From No Boundary:
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This time a year ago you had different concerns and basically different problems. Your immediate experiences were different, and so were your thoughts. All of these have vanished, but something in you remains. Go one step further. What if you moved to a completely different country, with new friends, new surroundings, new experiences, new thoughts. You would still have that basic inner feeling of I-ness. Further yet, what if you right now forgot the first ten years, or fifteen years, or twenty years of your life? You would still feel that same inner I-ness, would you not? If right now you just temporarily forget everything that happened in your past, and just feel that pure inner I-ness—has anything really changed?
There is, in short, something within you—that deep inward sense of I-ness—that is not memory, thoughts, mind, body, experience, surroundings, feelings, conflicts, sensations, or moods. For all of these have changed and can change without substantially affecting that inner I-ness. That is what remains untouched by the flight of time—and that is the transpersonal Witness and Self.
Is it then so very difficult to realize that every conscious being has that same inner I-ness? And that, therefore, the overall number of transcendent I’s is but one? We have already surmised that if you had a different body you would still basically feel the same I-ness—but that is already the very same way every other person feels right now. Isn’t it just as easy to say there is but one single I-ness or Self taking on different views, different memories, different feelings and sensations?
And not just at this time, but at all times, past and future. Since you undoubtedly feel (even though your memory, mind, and body are different) that you are the same person of twenty years ago (not the same ego or body, but the same I-ness), couldn’t you also be the same I-ness of two-hundred years ago? If I-ness isn’t dependent upon memories and mind and body, what difference would it make? In the words of physicist Schroedinger, "It is not possible that this unity of knowledge, feeling and choice which you call your own should have sprung into being from nothingness at a given moment not so long ago; rather this knowledge, feeling and choice are essentially eternal and unchangeable and numerically one in all men, nay in all sensitive beings. The conditions for your existence are almost as old as the rocks. For thousands of years men have striven and suffered and begotten and women have brought forth in pain. A hundred years ago, perhaps, another man sat on this spot; like you he gazed with awe and yearning in his heart at the dying light on the glaciers. Like you he was begotten of man and born of woman. He felt pain and brief joy as you do. Was he someone else? Was it not you yourself?"
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Let us walk in the holy presence.