An Attempt To Describe How "I" Just Disappeared and Returned

I thought I was cob of corn. Turns out I am an onion.

About an hour ago, “I” suddenly disappeared.

I was sitting in the late morning sun with my coffee in my garden, and suddenly “I” was gone.

My body, of course, was sitting in the chair.

But I was gone, completely gone; there was nothing left, just emptiness where “I” used to be,

The actual world - my body on the chair, the pool, the grass, the sky, the sun, the sounds around me, the birds, the wind, the heat on my skin - all of it was still there and happily functioning. To my astounding surprise, it didn’t need the “mental me” or “the idea of me being a separated entity” at all. Everything was perfect as it was.

Mooji comes to mind. He had the same experience, and now I finally know what happened to him.

Many years ago, I read about how Mooji described his awakening.

I tried to find his story, but the Internet is useless for things like that these days.

All I get is cultural Christian ideologic brainwashing and propaganda. A mixture of worrying articles about dangerous cults and subtle rubbishing of his teachings mixed with cheap ad hominin attacks on the man himself.

Anyway, I can paraphrase it from memory.

He went to India to end up on Papaji's feet, a well-known and highly regarded non-dual guru. In the years prior, Tony Moo-Young, a Jamaican immigrant to the UK, had a number of awakening experiences that made him feel spiritually full of himself, as they tend to do. But they are all part of and necessary for what is to come.

In one of the Satsangs with Papaji, he unfolded a long letter regarding his spiritual experiences and opinions and read it out loud for all to hear. (I think there is an actual video floating around about it). Very proud of his deep insights, he put down the letter expecting praise from the master.

If I remember right, Papaji burst out with very contagious laughter, and in no time, the whole hall was laughing with him. Tony Moo-Young was deeply humiliated and got very, very angry about it.

In a great rage, he rushed out of the hall, went to his room, threw all his belongings into a duffle bag, and stepped out onto the parking lot. He was done with spirituality, he thought. He was about to leave India and never return.

And then it happened. On the parking lot. Suddenly.

He was gone.

He simply disappeared.

That’s the words he used, and I read and pondered over them many times, unsuccessfully trying to imagine what they meant.

How can “someone” be suddenly gone, and how does that feel?

Now I know. It just happened to me. In my garden, being nobody, going nowhere, drinking my coffee in the sun with not a worry on the horizon.

Now I also know why it can’t be imagined.

Because the experience itself is beyond imagination, it is outside of it. There is literally no one left who can imagine anything. My mind, Mr. Imaginer himself, had been paused. All that was left was pure awareness without any imagination whatsoever. All that was left was reality.

There was literally just empty real space where I previously seemed to exist.

Only because of the contrast of being absent did I realise that prior to it, I was (and am again) a hologram, an energetic, mental creation with no actual existence whatsoever.

Tony Moo-Young said his false sense of self never returned.

He profoundly thanked his master Papaji for liberating him (Masters work in mysterious ways, don’t they?), changed his name to Mooji, returned to the UK, and started to teach non-duality.

After a while, he must have been picked up by wealthy supporters (he was a penniless artist who sometimes lived on the streets) who financed an ashram in Portugal where Mooji still teaches today.

My “false self” returned slowly, subtly and gradually, and I was aware of the return and its nuances.

The most surprising element was how ordinary everything was. There was nothing so-called “spiritual” about it. Or what I previously considered “spiritual”. Not one tiny bit. It was simply an ordinary, real, empty physical space instead of “me”. I can’t say it any better.

Where I was, there suddenly was just “nothingness.” Prior, that now empty space was filled with a mental “me-ness,” containing everything I ever thought, remembered, and experienced. My whole life, history, and identity are just that—a mental cloud.

That doesn’t mean the events of my life didn’t happen. Of course, they did. My body was born to particular parents, I grew up, lived a life, and so on. As it happens to all bodies, it happens automatically. It doesn’t need a mental me, a separate consciousness in time and space.

