WHAT IS THE EXPERIENCE OF SELF LIKE?

WHAT IS THE EXPERIENCE OF SELF LIKE?

It is so difficult to explain.  You are already experiencing the Self in everyday life.  It is the basic background experience of being alive and aware.  But this state is buried within a matrix of everything else going on in our life from daily activities of living, daydreaming, sleeping, feeling urges, emotions, imagining, and most of all, thinking.

All of these activities make up the average person’s life. To get to that base experience of being alive and aware requires a drilling down through all the activities, mental and physical, to that bottom most, all permeating base awareness that underlies and suffuses all other experience as light and life.

When drilling down by meditation, or by practicing self-awareness or self-inquiry, gradually losing interest in the world or refusing priority attentive care of our body's or our mind's slightest needs, wants, desires, and distractions, we “sink” gradually into that base layer of Self, and thereby doing, we, as observer, become self-aware of the Manifest Self, the bare consciousness and awareness, and of ourselves witnessing that base awareness.  We become fully self aware of the Life Force, Sentience, awareness, and the hidden witness thereof, which is the Unmanifest Self.  

The witness, and the Manifest Self are one. We identify with both and are aware of their apparent separation as Unmanifest and Manifest, yet one.

Once we hit this realization we are awakened to the ground of being and the identity of the Absolute and our ephemeral, phenomenal existence as a human being and identify with That one.  But this one consists of being human, being the Manifest Self of Consciousness, and the Absolute, Unmanifest Witness.

How do we know when we have realized Self?  

Two ways: First we feel as if we have come home.  We feel like we rest in our heart of heart, our heart of awareness, the center of our sense of being.  We rest in our sense of identification.  It is our most intimate sense of vulnerability and awareness.

Secondly, characteristic of realizing that Manifest Self, our aliveness, and awareness of our alive, sentient, existence, that Self wants to shout:  I have come alive; I exist!  

Our self-awareness of the magnificent, magic, and mystery of being alive, knowing and perceiving is so wild and magnificent discovery that all other knowledge of the world means noting in comparison, for we have found that for which we have always sought: our truest and deepest identity as life and sentience as the Manifest Self come aliveand creating the phenomenal world of constant experiences and change, wherein dwell both the Manifest and Unmanifest Self at the deepest level of our sentience and being.