Mindfulness in Plain English

by Henepola Gunaratana

You search for that thing you call “me,” but what you find is a physical body and how you have identified your sense of yourself with that bag of skin and bones. You search further, and you find all manner of mental phenomena, such as emotions, thought patterns, and opinions, and see how you identify the sense of yourself with each of them. You watch yourself becoming possessive, protective, and defensive over these pitiful things, and you see how crazy that is. You rummage furiously among these various items, constantly searching for yourself — physical matter, bodily sensations, feelings, and emotions — it all keeps whirling round and round as you root through it, peering into every nook and cranny, endlessly hunting for “me.”