when there is no ‘you’

The idea hit me like a whisper from the cosmos: When there is no sense of ‘you,’ there is no way that ‘you’ can be separate from the rest of the universe. It wasn’t a conclusion, not even a realisation, really. It was more like a question wearing the mask of an answer, teasing me into silence.

Think about it: this “you” we all carry around—this construct we’ve painstakingly pieced together from childhood memories, hopes, fears, and endless streams of opinions—isn’t as solid as it seems. It feels real because it’s familiar, and it’s familiar because it’s always there, narrating, labelling, and categorising.

But what if it’s just a mirage?

For most of my life, I believed I was “me,” distinct from everything else. Here’s Clay, over here, doing Clay things, surrounded by a world of not-Clay. The boundary felt firm—my body, my mind, my story. This was my fortress, my anchor.

But if you sit with it long enough (and I mean really sit with it), you start to notice cracks in that foundation. Neuroscience will tell you the self is a story your brain tells to keep you functioning, a kind of cognitive life raft cobbled together from sensory input, memories, and emotions. The Buddhists go further, calling it anatta, the doctrine of no-self. They argue there’s no fixed “you,” only a river of moments, each flowing into the next.

What happens when you let that idea sink in? When you stop gripping the edges of your raft, stop insisting on your separateness?

Carl Sagan once said, We are a way for the cosmos to know itself. It sounds poetic, but when you really feel it—when the “you” falls away—it becomes something far deeper. If there’s no “you,” then what’s left? Just the universe, seeing through your eyes, thinking through your thoughts, feeling through your sensations.

Advaita Vedanta, an ancient non-dual philosophy, compares this to a wave realising it’s the ocean. The wave spends its life believing it’s something apart—a unique, distinct ripple. But it’s always been water, always been part of the vast, infinite sea.

When the illusion of “me” drops, the boundaries collapse. You are not in the universe; you are the universe, inseparable from its wholeness.

Here’s the catch: as soon as you try to describe this, you lose it. Language is built on duality—subject and object, self and other. How do you talk about something that erases those lines?

Mystics have wrestled with this for centuries, often resorting to poetry, riddles, or silence. Take the Zen koan: What is the sound of one hand clapping? It’s not meant to be solved. It’s meant to short-circuit the thinking mind, to nudge you out of your habitual patterns and into direct experience.

Trying to explain the absence of “you” is like trying to describe the taste of water. Words falter. The experience itself remains.

If the idea of no-self feels terrifying, you’re not alone. The ego doesn’t go down without a fight. It’s built for survival, after all, and the thought of its own nonexistence is an existential threat.

But there’s freedom on the other side of that fear. Without a self to defend, there’s nothing to lose, nothing to protect. Life becomes less about striving and more about flowing, less about control and more about surrender.

Taoism has a term for this: Wu Wei, or effortless action. It’s the art of moving with the current rather than against it, of living in harmony with the unfolding of things.

Here’s where things get messy. Even if you glimpse this state of no-self, the world doesn’t stop. You still wake up in the morning, feel hungry, answer emails, and pay bills. The illusion of “you” may be seen through, but it’s persistent, like an old habit that doesn’t know when to quit.

The challenge is integrating this insight into the everyday. When you walk through a forest, can you drop the sense of “me” and let the rustling leaves, the sunlight filtering through branches, the crunch of dirt underfoot all arise as one seamless whole? When you’re stuck in traffic, can you feel yourself as both the driver and the road, the observer and the observed?

It’s a practice, not a finish line.

The truth is, we’re always moving between unity and duality. Some moments, the boundaries dissolve, and you feel the vastness of it all. Other times, the “I” creeps back in, whispering its stories and drawing its lines.

And that’s okay. Maybe the goal isn’t to banish the self but to loosen its grip, to play with it like a child playing dress-up. You can still wear the costume of “you” without mistaking it for the real thing.

When the self falls away, the universe unfolds exactly as it always has. But now, there’s no one left to resist it. Only the dance remains. And maybe that’s enough.