I celebrate my unity with all life, knowing we are one.
Deepak Chopra
I have been talking a bit about the personality and how, in order to reach true awareness, we have to go beyond the idea of " myself, my personality, my life" etc to who we really are. That gets confusing, I know. So I would like to make the distinction between self ( lowercased 's') and Self ( uppercased 'S').
Just Words!
To begin, let me remind you that these are all just "words"...symbols, concepts, ideas, and pointers toward truth but in themselves, they are not the real experience of 'truth'. We really, really need to see the limitations of words.
'self'
Next, let me explain again that 'self' is this idea we have of who we are based on something we call the personality. The personality, in turn, is a collection of "ideas' we either absorbed from others or have created over the years based on our conditioning, opinions from others, and memories of how we reacted, responded, felt, thought, acted, believed, stored, achieved, or lost in response to life. I can not stress enough...that 'self' is an idea, a mind-made construct... This 'self' is not a real entity but a tangle of collected thought in our minds and in the minds of others used to help us make sense of our experience. The thing is though...it only creates a pseudo surface layer understanding that keeps us on the superficial layer of our reality. It doesn't really help us to understand and experience Life fully. In fact, it takes us away from our true 'experience' of living because it keeps us trapped in our heads. As a concept, in order to understand it and live it we must conceptualize it. To conceptualize we must spend time in our thinking and in our mind. If we are constantly living in our minds just so we can make sense of some 'self' we created, we are not in our bodies, not in our environments, not in our moment, and not in our Life. So this idea of 'self' then is only in the head and if we are caught up in it, like so many of us are we are living in our heads instead of living in our lives. We can not see clearly what Life truly is and who we truly are. If we cannot see clearly we cannot live fully on the experiential level. Yet, many of us are so caught up in that tangle, this ego-self...we do anything to create, define, build up, tear down things in the way, judge, perceive, react, defend and even attack to protect this 'self ' that is just an idea. We build a whole industry around its preservation and advancement in the form of psychology, psychiatry, self-help, and personal development. We erroneously strive to make it stronger by trying to increase its esteem and give it the power it needs to control the external environment. We work diligently to feed that mental tangle and we get more and more caught up in the concept of a separate 'self'.
Letting Go of 'self' for 'Self'
The teachers of ancient wisdom, however, have been telling us for eons that this is not wise. They have been encouraging humanity to begin 2 'letting go' of this notion of 'self' because it is the source of most of our suffering. They teach that this knot of collected ideas and feelings, perceptions and beliefs we call 'me' is not enhancing our experience of Life, not bringing us closer to true reality, it is, in fact, in the way of our Life and our truth. When we get past this mental construct, past our busy mind and all its tangles, we will fall into the true Self. Self, with a capital S is who we really are. It is the experience of "I" without all the mental tangles in the way. It is not dependent on thought. It just is.
Now, in Yogic and Vedic teachings Self-realization should be our goal. To become self-realized, however, we must be able to see beyond our distortion of 'self'.
You seem to have lost your original identity and have identified with your thoughts and body. Suppose I ask you who you are. If you say, "I am a man," you have identified yourself with a masculine body. If you say, "I am a professor," you are identifying with the ideas gathered in your brain. If you say, "I am a millionaire," you are identifying with your bank account; if "a mother," with a child; "a husband,' with a wife". ...But without any identification. who are you?...behind the different forms of energy is one unchanging consciousness...Self. page 7-8
Life Skill Development 101
The Buddhists refer to the term "no-self" but really it is the same as Self. Both simply point to freedom from entanglement in this false notion of 'self'.
There is a whole industry, or movement built up around this disentanglement from 'self', this realization of "Self/no-self and it is called spirituality. (Again...spirituality is just a word, right? I prefer to call it "life -skill development.') Why would we want to invest in that movement?
On an individual level, though, Self-realization or no-self realization eventually takes us away from any false notions of us as "separate individuals"...it will free us from suffering and allow us to live peacefully, and joyfully. It is in this idea of 'self' where our fear breeds and grows and it is our fear that causes most of our human suffering. Imagine your life without fear! Imagine the world without fear!
We also get out of our heads when we are not caught up in those mental constructs. We come down into the body and we experience Life fully as it is in our moment...we are no longer disconnected. We are here and now. We are!
Unity
On a deeper level, it takes us to the understanding that 'self' as separate is a false idea. There is no separate 'self', therefore there is no other. Separation of us from others, from Our Source, from Life is not possible. We are reminded of our inter-being, our unity our "Oneness."
If you detach yourself completely from all things you have identified yourself with, you realize yourself as the pure "I". In that pure "I" there is no difference between you and me. ...That is why, if we could calm our minds and get to the basis of all modifications, we would find the unity among everything. page 8
So if we are wanting to begin this Life-Skill Development journey of going from 'self' to 'Self' we do need to understand 'self' and all the mental modifications we have swarming around in our heads. We need to see them, accept them, and understand them, before we can let them go. So psychology does come in handy for that. We also need to recognize that this is not where it stops. Letting go of our notions of 'self' will help us let go of our notions of 'other' so we can experience Oneness and the Tat Tuam Asi of our experience ( that you are ).
Hmm! "Ain't going to happen overnight,"...at least not for most of us... but the sooner we begin, the happier and healthier we will be and the happier and healthier the world will be. This, my dear friends, is Yoga!
All is well
Deepak Chopra (n.d.) 21 Day Meditation on Abundance. Spotify
The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali (as translated by Sri Swami Satchidananda) (2011) Yoga Ville: Integral Yoga Publications
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