It is all just a misunderstanding, a false identification. I am simply the universal consciousness, that’s all. But words will never do it justice and will always be confusing because it is paradoxical and hard to describe.

Words will never be able to describe it accurately. No words will ever be able to describe anything real. Full stop.

“So how do you know that this experience of disappearance of yourself wasn’t just a more subtle mental illusion?” some might ask. “How do you know this was real?”

Maybe it was. I don’t know. Perhaps the body, the chair, the sky and so forth are also mental illusions, and one day, they will disappear, too.

But the disappearance of “me” wasn’t an illusion. Only something, “some” “thing”, can be an illusion. Nothing, “No” “Thing” can’t be an illusion. For an illusion to be, something has to be imagined.

Apart from that, I just “know.” The only way to know anything about reality is to experience it.

For example, we cannot know how water feels until we experience it. Even if we read a whole library about water and watch thousands of photos and videos about it, we still won’t know anything real about it. The moment we touch it, we know it in reality.

It is also paradoxical.

While “I” (the real and only “I”, and simultaneously also the “everything and nothing in particular”) was still observing the “empty space” where the “mental ego-I” used to be, this real “I” also noticed the mind creeping in again.

In short, this non-ego Self, impersonal, universal pure awareness, can observe the functioning of a personal mind in space and time.

The mind can’t help itself - it needs to reflect on all experiences and construct human ego-meaning compulsively.

In this case, the “empty space” with absolute nothing in it but the pure physical reality of this ordinary world, was subtly penetrated by a range of profound insights and experiences.

Yes, even profound spiritual experiences and the deepest insights are reflections of reality in the mind and, therefore, woven by the fabric of the mind.

How else could I memorize and report on it?

This split-off mind reflects and conceptualizes all experiences like a mirror reflects visual appearances. Only a very still, clean mirror of the highest glass quality will accurately reflect visual appearances.

Similarly, only an unmoving, untainted mind will accurately reflect the reality of the “ego I” and magically reveal its actual substance. Its true substance is emptiness. The “ego-I” is a mirage.

I read about it many times, thought about it a lot, wrote about it, and speculated about it. Now, I know this fact with absolute certainty. And that is all that matters.

Once again, I try to describe it—this time in a loosely perceived timeline.

Without any preparation, intention or practice, literally out of the blue, I suddenly noticed an

1. Extremely ordinary emptiness where “I” was before. No amazing spiritual bells and whistles or profound, super-meaningful stuff at all; sorry to disappoint. Just empty space, nothing left of me. I can’t repeat it often enough. It was highly ordinary. There was nothing novel or surprising about it at all. This can only be because we must experience this constantly, but we don’t realise that we are experiencing it. The only difference was that I became acutely aware of being gone this time, out of mysterious reasons. In other words, only because we don’t notice something doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. Millions of things around us and within our bodies happen as we speak that we don’t notice consciously. Yet, they are still happening.

2. This sudden absence of myself was then filled with an acute sense of wonder. It was supremely astounding. How simple!!!! At one moment, it felt so amazed that it gave the impression that nothing else existed and time stood still.

3. Then, I realized I felt acutely liberated. I suddenly knew what the word “liberation” points to in reality. It is simply “freedom of” … what I thought to be me, myself, everything- my whole personal world. Everything was gone, disappeared, and this felt incredibly liberating, safe, worry-free, and secure. No fears or desires were present. It was like the “freedom of everything” that ever shackled me down and bound me. I also realized that all this bondage was entirely self-inflicted by a mind that is attached to an illusion rather than seeing reality as it is.

4. Then I noticed how my filtering mind slowly crept in again, trying to make sense of everything and express it in thoughts and words.

