If the present moment is “all that is real,” and the present moment vanishes, is anything really real?
If the ego isn’t the real, authentic self, is there a self beyond the ego? And if so, how do we come back to it?
When we look for that within us that is permanent, it is quite elusive:
Thoughts come and go
Emotions come and go
Activities, personalities, relationships come and go
Life itself comes and goes
I temporarily exist as a body. But even during this life, the atoms that made up my body when I was younger have been completely replaced by other atoms.
If we strip away everything that changes, is anything left that we can identify as our true self? A self beyond this ever-changing physical life? Or is the self only “a mass of constantly changing, causally connected physical and mental phenomena,” as suggested by Buddhist philosophy Rupert Gethin in The Foundations of Buddhism?
Whether or not the self exists independent of physical and mental events, we can discover our basic human nature through meditation. We can temporarily dissipate the obscuring clouds of the mind to more directly experience the safety, freedom, love and connection that lie at our core.
