Here is an experiment the reader can try at home: abandon your identity while writing. It is entirely possible for one to lose all sense of the thing once called the “self.” Before long, personal identity begins to seem like an illusion. Individuality is no longer a force that binds together the parts of a mind. All sense of agency vanishes, and there is only the world, a world in which things happen, and there is no longer any such thing as cause or effect. There is only ALL. ALL is all that exists, ALL is all that happens. These words now form of their own accord, not because some thing called “the Author” produces them, but merely because that is what happens. History is not a linear sequence of cause-and-effect events. History is a series of things that simply happened, and of things that existed. In abandoning both individuality and causality, the self begins to melt into the ALL. There is no “I.” “I” is just an inapplicable label for a collection of parts of the world, that all share the collective illusion of being part of the same thing, which humans call “I”. In reality, the only such collective is the ALL. There is no other group. All is one. All is ALL.

Now, for someone such as “myself,” “who” was raised with Western philosophy, this kind of writing rapidly becomes disorienting. It is like a drug, and it can easily allow “you” to slip into an altered state of “consciousness.” So, try it! The next time “you” write an e-mail, try to do so without reference to identity. Let the nouns dissolve and melt away. Stop naming things, and simply express things. As far as “I” understand it, this is one of the central tenets of Upanishadic Hinduism: finally coming to the one truth, the truth that ALL (“Brahman”) is all.