5. The awareness and realization that “my mind creeping in again” will be the death of the raw, unfiltered experience.

6. The remembering of Mooji’s story and the thought: “Why was his mind not creeping back in while mine seems to do so?”

7. The awareness of a brief resistance to that process of the mind creeping in. This was overruled by the insight that it couldn’t be helped and had to be allowed. The understanding that any attempt to cling to and prolong it is also part of the illusion. The mind can’t actively and deliberately eliminate itself. Any movement in the mind, any for or against an actual experience, is part of the matrix of the mind. All of the moving mind is the Matrix. Only the absolutely still mind can reflect reality accurately.

8. Embracing and allowing the mind to do its thing paradoxically allowed me to stay “on top of the mind” and observe its doings. In other words, not clinging to any experience keeps the process of bathing in experience alive.

9. The gradual return of the “ego-identity” saying: “What the fuck just happened?”

10. Realizing what happened in the constrained limitations of conceptual thinking.

11. Immense gratefulness, gratitude and peace

12. Writing a mental note to myself: “Don’t even think about to try to repeat this experience consciously.” Be done with it. Forget about it. Just chill and be grateful.

13. Waves of gratitude

14. A building desire and urge to write it down and (maybe?) share it.

15. Questioning myself about my motives to share it.

16. Remembering to trust the process - whatever happens happens and is bigger and beyond my petty desires. Increasingly, I have these weird hunches that things have already happened anyway, and time runs backwards. Which is relaxing because it makes me feel there is nothing I need or can do if it already happened.

17. Getting up and writing it down

While I was still gone, the onion metaphor about our inner self appeared. I have been searching for “my” inner true Self for decades and never found it.

Now I know why. You can’t find something that doesn’t exist. Its existence is solely based on an idea, a mental illusion.

This idea of a true inner core might originate from the psychotherapy models, but I don’t know for sure. It is the idea that we have layers of automatic conditioned behaviour fuelled by subconscious, hardwired core beliefs. In our “personal work,” we peel away layer after layer until we reach the golden core of our true self.

Before this experience, I thought of myself like a freshly picked cob of corn. The green leaves are layered and can be peeled off one by one until this beautiful, golden, yummy cob appears. My true self had to be unearthed by peeling off the “false layers”, or so I thought.

I just discovered that this is an entirely false metaphor. There is no true self within ourselves. It is the other way around. An illusionary idea of a self is embedded in the universal mind. There is no such thing as an individual, separated person.

Our inner mental structure is not like a corncob; it is exactly like an onion.

There is no core.

There are only mental layers.

The layers of our personality are core beliefs about ourselves and the world.

Maybe they can be peeled off individually, but that might take a long time, and maybe new layers grow secretly; who knows?

We don’t need to be overly concerned with the layers. We need to be concerned with finding the core. Only when we discover that there is no core do we realise who we really are.

All of what we think of as “us” is mental—the layers and the mentally constructed idea of a core.

When we start peeling an onion, the outset layer is often dry, dead, and ugly, deprived of the radiance of life. The layers become fresher, more fragrant, alive, and beautiful as we peel deeper. Therein lies the value of earnest psychological and spiritual self-enquiry. We become a much more beautiful onion, no doubt.

But we are still onions. An onion is an onion, no matter how beautiful. There is nothing wrong with being an onion, but there is no lasting peace in being a beautiful onion. Eventually, all onions turn brown, dry, and dusty.

The good news is that we only appear to be onions, and this is self-inflicted. We are so in love and in awe of our beautiful onion-ness that we never wonder if we are more than ordinary onions.

The onion is a metaphor for the nature of our Self, true Self.

The whole onion is ego, no matter how holy, intelligent, compassionate, loving, or enlightened our layers appear to be.

Only after all layers are peeled away do we realise there is nothing there. Or we dive right to the centre. Or we are just lucky, and grace is with us.

The important thing is not to give up.

Spiritual work is constantly shedding layers or digging in the gravel until we suddenly find gold.

There is no guarantee that we find gold anytime soon. But it is guaranteed that we will never find gold if we don’t dig.

Another way is to not take the layers seriously.

There are as many ways as there are people.

Find your own, and you will be blessed.