Birth Of Self

Seeing through the earliest belief we were taught

I recently heard something I've come across many times before, but never fully grasped. It was the simple pointing that the fact that "I" was born is not something I experienced. It is something I was taught.

This time, it fully landed.

When the body is born, there is no self. There is just raw experience. Sensations. Sounds. Colors. Movement. There is no "me" yet. No ownership. No center. The mind is clean and free from concepts, without a story about what any of it means.

At some point, very early on, we are taught the ideas of "me" and "mine," "you" and "yours." We learn to place a sense of ownership on thoughts, sensations, and experiences. We learn to separate the world into "this is me" and "this is not me." And from there, the self is born.

It is strange to realize that what we call "me" is actually a story layered on top of life itself. A collection of concepts stitched together and believed in so deeply that it feels solid and real.

What is even more interesting to me is that this insight did not come right after the initial realization. It dawned almost two years later.

Realization itself is like a sudden seeing that the whole structure is empty. But it takes time for all the hidden assumptions and beliefs that were built inside that structure to be fully seen. They reveal themselves gradually, piece by piece, not because they are new, but because the mind and body are still unwinding from a lifetime of conditioning.

It is a humbling and beautiful process. A continued falling away of what was never true to begin with.