This is a true story. And it’s about you.
The creaking floorboards and the flip and flop of the onomatopoetic footwear announce the next student. An awkwardly long pause, then comes the knock.
Rap. Rap. Rap.
My voice is next: “Come in.”
The student enters, closes the door with a care usually reserved for the bathing of newborns, turns, and slowly lowers herself onto the meditation cushion opposite me. Her eyes downcast as she puts her hands together in prayer and bows. I do the same.
The student’s name is Diana.
We’re in the middle of a silent retreat, one of my Enlightenment Camps, designed to give people a visceral taste of who they really are (emphasis on the “really”). It’s typically a three or five day schedule of discussions and practices and hands-on explorations designed to reveal the capital-t Truth of our identities prior to us being bamboozled into believing we’re this body-mind thing.
Each day on the retreat, we set aside time for the students to ask questions in private. Questions about their understanding, the techniques we’re using, their experience. Anything to help them progress with their investigation. It’s a process I ripped off from the Buddhists. They call it dokusan.
Diane looks up, her eyes brimming with tears, she blinks out two fat crystalline rollers that trace lines down her cheeks.
I begin: “How can I help?”
“I’m not sure.” She pauses.
I wait as she stares off into the ether somewhere over my left shoulder
“Something happened…” she shakes her head, “It’s like…I don’t know…It’s like I disappeared.” Then adds, “But at the same time I felt infinitely vast and infinitesimally small at the same time.”
I smile inwardly. The process is working.
“It’s like I disappeared, but at the same time I felt infinitely vast and infinitesimally small at the same time.”
Diane has had what I like to call a “glimpse”. A brief flash of the Truth; one that is usually obscured by our stubborn belief structures that give life to the illusion of the separate self. It’s evidence that something grand really does exist outside the walls of the self-created prison cell of the ego.
Think of it as a chink in the ego’s armor.
There’s a lot of talk in spiritual circles about enlightenment.
Though it’s called by many names, from spiritual liberation to Self-realization, and spiritual awakening to God-realization, all roads really do lead to Rome, as they say. In other words, even though some would argue otherwise, we’re all, in every tradition, talking about the same thing.
Problem is, even though there’s lots of talk, when it comes to clarity—well, not so much.
In simplest terms, enlightenment means to know who you are. To know your most essential Self. Not conceptually, but experientially, and the problem is who you are is 100% other than who you experience yourself to be. At least if you’re like 99.9% of people on the planet.
Now, it’s important to understand, that when we say your “most essential Self”, we’re not talking about superficial and ever-shifting traits like preferences and opinions, we’re talking about the most fundamental Truth of who or what you are. At your core.
The problem is this: who you are is 100% other than who you experience yourself to be.
And in that vein, the great sage Ramana Maharshi gave us a remarkable clue when he said this: “Let come what comes, let go what goes, and see what remains.”
And of course, when we think about it (even though too many of us don’t), that makes perfect sense.
For if you are aware of something (for instance, a thought, like “I love Pop Tarts.”), you could argue that it might be an essential part of you.
That is, right up until that thought is no longer present.
For, if YOU are here, but the thought “I love Pop Tarts” is not here, there is simply no way that that thought could be a part of your essential Self. Because how could YOU be here and aware, while your essential Self was not?
Duh.
So, we might paraphrase Ramana, “If it comes and goes, it just ain’t you.”
But here’s where it gets more interesting. When we actually slow down enough to look at our own experience, something we in the yoga world like to call Svadhyaya (self study), things begin to get clearer.
So, in that spirit, let’s take a little inventory of what comes and goes, shall we?
We’ll start with a not-to-scale map of reality.
To the left, there is your self, or at least the particular body-mind you’ve come to call your self—with all of its thoughts, its feelings, its hopes and dreams and bodily sensations and such.
Then, to the right, on the other side of the dotted line, we have other-than-self. That is, everyone and everything else around you. People: like friends, family, neighbors, strangers. And other things too: like buildings and cars and trees, puppy dogs and butterflies…
You get the idea.
And it’s at this point, I’ll invite you to take a look at your present-moment experience to verify that this map is at least somewhat reflective of your now-experience…
Right now, there is a body-mind at the center of your experience, is there not? And there very likely is a variety of other things, perhaps sentient, perhaps not, arrayed around that body-mind, yes?
