future. The exquisite beauty of the present moment is uninteresting to the Me.

The Me identifies strongly with the body, so that aging, rather than simply being part of the natural ebb and flow of life, becomes an enemy that must be stopped. Wrinkles or a little belly flab are a cause of panic for the Me.

The Me wants us to believe that it has our best interests at heart, so when things go south, it must be external circumstances or other people who are to blame. This makes the Me obsessed with controlling events and managing others if we are to be happy. Blame and criticism are the main tools that the separate Me uses in its attempt to control the world.

Not only does the Me want to control others and the future, but it actually believes that it is able to do so. Our actions do create causes that do produce effects, but as much as it wants to and believes it can, the Me has no ability whatsoever to predict or control what those effects are. When it imagines itself to possess an omniscience that is able to predict outcomes, it doubles down on this fantasy by anxiously worrying about not having those outcomes come to pass.

The Me believes it can own things: my wife, my money, my house, my children, my health, my land. These are all things that the Me believes it owns, and therefore can lose. The pain of fearing that we may lose these possessions causes still more anxiety, compelling us to engage in an enormous amount of work to prevent this from happening.

Perhaps the most confounding trick the Me plays on us is that it believes it can obtain happiness, Heaven, or Enlightenment. The Me will even co-opt spiritual practice itself, thinking that if it just becomes “spiritual” enough, this will finally make it happy. It wants the peace and happiness of liberation—but as the Me.

The instinct to seek freedom is spot-on, but the Me will never find the solution to its predicament. Because it feels severed from the world, the Me is constantly trying to bridge that gap of separation, to become one again with everything, to be in love with the world, and finally achieve lasting peace—the goal of all spiritual practice. But liberation is a goal that the Me will never reach, because to achieve it means that the Me must cease to be, something that it must avoid at all costs. So the imagined Me is in a truly impossible situation. It is on a desperate, lifelong search for the one thing it cannot have: its own absence.

What the Me Is Not

To sum up, the imagined Me can never be happy, and this was the key finding that the Buddha pointed out. He recognized that the Me we picture ourselves to be is tightly bound to anxiety and intrinsically laced with painful emotions. It is hopelessly confused about what feels good, causality, time, and reality itself. It can’t be overstated how closely anger, fear, guilt, blame, jealousy, and all painful states of mind are linked to this false sense of self. The innate belief that we are this inherently existing Me is nothing but pain.

To be clear, the Buddha wasn’t talking about ordinary pain, like headaches and broken bones. If you have a body, those kinds of pains are unavoidable. He’s talking about the very foundation of misery—the unawareness that clings to the Me as real. This is the real suffering, and we don’t even know we have it. Again, this is the purple goggles—ignorance of the way things are. This unawareness is the first link in a chain of deluded thoughts and actions that will never lead us to the peace and security we want so badly. This is the suffering he’s trying to lead us out of.

The small-m me or personality who has preferences and talents—the one who laughs at jokes or enjoys cooking, who is drawn to create, have families, make art, or start businesses—is not the problem. The problem is the unawareness that forces us to identify with an imagined Me who can be hurt, offended, or inadequate, and who desperately wants to control the show.

The good news is that the Me is not who we really are. But how do we get rid of this Me who is causing such a vast array of problems? Like unicorns, you can’t get rid of something that doesn’t exist, but what you can do is realize that it doesn’t exist. Realizing that it doesn’t exist is really our only option if we want to be at peace, because it’s impossible for the separate Me to view itself and the world any differently than it does.

Looking for the Me

So to finally get rid of the root cause of all our problems, the Buddha suggested that we look—really look—for this Me, and find out for ourselves if that is who we are. This begins a gradual journey of shedding the illusion of separateness. Every practice that the Buddha prescribed—this investigation of the self, along with the various techniques for cultivating love and compassion—loosens the grip of that illusion. When you begin to ask the question, “Who am I?” and really look in earnest for this Me, you won’t be able to find it, and the consequences of this discovery are something that you would never expect.

If someone asks, “Who are you?” the usual reaction is, “Well, I’m me, of course!” We go through life carrying around an idea of who we are and rarely question what that Me really is. But if we dig a little deeper, what comes up?

Another level down is, “I’m 70 years old, married, have a daughter, a dog, a cat, and I like hiking and cooking.” Most people will be satisfied with this level of answer, as would the Buddha. There is no doubt someone here—a body and mind that functions perfectly as a person in the world should function. No problem. All well and good so far. Really no reason to go further. But what if we did? Where does that take us?

We look in the mirror and we see the body, and we think, “Hey, that’s me.” But what is the body as it relates to who or what the Me actually is? The Me that we usually feel ourselves to be is more of a solid, permanent, and independent thing existing somewhere inside the body, not at all like the rapidly morphing, changing, and aging machine that the body is.

Just stop for a minute and see if you can detect the exact location of that solid Me inside the body. Examine your body parts one by one and see if you can locate your Me in them somewhere. Is it in the head? The chest? If there were no body, we’d have no Me. Yet the Me doesn’t appear to actually be the body or have anything to do with the functioning of the body.

