The Self

"If I cannot live with myself, there must be two of me"
Eckhart Tolle

There is a fundamental rule we find in meditation and in many growth practices. What happens is - you have a subjective identity, something that you call yourself. And that seems to be a real subject. A subject is defined as that which is aware of an object. But if you actualy look at yourself, get a sense of yourself, feel yourself, - it’s not a subject, it’s an object. So, what you call yourself, the thing that you’re aware of, that’s not who you really are. Everything you know about yourself as an object is actually exactly what you are not. And every time you identify with an object - whether is your body or your thought or desire, - anytime you do that, then you’re binding yourself to fragmented partial phenomena, and the result of that is suffering.

You have two selves - you have a self that can be seen and you have the sear. The reason enlightenment is a little bit tricky is because it’s so simple. Fundamentally, enlightenment is identifying your true self. The true self is that which is not an object. As you’re looking inside - I’m aware of this body, I’m aware of sensations arising in this body, I’m aware of thoughts - you can also become aware of your own self, of your own sense of it: this is me, I’m this person with this story. That’s another object, it’s not what you are. But it is something that is aware, and that is the true self.

So, if you push back and back to this transcendental self, it has different qualities than your personal self - the self that you can see, the self that you’re identified with, the self that you’re defending. And this is a huge mistaken identity - this identification of the seer with the instrument of seeing. So, we identified with all those things that we are not. The transcendental self, as you start to rest in that, you rest in the witness. But you can’t see the witness. This is one of the mistakes people make when they’re trying to get in touch with absolute reality - they think that all they have to do is to look in the right place and they will be able to see the real self. Everything you can see it’s an object and it’s not your real self.

When you go back to this transcendental self you don’t see something, you start to just get a feeling of freedom, of release from these things that you were identified with. Every major spiritual tradition teaches you to move from identification to finite phenomenal events and identify instead with this transcendental openness. The transcendental self is vast emptiness, vast openness, and you experience this openness because it is the space in which everything is arising right now. The shift from being identified with a small limited self to being identified with the transcendental self is the fundamental awakening process.

The process of evolution has these two phases: transcendence and inclusion. As an example, you have an atom, then the next stage of development transcends the atom, and that's the molecule - transcends means it goes beyond, it's more complex than the atom. And it also includes the atom. The same way molecules move into cells, the cells transcend molecules. They go beyond them, they have something greater in them than the molecules have. But they also include them, contain them.

Human stages of growth work just the same. The limited self has to be transcended and included. The true self contains it, is not separate from it. There is no separation at the moment of awakening, things become singular. Instead of managing multiples, now you are not managing, you just become singular, in alignment

Dan Motoc