So, with that verified, let’s get to our inventory…
We’ll start with the easy part: with the things that are obviously not you.
These are the people, animals, structures, and other things around you—those on the right side of the dotted line labeled “other”. Sometimes they are present in your experience; other times they are unquestionably not. So, they all quite obviously come and go, and thus, cannot be you.
Once again: duh.
But, it’s here that things get a bit more interesting (and for some, challenging)…
Let’s take a look at the realm of thought. These are mental phenomena that come in various forms: from ideas and memories, to hopes and opinions, and beliefs and preferences. And while yes, some are more frequently present than others, none are always present in your experience.
For instance, even a thought as fundamental as “I am <state your name here>” is but a discontinuous presence in your life. And, in fact, it’s likely that it wasn’t even a part of your now-experience until you read that last line.
And to go a bit further, if you really look, you’ll see that there are times, albeit brief, that no thoughts are in your experience at all. Blank, zip, nada. So, from this analysis we can safely say all of your thoughts come and go…
Therefore, you are not your thoughts.
But, what about your feelings? Do they too come and go? A quick look verifies that they do indeed.
Instinctual feelings like hunger and thirst and loneliness, sometimes are present, sometimes are not. Emotions like grief or anxiety or joy or excitement ebb and flow from out of the ether. Even those of us struggling with chronic conditions like depression or PTSD, if we really look, we notice that we have occasional flashes of relief—if only momentary. So, indeed it is true: all of our feelings come and go too.
Therefore, you are not your feelings.
So, that leaves the body. We therefore must be this body, right?
Well, not so fast.
Look in the mirror. What do you see? (not who, mind you, but what).
Is that the same heap of biomass that was there 10 years ago? 20 years ago? 30?
The answer is an unequivocal no. Not only is it aging, maybe sagging, maybe wrinkling, but, speaking for myself, what I see peering back at me in the mirror bears zero resemblance to the cute, blonde-haired little boy that peered back at me fifty-odd years ago. There’s literally no trace of that uppity tyke left. All of my cells, all of my molecules, have been replaced many times over.
And, by the way, modern science would agree. It’s been proven that 98% of all atoms in your body are replaced every single year.
What I see peering back at me in the mirror bears zero resemblance to the cute, blonde-haired little boy that peered back at me fifty-odd years ago.
The fact is the building blocks of your body are in constant flux: You get a new suit of skin every month, you get a new liver every six weeks, and a new stomach lining every five days. So, the body too, if we look close enough, indeed comes and goes.
And therefore, you are not your body.
It’s at this point we need to ask: “What’s left?”
Because it seems pretty clear that all of the things that you’ve used to cobble together a self: the thoughts and feelings, the likes and dislikes, the bodily sensations and meaty appendages and on and on, owing to their comings and goings into and out of your experience, they simply cannot be the true and most essential you.
Making matters more challenging, when we take a look, we see that we’ve checked off everything on our map.
Which means that the true and most essential you must not be depicted on this map.
Of course, there’s a reason for that: namely, it’s because, as we stated from the outset, our map illustrates how *most* of us process our experience of ourselves (and our world)—and most of us are not yet awakened to our True Selves.
So, we find ourselves right back where we started, with the fundamental question of who or what are you?
To ask it another, perhaps more helpful way: What is present right now in your experience, tangibly, undeniably, and that is not depicted on the map? Any ideas?
I’ll pause to give you a moment to take a look.
.
.
.
Here’s the answer:
That which is missing from our map, and that which is happening now, and that which has been the only continual presence in every moment of your entire existence, and that which must be your most fundamental essence, your true identity, is this: Awareness.
Now, before anyone flies off into some unmoored, woo-woo fiddle-faddle about awareness, for now, put down the idea of spirit or soul or source or any other vague or ambiguous notions that are destined only to keep you chasing your spiritual tail.
That which has been the only continual presence in every moment of your entire existence, and that which must be your true identity is this: Awareness.
Rather, my invitation is to stay grounded in your now-experience, and see clearly just what is being shown to you.
I’m pointing to the practical, verifiable fact that something here, right now, is aware of these words.
