As a Buddhist born and living in the West, I find releasing the concept of a self difficult.

It appears to me that this body exists, and that my thoughts are trapped within this body. So I have meditated upon these things and understand the Dharma in this way currently, in the hopes that it will allow me further progress on this path:

All that exists consists of the same basic material. This material is arranged in countless ways, and we define these arrangements as the basic materials out of which the existing universe is built. This makes the statement that a tree, a Martian rock, my friend and myself are of the same material. Our difference lies not in our basic material, but rather in our structure.

These formations or structures arise and consequently fall apart. My body, for example, is the form in which I currently entered this world. It was born, it will age, and it will die and decompose. But when I ask myself, “where do ‘I’ abide,” I find an answer that unsettles me: I don’t abide anywhere within my body. My body-mind is the mirror upon which the motionless, changeless faculty of Pure Perception perceives the reflection of its true nature. “I” am the disturbances upon the surfaces of the mirror; the concept that I consider “me” is simply the distortion produced by the impermanent nature of being. How much more illusory can one get than to be the distortion between two mirrors?

Consequently, I must work to understand my physical and mental nature despite its actual nonexistence. In understanding the limitations and capabilities of this changing existence, in quieting the ripples of distortion through meditation, insight and self-discipline, original purity is revealed, not to ‘me’ but to itself, reflecting like brilliant light inside the sides of a cut diamond.