The Infinite Depth of Your Own Self

In order to discover the infinite depth of your own self, you must find a way to enter into a very deep state of meditation—such a deep state that your awareness of thought moves to the background and eventually disappears. When awareness of thought disappears, the awareness of the passing of time disappears along with it, and so does the awareness of the world and all the objects within it. If you keep penetrating into the infinite depths of your own self, eventually your awareness even of your own physical form will disappear. It is enlightening to discover that when thought, time, world, and even your own body disappears, you haven't gone anywhere! Even without the movement of memory, you will find that the most intimately felt essence of your own self—who you always are at the deepest level—remains intact. That self that remains when time and form disappear is eternal and unchanging. It has never been born and will never die. That self is the deepest ground of your own being, in each and every moment, whether you are aware of it or not. Everything that is born, the entire evolving cosmos, arose from that empty ground, and everything that dies will return to it. In that no-place, that zero point, where there is no birth and no death, nothing ever happened and the cosmos never existed. When we discover this dimension of our own self, we find only nothing at all: desirelessness, the fullness of Being, and indescribable peace, without end.

—Andrew Cohen