It is the same thing that is aware of the sensations in your legs.
It is the same thing that is aware of the memory of you sitting next to Susie-Jo in Mrs. Logue’s first-grade class at Ladera Elementary (of course, insert your own memory here).
‘Round these parts, we depict this awareness on our map like this.
Now, to be clear, awareness is not a “thing” in the classical sense. That is to say, it has no mass, it has no qualities, it has no color, or shape, or size of its own. It is quite literally “no-thing”, just a pure and spacious aware-ness that is present to whatever arises before it.
Depending upon the tradition, this awareness is variously named: sometimes called The Witness, other times, The Seer, and still others would call it Christ-consciousness.
It has no mass, it has no qualities, it has no color, or shape, or size of its own. It is quite literally “no-thing”, just a pure and spacious aware-ness that is present to whatever arises before it.
Now, those of you who have been studying with me for any length of time know, I go out of my way to encourage people not to believe a gosh-darned word I say. Instead, I prefer to lay out a hypothesis and invite people to verify said hypothesis in their own experience.
For truly, blind belief is the booby prize in this business.
So, in that spirit, please, check it out in your own experience, right here, right now…
Isn’t there a part of you that is aware of your thoughts, like maybe, a thought about what you had for breakfast?
Isn’t there a part of you that is aware of certain feelings or emotions or bodily sensations present in the body right now?
And isn’t that part of you also aware of the absence of these things as they fade into nothingness and are replaced by new experiences in this ever-changing parade phenomena?
At the risk of leading the witness, I’m going to bet your answers are the same as mine: Absolutely, 100% yes.
All this leads to a rather obvious conclusion: you are not what you have come to believe you are. At least, to the degree that you’ve identified with that walking, talking heap of compost called the body-mind.
The fact is the so-called spiritual quest is a rather simple matter: it’s all about solving a tenacious case of mistaken identity.
You are not what you have come to believe you are. At least, to the degree that you’ve identified with that walking, talking heap of compost called the body-mind.
You see, most of us have come to reflexively overlook the existence of this ever-free, spacious, and accepting part of ourselves (awareness) and instead, identify with what we might think of as a false self constructed from the body-mind and its attendant likes and dislikes, dramas and frustrations, and, yes, diseases and death.
This kind of oversight is something we call in the biz: Spiritual Ignorance, or as I like to put it, Spiritual Ignore-ance.
I throw in that little hiccup of a hyphen because Spiritual Ignore-ance is a special kind of ignorance.
Unlike your everyday, garden-variety flavor of ignorance, where we define it as not knowing something, with this special, spiritual brand of ignore-ance we imply a more literal meaning: it’s not that you don’t know something, it’s that you’re not noticing something. You are literally, though not intentionally, ignoring something. And that thing is you. The real you.
That’s why, if we wanted to re-draw our map in a way that accurately reflected the capital-t Truth of things, it would look more like this…
You’ll notice that not only are you (awareness) now on the map, but we’ve also shifted the line distinguishing self from other-than-self, or we could say, the demarcation between the essential you and the ever-changing parade of things that come and go.
And this brings us to perhaps the most important point.
You are always, already home. You are pure, divine awareness, ever-free, perfectly accepting, unconditionally loving.
There is no need to strive to re-connect with your eternal essence, for how could you, for even one moment, be separate from what you really are?
You can let go of the struggle to become worthy enough to deserve entry into the Kingdom of heaven for you are already there.
It really is just a game of unplugging from the case of mistaken identity and noticing the fact that you truly are something other than this bag of blood and bile. Recoginizing that you’ve always already been pristine and free and eternal—the embodiment of love itself. Even if that fact has escaped you.
I’ll end with another reminder from Ramana Maharshi: “I see what you see, it’s just that I notice what I see.”
And, I’ll add, like Diane, so can you.
FOR REFLECTION
How often do you take time to silence your mind and notice the underlying ever-peaceful spaciousness of awareness?
In what ways might you be unconsciously reinforcing the spiritual ignore-ance that robs you of the experience of your truest self and the feelings of wholeness and joy that come with it?
What practices or exercises might you include in your daily routine to help you pierce the stubborn illusion that you are limited by the body-mind?
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This was excellent! Thank you, Eric!