end of suffering?

"The closest that the mind can come to representing who we are is the thought ‘I’ am'. But that thought is not who we really are. Whether that thought is there or not, we still exist. We know the thought 'I am'. That thought is the start of the false sense of an individual, a separate ‘I’. Because we didn't know any better, the mind attached other labels to this ‘I’ thought, such as 'I am good,' 'I am bad,' 'I have this problem,' and so on. But those thoughts don't have anything to do with us, because the very ‘I’ thought itself, the sense of separation, is not actually who we are. Once you see the falseness of the ‘I’ thought, that what we are is not an individual person at all, the identifications and ideas of a lifetime all collapse because they are all based on a false premise.

There is no practice to overcome suffering. It is simply a matter of seeing that the false ‘I’ is an assumption, that the whole mechanism is a conceptual house of cards. Then a life­time of suffering evaporates. As Bob (Adamson) says, without the cause (the ‘I’), can there be any effects (psychological suffering and bondage)?

As I sat on his couch at one of his talks listening to him say 'There is no person,' suddenly it hit me. I looked and saw that right now and here, there is not a separate person in the picture at all. In that moment, all my doubts and confusion evaporated. I realized that all problems and questions stem from the sense of an ‘I’ that was assumed to be there at the center of my life. Upon actual looking, I discovered it was not there at all. Fifteen years of meditating could not accomplish what occurred in a few moments of direct looking. In that recognition arose a direct and immediate sense of clarity and peace. I intuitively felt that the searching was over. "

John Wheeler, "Awakening to the Natural state"