Is Me the mind? What we usually think of as Me is not this clear, knowing, discerning phenomenon of awareness. Mind is a part of what we consider the Me to be, and what we think of as Me depends on the mind—just like it depends on the other parts of the body/mind complex, our physical form, thoughts, feelings, and sensations. But what I perceive to be Me is not identical to the mind.

So, if you examine the two main parts of what we consider to be who we are—our physical form and our mind—neither of them match up with what we consider to be Me. In looking for the Me that we assume is so solidly, permanently, and independently here from its own side, it turns out that we can’t locate it, except as a mental image/concept imputed upon the innumerable parts, causes, and conditions of the body/mind complex. The Me that appears to be real from its own side is empty; it doesn’t exist. If it did, we should be able to find it, and it’s completely unfindable as the independently existing thing we believe it is.

When you systematically look for the Me in this way and you can’t find it, the dream begins to be seen through, and the belief in the Me is deprived of the sustenance it needs to survive. After repeatedly looking for and not finding this independent Me in meditation, the misconception that it exists begins to clear away.

Clouds, Body, and Atoms

We not only apply a Me to ourselves—we apply Me-ness to all phenomena. We give the stool its stool-ness; every thing its thing-ness. When we look up at the sky and see a cloud, we can’t help but see a Thing, which in that moment appears to be permanent, partless, and independent. But in the case of a cloud, it is easier to see how it is none of these things—it is constantly in a state of change; there is zero permanence from moment to moment. Each seemingly solid cloud mass is made up of a constantly swirling collection of fine water droplets suspended in the air, and this Thing depends upon these droplets, their momentary cohesion with one another, the composition, temperature, and movement of the surrounding atmosphere, light, our visual sense organ—an unlimited number of causes and conditions and mental conceptions that come together from moment to moment but appear solidly to our mind as Cloud.

Everything is like this. Clouds, people, chairs, dogs, roads, governments, planets—everything is a swirling, constantly changing mist of fine particles of energy, each one temporarily gathering together in a cloud of causes and conditions that appear to our minds as solid, distinct entities, when no such separate things actually exist. The only way they exist is as mental imputations that we wrap around these amorphous, interdependent forms, creating momentary snapshots in time which we then unconsciously label as reality.

The way we conceive the self-existent Me is as permanent/changeless, unitary/partless, and independent/not depending on the body-mind. This type of person cannot exist. Likewise, when we think of the body, it is as a permanent Thing which is changeless, a singular unit having no parts, and as existing independently, separate and apart from everything else. This type of body cannot exist. The body, like the Me, is also a dependent arising: a seemingly separate and permanent thing that arises in dependence on a plethora of other things, which in turn are each dependent on other things, ad infinitum.

Just spend a minute looking for this thing we casually call “body.” Where exactly is “body”? Is body in the arms, in the legs, in the torso, in the head? Is body in the skin, hair, or fingernails? Is it in the chemical components of the air and food that provide energy? Is body in the complex configurations of the molecules of the flesh and bones, or in the atoms that make up those molecules? Is body the DNA and other atomic footprints in our cells? You could claim that the body is all these things together, but this is not how we view it. When we say “my body,” it is always as a singular, separate, uncompounded thing that seems to exist on its own, ignoring the zillions of parts and processes that it interdependently relies upon.

You may think, “Okay, I get it that the body is a concept, but surely atoms exist!” Not so fast. Will you ever find a final, smallest, partless particle that exists in the way that we think: independently and inherently existing from its own side, separate from its causes, its parts, or our mind? This goes for all phenomena, like other people, rocks, planets, stars, and stools. You can take any object at all and go through the above steps, trying to find its “Me,” its independent, From-Its-Own-Side-Essence, and you won’t be able to find it. If you really look, you’ll come up empty-handed.

As you begin to peek under the hood of what you believe is real, you’ll discover that the world we thought was “out there” always shows up “in here,” within the mind’s field of appearance. And you’ll be hard-pressed to establish any inherently separate, objective reality apart from the way it appears to you.

In the end, everything we experience appears as mental events arising within the mind. Try and see if you can detect a dividing line between an object which you see, the function of seeing, and the mind where this seeing lands. We feel that these are three different phenomena, but in actual experience, can we honestly separate them?

Realizing Emptiness

To develop an intellectual realization of this emptiness of inherent existence, first bring to mind your sense of this Me—a picture or generic image of who we feel ourselves to be. It may seem like it hovers in the vicinity of our head or chest, as a strong sense of I. This sense or generic image of Me is normally hidden from us, but one way to bring this self-image into focus is to recall a time or imagine a situation when you were very angry, afraid, proud, or wrongly accused of something.

When you’re super angry, or feel you’re wrongly accused, the false self suddenly rears up, inflated with pride and indignation. When this happens, you can clearly observe how solid and real the Me appears. Catching this self-image red-handed is called “finding the object to be negated,” which means precisely pinpointing the thing that we lazily assume exists, because as long as we’re fuzzy about what it is, we can’t then see that it doesn’t exist.

