CHOICELESS AWARENESS CLA

 B

What you’re pointing toward is a state described in a lot of contemplative traditions, though they phrase it carefully because the words can easily become misleading.

In Buddhism, the term śūnyatā (often rendered as “emptiness”) doesn’t usually mean literal nothingness or annihilation of mind. It points more to the absence of a fixed, independent “self” in experience. When clinging and identification drop away, what remains is still experience—but without the sense of ownership or separation.

So when you say “non-existence of ego is felt,” that maps closely onto descriptions of ego-less awareness in meditation traditions. But importantly, it’s not typically framed as the mind disappearing into nothing. It’s more like:

• thoughts still arise

• perceptions still happen

• sensations still occur

• but none of it is taken as “me” or “mine”

In Advaita Vedanta, a similar point is made, though in different language: the “ego” is seen as a mistaken identification with thoughts and body-mind activity. When that identification drops, what remains is pure awareness (pure witnessing), not voidness in a nihilistic sense.

And in Zen traditions within Buddhism, “no-mind” (mushin) or stillness is not unconsciousness or blankness either. It’s often described as:

activity without separation, response without internal division

So the phrase “perfectly stilled, unmoving” can be a little tricky. Many practitioners later clarify that the stillness is not the absence of phenomena, but the absence of grasping at phenomena. From the outside, life may look unchanged; internally, the “stickiness” is gone.

One important nuance: if “annihilated mind” is taken literally, it can drift toward a nihilistic interpretation, which most contemplative traditions explicitly reject. They usually distinguish between:

• ego dissolving (loss of identification)
  vs

• mind ceasing (which would imply no experience at all)

What you’re describing fits much more with the first.

A useful way some teachers phrase it is:

• Not “nothing is happening,” but “nothing is being clung to as ‘I’.”

If you want, I can map your description more precisely onto specific terms like śūnyatā, turiya, or mushin, and show where they overlap and where they differ.