You have been told a sentence about yourself so many times you no longer hear it as a sentence.
I am someone who. I am the kind of person who. I have always been. I could never.
The sentence runs underneath the day like a stream you do not notice you are walking next to.
You think the sentence describes you.
The sentence is making you.
Sit for a moment and listen for it.
Not the loud sentences. Not the ones you would post. The quiet ones. The background hum.
I am tired. I am behind. I am not the kind of person who handles this well. I am the responsible one. I am the one who notices everything. I am the one who has to hold it together.
Each sentence has a subject and a predicate.
The subject is always I.
The predicate is whatever the day handed you, dressed up in the costume of a permanent trait.
The trick is the costume.
If the day handed you tiredness, the sentence does not say there is tiredness. The sentence says I am tired, which sounds the same but is not.
There is tiredness describes a weather pattern.
I am tired installs a self who owns the weather.
The self is the predicate pretending to be the subject.
Nisargadatta sat in a small room in Bombay for forty years pointing at this.
He said: go back to the sense of I am before it got contaminated with I am this or I am that.
He meant: the bare sense of being, before the predicate arrived.
Try to find it.
Not the sentence. The thing before the sentence.
You will notice the sentence rushes in to fill the space.
I am trying to find the sense of being. I am noticing that this is hard. I am the kind of person who finds these exercises difficult.
The sentence is the entire factory floor of your inner life.
It does not stop running because you asked it to.
You cannot stop the sentence.
You can notice it is a sentence.
A sentence is made of words. Words are made of sounds. Sounds are made of breath.
The whole sentence about you is a faint vibration in the air of your mind, repeating.
Watch what happens when one of your sentences is contradicted.
Someone says something kind about you that does not fit the sentence. Someone says something harsh that fits too well.
In both cases the body braces.
The bracing is the sentence defending itself.
The sentence wants to remain the sentence.
This is how you know it is not you.
You do not have to defend yourself from being yourself.
The defending is happening because the sentence is not you and is afraid of being seen as not you.
What is left when the sentence is not believed.
Not nothing. Not a void.
The room you are in. The weight of you in the chair. The faint sound of whatever is making sound.
A field of experience that does not need a sentence to hold it together.
The sentence was the glue.
You thought it was the substance.
Buddhists call this anatta. Not-self.
Not the doctrine that you do not exist. The observation that what you have been calling yourself is a sentence the mind keeps producing.
The factory is real. The product is real. The product is not what the product claims to be.
You are not the sentence I am tired.
You are what is here when the sentence is heard and not believed.
This does not mean the tiredness goes away.
The tiredness was real before the sentence got hold of it.
What goes away is the sense that the tiredness is you, that it tells you something permanent about who you are, that it is a chapter in the long book of being a certain kind of person.
The tiredness becomes weather.
Weather passes.
A self who is tired does not pass. A self who is tired waits for tomorrow to feel different so it can install a new predicate.
You can stop installing.
Not by force. By noticing.
The sentence runs. You hear it. You do not believe it. The sentence runs anyway.
After a while the running stops being the soundtrack.
It becomes one more sound in a room full of sounds.
You stand up. You move through the day. The sentences keep arriving.
I am hungry. I am late. I am the one who forgot.
Each one passes through.
None of them sticks long enough to become you.
There was never a you for them to stick to.
There was only the sticking, and the sticking was the sentence.
Sources: Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That (1973). The Buddhist doctrine of anatta, traditional.