Yogi: My awakening experience was really bad – there was no feeling of ‘me’ or ‘I’.
It was confusing and awful – the fear exploded and the ‘I’ came back.
As the fear slowly subsides, I concentrated on the breathing.
The awful thing is ‘where was I?’ for that period of time.
Sayadaw: Actually, there is no ‘I’, but the thing that keeps the ‘I’ alive in our mind is the thought of me. When you woke up, the thought of me couldn’t form and that was what you experienced.
We have relied on ‘me’ our whole life and when it disappears, it is like ‘what do I rely on now?”.
It is a very strange and new experience.
It is just the thought of ‘me’ that was gone; when you think, the ‘me’ is back.
It is not so easy to lose the sense of self. The sense of self is always with us.