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We've become convinced (read: we've been persuaded) that if we peel back the layers of our lives (as if they were onions) ie if we peel back one layer and then we peel back another layer, and then we keep on peeling back layer after layer after layer until we've peeled back all the layers all the way down to the last layer, we will have reached our core, and we've accepted that this core is who we really are. We're certain that it's in fact the very substance of our lives. We have it that this core is us ie it's the thing we call "I" / "me". Go ahead. Try it. Experiment for yourself by peeling back the layers of your life like an onion until you get to the last layer, and then see if you can look below the last layer at your core, then tell me what it is you're seeing.
If you look closely and tell the truth unflinchingly about what it is you're seeing, that is if you can set aside your concepts and beliefs about what it is you think you should be seeing, for just long enough to see what's really there, you'll see there isn't a core. When we peel back the last layer of the onion, what we see is there's nothing there, nothing at all. It's empty! There's nothing but space. And that's who we really are: empty space - in a word, who we really are is nothing but context.
Seeing who we really are below the last layer of the onion, as nothing, as empty space, as context, we realize something else, something so obvious that it's easy to miss its profundity altogether: we realize we, as nothing, have the capacity to experience ie we realize the nothing we are, is experiencing! When we look closer at the nothing / context we really are, we see it's an experiential context - which is to say we see it's the context in which everything we experience shows up. We see it's the context in which all of this shows up (and yes, I do mean all of it) - in another word, we see it's the context in which EVERYTHING shows up. And that's who / what we really are: nothing ... in which everything shows up.
