What holds you together?  What prevents you from dispersing?  What is the sine qua non, the “without which not,” of your selfhood?  Perhaps the true goal of a higher meditation is indeed the dispersal and surrender of such constituents of being, so as to arrive at a space of emptiness in which the self has no shadow.  But I think it is also a fruitful process of meditation and a valuable enough outcome if it simply helps me to find and refine the answers to these questions, to identify that to which I cling as I cling to the very idea that I am, and that I am something?

The answers may surprise you.  There may be fewer answers, a few harder answers, than you suspected.  And only if you know the answers, if you have really felt deeply once more the awareness of what makes you you and not another, can you then know if you are truly willing and eager to see them cast off in the wind, leaving you boneless and homeless and more truly open than you ever imagined possible.

And if such freedom never comes, you will at least know better what that is, without which you would not be.

1 October, 2024.