Choicepoint

Where is the actual thinker of the thought?

Photo by Darius Bashar on Unsplash

Of course there is no memory of the first time I heard–or there was an experience of hearing–a certain combination of sounds and understanding that those sounds were meant somehow to pull at awareness–at attention. They were a label, a name, “my name”. 

So, this experience, or awareness had a particular name, then! It was separate. There were “other people” and they had their own labels and names, “Momma”, “Daddy”, etc.

When did I begin to learn that? Because it seems to have happened behind a veil or a cloud–it seems to have been such a matter of course, taken for granted. A belief unchallenged for years and years. “I am Alyce.”

When was the first time that someone held a mirror or a photograph in front of this experience or awareness and said, “Who is that? Yes! That’s right. That’s you!”

But I have since been called by other names, “A.J., Aly” and by various nicknames and surnames. Right there is a first clue that what I am is not “Alyce”. And the images in the mirror and the photographs are ever-changing, so those images are also not what I am. 

Beliefs, assumptions and stories began to be added on to the original awareness: I was born in such-and-such a place. This is what happened when I was ten years old and all these other things happened when I was nineteen, twenty-seven, forty-two years old. Now I’m sixty-six years old and this is the life I have lived so far. All self-created as I placed invisible, ephemeral post-it notes on things in the mind as if they were real and true. But I believed them.

How can I be this shape-shifting thing? How can I be this fleeting story that seems to blink in and out and has no real evidence of a past at all when I really look?

What a blessing to simply take a breath without trying to “go” anywhere at all or “be” anything at all. How sweet to take a break from all the imagining and see what remains. How wonderful to stop defending anything and be vulnerable, surrendered, completely empty–and at least for a moment glimpse that I am that Peace.

At some point I realized that I have no idea where my thoughts even come from. They arise. They show up. They don’t really “know” a thing. They’re appearances as much as anything in this world is an appearance. 

I used to believe that the appearance of a thought meant something about “me”. I built a whole “personality” around that, as if the thoughts were “myself”, especially the ones I really grabbed onto and held precious. I believed them.

Now I’m learning that the arrival of every thought is a choicepoint. I can allow certain ones to bring misery or fear–or I can get curious about to whom the thought is arising. Where is the actual thinker of the thought? I can be humble, or I can fight for my right to a thought.

Fighting for my right to a thought is painful, irksome. Defending the personality and its ideas is hell. Something knows that what I am isn’t any of the drama or distraction going on in the mind. I am not the stories the mind tells or what the mind clings to. I am the Unbound Awareness that has always been here and has always been still, steady, unchanging. I am the naked sense of “I” before any of the labels and post-it notes got tacked on to it.