Michael Markham - indefinable presence

 

We can never truly know who or what we are because there is no solid, independent "self" to be known. There is only a shifting reflection, a hologram composed of memory, thought, and perception. 
The identity taken for granted, the "me" that feels so real, is nothing more than a collection of past experiences, conditioned responses, and inherited narratives stitched together by the objectifying brain to create the illusion of continuity. 
When examined closely, there is nothing tangible at the center, no fixed essence, no autonomous entity directing the show, only a fluid, self-referential process that arises moment by moment.
Like a hologram, this sense of self appears three-dimensional, vivid, and convincing, yet it has no actual substance. It is generated by the brain’s objectification, which separates and categorizes experience into subjects and objects, past and future, self and other. 
But outside of this mental framework, there is no "self" that exists apart from the thoughts that describe it. We are echoes of memory, patterns of recognition, fleeting reflections shimmering across the surface of sentience.
Because of this, the very act of seeking to know ourselves is paradoxical. The seeker is nothing more than the seeking itself, an illusion chasing its own tale. 
Any answer the mind arrives at will only reinforce the illusion, solidifying the belief that there is someone there to be understood. But when this illusion is seen through, what remains is not a void, not a lack, but an openness, an infinite, indefinable presence that has never needed a name, a story, or an identity to simply be.

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