Wisdom from Nisargadatta: Three I’s, but No You.

We speak of three ‘I’s’. There is the absolute, unmanifested, impersonal ‘I’, pure Awareness, beyond all sensory perception, aware of itself only when manifestation arises. There is the super-personal, manifested ‘I’, the conscious presence which is the reflection of the Absolute appearing as ‘I am’. And there is the individual, personal ‘I’, appearing to be separate, the apparent doer and enjoyer and sufferer of actions, but which really is just an imaginary construct of the psychosomatic apparatus into which consciousness has manifested itself, and with which it has mistakenly identified itself.

This third ‘I’ is totally false; it has no existence except in the imagination, in ignorance. And the second ‘I’ , the manifested, in actuality is one with and indistinguishable from the first ‘I’, the unmanifested, in which it is but an appearance, a reflection. The first ‘I’ is the Reality, the one basis on which the manifested ‘I’ appears as a movement.

Consciousness arises in pure Being for no particular cause or reason other than that it is its nature to do so – like waves on the surface of the sea. Simultaneous with its appearance the world appears within it, and when it disappears the world also disappears. But, before all beginnings and after all endings, the ‘I’ (the first ‘I’… the real ‘I’) is there to witness all that happens.

All is ‘I’… in truth, there are no objects, there is only this pure subjectivity. The first ”I’, the absolute Awareness, prevails when the other two ‘I’s’ disappear… when the mind becomes absolutely motionless and all conceptualization ceases. Then only the Reality remains. When the mind fasts, Reality enters; when the mind feasts, Reality disappears.