Welcome to a story for those seeking a shore in a world full of waves.
They say every soul is born with a vessel—a fragile raft woven from memories, names, roles, and stories.
We spend our lives sailing on it, believing it to be I Am.
This man did too.
He charted his course through life, certain of the captain he thought he was, secure within his sturdy wooden identity.
But one day, as all seekers do, he leaned too far into the world of distractions—and slipped.
Not into water… but into himself.
Suddenly, he was in the ocean, not merely on it.
This ocean was not made of saltwater—but of thoughts.
Endless. Restless. Ancient as time.
A wave of memory swept him backward into what was.
Another threw him forward into imagined futures.
North and south, east and west—
he spun through currents of regret and hope, fear and desire.
For the first time, he realized:
The ocean was not outside him—it was him.
His breathing became shallow.
Every thought acted as a riptide, dragging him further away from the silent core.
He reached for ideas like floating planks—
beliefs, philosophies, identities—
but they dissolved like mist in his hands.
He sank deeper.
The Christian Saints wrote about this place—
the dark turbulence of the mind,
where ego thrashes like a drowning man
and every struggle tightens the noose.
He now understood why Buddha said the mind is a great monkey.
why Lao Tzu warned that chasing after the world only leads to loss,
why the Upanishads whispered: “The mind is Maya.”
He was drowning not in water.
but caught in the storm of his own thoughts.
Just as the last strength faded from his limbs, something emerged from the silence—not a shout, but a feather-light whisper:
“Remember.”
A life vest floated nearby—simple, weightless, eternal.
A life saver named ...Self-inquiry.
Another ... Self-remembering.
The forgotten teaching of every master.
He grasped the question as if it were life itself.
Who am I?
Not as an answer,
but like a door.
The ocean roared back with stories—
you are the body. You are your name. You are your past.
But instead of believing, he asked again:
To whom do these thoughts appear?
He did not search for an answer because an answer is just another wave in disguise.
He paused. He observed. During that moment—
that sacred gap where words failed to reach—as awareness shifted from the waves to the observer of the waves, something subtly changed.
The waves continued to rise and fall, but he was no longer being thrown.
He stood on the inner shore, vast and untouched as the sky.
Thoughts drifted like birds across the horizon of consciousness—noticed but no longer obeyed.
In that stillness, the storm exhausted itself.
He understood what the sages meant:
You are not the wave. You are not the drop.
You are the ocean.
You are not the thought.
You are the ONE who is aware of thinking.
You are the sky in which all weather happens,
but is never harmed.
He climbed back into his vessel—
not the old one made of ego, but a new vessel woven from stillness, from silence, from presence, from unbroken beingness, and his anchor was grounded within.
And from that day forward, when the ocean stirred, he did not fight the waves.
He smiled, let them dance, and returned to the inquiry:
Who am I before thought names me?
Every time he asked, the rope pulled him back home.
Every remembering dissolved the illusion of drowning.
And the ocean that once threatened to swallow him became the very water that carried him forward to freedom.
He did not conquer the mind—he simply awakened from it.
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