I have never tried to fashion a spiritual personality. I have never tried to be kind, helpful, selfless or benevolent for the sake of it, or because somebody has said that that is the right thing to do.
I was fortunate enough to take my aim at inner silence from a young age. I didn’t have much interest in changing my personality or appearance, or in gaining titles or a new status in the world. Somehow, from the age of fourteen, my longing for dissolution has been the core around which my entire life has been shaped.
This is usually the case with our chief desires. If our primary desire in life is to earn money, then everything else in our life will have to shape itself around this. This will affect our work, relationships and maybe even our health.
For me, the irresistible, magnetic pull into a state of total ease, of weightless naturalness has been the centre around which my life has spun. The trusty sidekicks of this pull have always been various the whims that arise in different moments: to go here or there, to undertake this activity, or to abandon a certain mode of existence all together.
These whims, which have always surrounded my overall inclination towards dissolution, have been my primary teachers. They have often seen me creating one kind of stable foundation in life, only to then instruct me to smash it to pieces and start afresh in a totally unknown, unsecure mode of living.
As the dissolution process continued, my sense of personal, self-protective willpower became weaker and weaker and weaker. This meant that I could no longer resist, through fear, the pull to nullify my present scenario, take a leap of faith, and start all over again.
How has this approach to life helped me? In practical terms, it hasn’t. But I was never that interested in practical terms. I was never that interested in feeling safe and secure in a world that I had already forsaken. As an adolescent, I looked around at the world, at people, and saw nothing that interesting. Whatever the world, composed of family, friends, teachers and the culture as whole, tried to sell me—I wasn’t buying.
For me, this path has been like a total abandonment of the ordinary state of individuality, with all of its desires, fears and ambitions. At each point of time, from perhaps the age of twenty onwards, my life scenario has not been a creation of choice but a creation of happenstance. My focus has always been toward nowhere, toward the zero-point axis of self-annihilation. My outer scenario in life has always simply been a casualty (or a grace, depending on how you would like to look at it) of this incomprehensible zero-focus.
Eventually, the personality and the personal presentation becomes just another side effect of the process of dissolution. There comes a point when there is no longer any disposable energy available for the task of making oneself look or seem a certain way. One just most likely ends up, on the surface, expressing themselves in the same way as they did before the dissolution process started.
Personally speaking, I stopped growing in height at the age of fourteen. I also feel that my personality stopped developing at the same time. I am still the same as I was then, only minus all of the qualities like insecurity, fear, expectation, limited identification, which come about as result of existential ignorance. Externally, I may be frozen like that, in an ordinary, conditioned state, and yet, internally, I am hollowed out, excavated, unconditioned.
When one is excavated of self-identity, the dice of life fall as they may. One’s physical body and external personality are just left as they are—natural, raw and unfabricated. One’s life scenario becomes like a dry leaf blown by some unfathomable wind, which sometimes feels supremely intelligent and sometimes feels supremely stupid.
In such a state, your life is no longer your own life. You have sacrificed your individuality for the sake of universality. You cannot ambitiously plan your future anymore or pretend to have any control over what your life is going to look like. Outwardly, you may be extremely active, but inwardly, you are nothing—empty and nullified in the great space without beginning or end.
Surely, this is a path for the mad. This is a path for those who have grown weary and exhausted of pretending to be separate from life.
May all such mad, weary travellers reach their destinations. Certainly, we will all reach our destination in the singular inevitable zerozone of existence as it is.