"Meditation moves us in the other direction. It is an attempt to remove, piece by piece, layer by layer, all the baroque ornamentation with which we embellish our world of constructed experience. Underneath all the drama, the restlessness, the hopes and fears, behind the narratives we weave about ourselves, and even before we've thought of ourselves as ourselves, lies a simple, unadorned awareness. It's not even a thing - just an event that happens, a little burst of knowing, deep in the center of it all.

Experiencing this awareness has more to do with subtraction than with addition or multiplication. [...] The Buddha got two steps further than Descartes, beyond the 'me' and beyond the thinker: instead of 'I think therefore I am' we need only say 'thinking occurs', or even more simply, 'awareness occurs'. "

Untangling self