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Onions
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Who are we? I mean who / what are we really?
Consider
the colloquial view of who we really are, as
analogous
to what's at the core of an onion. And whatever's at the core of
the onion, is to be found below layers upon layers upon layers,
each layer
analogous
to one of the manifestations of who / what we are in
the world,
and of the components which
constitute
our lives.
We've become convinced (read: we've been persuaded) that if we peel
back the layers of our lives (as if they were onions) ie if we peel
back one layer and then we peel back another layer, and then we
keep on peeling back layer after layer after layer until we've
peeled back all the layers all the way down to the last layer, we
will have reached our core, and we've accepted that this core is
who we really are. We're certain that it's in fact the very
substance of our lives. We have it that this core is
us ie it's the thing we call
"I" / "me".
Go ahead. Try it. Experiment for yourself by peeling back the
layers of your life like an onion until you get to the last layer,
and then see if you can look below the last layer at your core,
then tell me what it is you're seeing.
If you look
closely
and tell the truth
unflinchingly
about what it is you're seeing, that is if you can set aside your
concepts and
beliefs
about what it is you think you should be seeing, for
just long enough to see what's really there, you'll
see there isn't a core. When we peel back the last layer of the
onion, what we see is there's nothing there, nothing
at all. It's empty! There's nothing but space. And
that's who we really are: empty space - in a word, who we really
are is nothing but
context.
Seeing who we really are below the last layer of the onion, as
nothing, as empty space, as
context,
we realize something else, something so obvious that it's easy to
miss its profundity altogether: we realize we, as nothing, have the
capacity to experience ie we realize the
nothing we are, is experiencing! When we look
closer
at the nothing /
context
we really are, we see it's an experiential
context
- which is to say we see it's the
context
in which everything we experience
shows up.
We see it's the
context
in which all of
this
shows up
(and yes, I do mean all of it) - in another word, we
see it's the
context
in which EVERYTHING
shows up.
And that's who / what we really are: nothing ... in
which everything
shows up.
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