Once you feel that you’ve identified it, then you’re able to review all the ways in which it depends on its causes and conditions, its parts, and on a mind which imputes onto it an inherent essence like we did above. It relies—or depends—on these things for its existence, and therefore it is empty of existing in the way we normally think it does: as independent, solid, and permanent, standing above and apart from everything else.

Not being able to find the independently existing Me, we perceive its absence—its emptiness. It is there in that it exists conventionally and dependently, but it’s not there in the way we thought it was. This realization first develops in the mind as an intellectual, conceptual understanding of what’s actually going on—how we trick ourselves into believing in something that isn’t there. Then with repeated application of simple logic in meditation, taking yourself step by step through the search for the Me and not finding it, it begins to dawn on you that not only is it not there—it was never there to begin with.

Then further down the road, as this intellectual understanding develops, it becomes internalized. Repeated application of this simple, clear, and logical looking at reality eventually triggers a non-conceptual experience of an absence of the inherent existence of the Me. This glimpse, however brief, is powerful enough to shake the foundation of everything you thought to be real in how you perceived the world. That may sound a bit frightening, but the opposite is true—it is incredibly freeing. The elaborate conceptual structures that we’ve built around ourselves to seemingly protect the separate Me from harm are seen to be totally unnecessary, as well as obstacles to love. Upon arising from this realization, the world then appears somewhat as a waking dream or mirage in which the distinction between me and other begins to melt.

Perceiving the absence of the false Me for the first time is not a quick fix to life’s problems, but a gradual process of allowing that understanding to seep into all aspects of life. The strongly grasped tendency to believe you’re a separate Me doesn’t disappear overnight, but is slowly softened and loosened by this new point of view. Clarity quietly grows in the background, taking the edge off harmful old habits and misconceptions as you get more accustomed to a non-dual view of yourself and the world.

The initial consequences of the deconstruction of the Me can be confusing and disconcerting, because it upsets the order of things that we’re used to. Projects and pursuits that used to be a consuming passion can suddenly become uninteresting. After spending a lifetime building up a self-image—complete with a career, a professional/family/religious identity, physical appearance, education, societal status, and more—one can feel like the rug has been pulled out from under you when the Me stops calling the shots.

But then, as worry and other painful emotions begin to take a long overdue holiday, the unwanted addictions and habits that used to hound you begin to lose their attraction as it becomes apparent that they have nothing to offer you. Then gradually, because nothing much changes in your life except for the new awareness of the absence of something that was never there to begin with, you begin to notice—and then get used to—the unfamiliar relief that the monkey is no longer on your back. A lightness and sense of peace begin to seep in.

Upon not finding the I, the thought can arise, “If I’m not that, then what am I? And what is my purpose?” But once the false Me begins to evaporate, and you’re increasingly no longer the center of attention, such questions become less interesting. Because the motivation for much that we do is often mixed in with what the false Me felt it—or society—required, once that Me is no longer in charge, new priorities come into sharper focus, and your mind becomes more peaceful. Your unique talents and energies become useful in unexpected ways.

It’s a gift to be released from the bondage of the Me, and to see how unimportant the Me is compared with others. Thinking more of others releases you from the suffering of thinking mainly about your own welfare, which is an immense burden to carry. We don’t even realize we carry it, and how much lighter life can be without it.

When we think that peace is something exotic, way out there in the future, reserved for special holy people, we rob ourselves of what’s possible today. Peace is as ordinary as breathing, and available to all who are interested in looking for it.

Virtue and the End of Suffering

Seeing the emptiness of the self severely damages your negative emotions, because you deeply get it that the inherently existing Me simply doesn’t exist; there’s nothing there to protect, defend, and be put first. Painful emotions begin to gradually recede as we whittle away a lifetime of insatiable craving, anger, and fear. All along, it was never another person or situation that bound us to pain; it was always our clinging to the imagined Me which was the problem. By letting go of this misconception, life finally relaxes. It’s the ultimate Get Out of Jail Free card. However, this is just the beginning of the end of suffering, and as your new point of view settles in, it becomes apparent that there is no end to the levels of joy, wisdom, and love that it is possible to develop, just as the Buddha taught.

What the Buddha suggests we do is actually quite simple and boils down to two things: powerfully increase your virtuous states of mind, and powerfully decrease your negative states of mind. The key word here being powerfully. The first we do mainly by the compassion practices and the second we do mainly by the wisdom practices.

And the Buddha wasn’t just talking about doing this for yourself, but to do it for all living beings—and this turbo-charges it. Do it constantly, repeatedly, powerfully, with all your heart, all the time, as much as you can. Then the more you engage in this, the more your world begins to reflect your new state of mind, and soon there are no limits to the levels of love and wisdom that are possible. And from that state it gradually becomes possible to effortlessly help others reach that same state. Wouldn’t that be great? And by the way, they are waiting for your help, right now.

Once you grow powerful compassion and begin to dis-identify as the Me, then love and wisdom arise naturally, and life is complete. It doesn’t need anything; it’s enough, and you’re enough. As you begin to no longer need anything, then a funny sense arises that you are everything, and everyone—which could also be described as Love.