The ’I’ Entity - 09.10.09

“There is no ‘I’ entity. That’s the first fact.” But because of people’s belief in this illusion, they go at great lengths to improve their ‘I’ illusion like a Barbie doll. They buy it new clothes, new accessories. But as Shunyamurti, director of the Sat Yoga Institute, explains, “it’s always more, more, more because the ‘I’ entity isn’t enough. Why isn’t it enough? Because it doesn’t exist in the first place.” But if we could only let go of this illusion of a person, the “phantom of our internal opera,” then we would be able to be free of all of the anxieties that the ego entails. “So what we’re doing in meditation is we’re paying attention. And that’s the thing that the ‘I’ entity doesn’t really want to do. It doesn’t want to pay attention. It wants to be absorbed in its fantasies, but it doesn’t want to pay attention to its own construction of those fantasies. So meditation is paying attention to the way you pay attention. . . . There will be, ultimately, a realization that the ‘I’ is the Absolute space in which it all occurs; not any entity at all.” Recorded on Thursday, September 10, 2009.