Perhaps the simplest way to think of this is to imagine that you are peering through your eyes through the opening of a cave, and in that peering you see starlight, shooting stars, comets, or moving beings. It is as though you are observing reality, taking it all in, bearing witness to what it is that is unfolding. And behind your eyes there is Self-Awareness, that part of us that takes in the experience and is changed by what it is we see, by what it is we observe, by what we experience, and even more importantly, how it is that we interact.
The Disappearing Self is the experience of a ‘thinking self’ that slowly ebbs away. The thoughts in one’s mind become nothing more than fog that clouds our view, much like mist that floats across the opening of the cave. The disappearance of the fog is the disappearance of our thought forms, those things that we impose on or shape our interpretation of what it is we see, what it is we feel, and, what we experience. There is a way to become pure in our experience, dropping the form of thought, but it is not something that we can consciously do. We cannot set out by declaring: “I will no longer think,” or “ I will no longer interpret.” — yet more thoughts. Rather it is a process that comes over time, a desire to enter into the experience of reality, unvarnished, unshielded, and without any preconception about what may transpire.
This openness, this willingness, this unfettered-ness is in essence at the heart of the disappearance of our individual self. By embracing the Larger Self (our Higher Self) we become one who simply peers out from the center of the cave; we sense our body as the container that holds the awareness that looks out. The longer that we live, the more we unfold, the more we let go of concepts, of ideas, of agendas, of thought, and the more we are available to simply behold what ‘is’.