"What is?" - - "Who am I?"

Ever wondered if you're just dreaming? What if all this is just a product of our imagination?

During the night, when we are dreaming, we believe the dream to be real. If in the dream we are thirsty, then water is needed to quench the thirst. Or if something very sad happens, we may cry. If we are pursued by a dangerous creature, then we flee, out of fear of harm and death.

We have identified ourselves with the character of the dream. Everything that happens to us, when in the dream state, seems as real as what happens when in the waking state.

When we wake up after a dream, we may laugh at what we thought was our grief. Things aren't as we had imagined them to be. But are things ever as we imagine them to be? How could what is ever fit in some limited thoughts?

As we wake up, the world (as we perceive it) wakes up with our thoughts (of it). As we dream, the dream "dreams up" with our thoughts too. In both cases, what we identify ourselves with is thought, a concept, a product of the mind superimposed on what is. Thus we confine ourselves to the very limits of the product, and are respectively limited in the experience of what is.

We can't deny ourselves, but what we think ourselves and things to be, yes. The eye may not be able to look at itself, but it knows itself not to be what it is seeing. Thoughts and feelings, all this unfolds in us and may be observed. We are prior to the mind because we are perceiving it.

If we let go and surrender all that we think to be, then all that remains is what is, and the mind is at peace, seemingly non-existent. If we seek to know the source of what we think to be, of the thinker (what we identify to be ourselves), we arrive at the same end.

We may ask ourselves, "Who am I?" Right now - and as a thought arises, we may ask, "to whom does it arise?" and maintain our attention. If it sways away, bring it back to the source.

By hanging on to this feeling of "I", to this thought of being the thinker, the body, we begin seeing it as the made-up illusion that it is. We begin seeing things as they are, being as we are (but have in fact always been), self-evident.

Seeking thus comes to an end, for the seeker has been found to be non-existent. His product, the conceptualization of what is to be sought after, is no more. All that remains is what is, free from bondage, without center or circumference. This alone does not come and go, as do thoughts and body.