“Is there no self?” asked Abhedya—a friend I had known for years—his voice edged with doubt.
“Yes,” I said gently. “At any moment, only a tiny part of the candlewick burns before the next replaces it—creating the illusion of a steady flame. Likewise, what we call ‘self’ is a stream of fleeting experiences that memory stitches into a seeming continuity. In moments when memory falls silent—during deep sleep, meditation, or immersion in nature—our sense of self dissolves. So, in reality, beneath the movement of thought exists a deeper stillness in which the boundary between observer and experience softens.”
Unsettled by this fragile notion of self, Abhedya—once proud of his unbreakable strength—began meditating daily, letting thoughts pass until he found himself resting in that deeper silence beneath them.
A Tear in the Silence
One day, after months of such practice, he sat in deep stillness and lost all sense of self—until a single warm tear slipped quietly down his cheek. Strangely, his mind held no sorrow or joy to explain it. Stranger still, he had long suffered from dry eyes that no doctor could cure.
As it traced his cheek, memories long sealed away rose with startling clarity, one after another: the silent meals after his wife left him, the lingering smile of his son lost to COVID-19, and the quiet mornings watching office-goers from his window after losing his job. Through each loss, he had refused to cry—pride hardening around the wound like scar tissue. For years, he held back tears until none were left. Yet in silence, this unbidden tear revealed a deeper truth. Resilience is not hardness or withheld tears, but the courage to feel our emotions fully and let them pass through—lest we dry the very springs of our humanness.
Encouraged, he no longer withheld the thoughts, interpretations, feelings, or tears these grief-laden memories carried. He observed them as a play enacted at a distance.
He was no longer an actor in the play but merely a witness—watching these happenings and the accompanying thoughts and feelings drift by like clouds, without clinging to or condemning them. When he could not distance himself from the actor, or when thoughts and feelings brought tears, he cried but observed the link among thoughts, emotions and tears.
Like a joke that grows too familiar to stir laughter, these memories gradually lost their emotional charge through his daily meditation and self-observation. Over time, he felt the grip of the sufferer within begin to loosen. He realised that when no one owns suffering as ‘mine’, pain coils and passes around us—like a snake gliding past a fallen twig. Abhedya’s tear also testified to the crack his practice of silence had made in the wall of illusory selfhood—a quiet opening to something larger than the self he had been defending.
The Sufferer Is Born
Abhedya knows he hasn’t found a universal cure for dry eyes. Miracles are unrepeatable; they arise from a realm we neither control nor fully understand. However, what he discovered in silence echoes across timeless wisdom traditions. The Buddha, introducing the insight of anatta—no fixed self—taught that while pain is real, inevitable and fleeting, the ‘sufferer’ is an imagined construct born of clinging to what is not self. Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron writes, “When we soften and fully experience the emotions we’ve been resisting, the self we’ve been defending begins to crumble.” Evan Thompson, Buddhist phenomenologist, observes, “To see that the self is a mental construct is not to eliminate experience, but to let experience flow more freely, fully, without clinging.”
Like Abhedya, we too can sit in silence and review our conversations—whether with others or within ourselves—gently noticing what triggered a feeling, where interpretation went astray, and how to rehearse a wiser response for next time. Repeated awareness gradually loosens habitual patterns of reaction.
Journaling these observations reveals our interpretive habits—the invisible grooves along which feeling tends to run. A spouse’s cooler greeting, a friend’s distracted reply—and the mind is already bracing for catastrophe. Once you notice these tendencies, deliberately introducing other tentative, plausible interpretations can loosen their grip, cool the emotional charge and open space for clearer seeing.
Our sorrows arrive not to crush us, but to awaken empathy for fellow suffering sentient beings—and to ask, quietly and insistently: who is it that suffers, if no fixed self can be found? By turning inward with this question, we see that grief, pain and anguish fade like passing clouds. Yet they may persist if we keep feeding them the next small part of the wick of interpretation, keeping alive the flame of illusory continuity of the self and its suffering. It is the story of selfhood alone that thickens passing clouds into the weight of my suffering.
“Why are you unhappy?” Wei Wu Wei asks. “Because 99.9 per cent of everything you think and do is for yourself—and there isn’t one.” Insist on being ‘someone’, and you can be broken; dissolve into ‘no one’, and you become Abhedya—the indestructible.