WHAT IS SELF?

 Recently I posted a comment stating that I did not have a sense of self until I was in my 60s.  People responded incredulously, asking that I experienced before I experience myself?  Before I answer that, I would like to ask a question to all those incredulous questioners.

Look inside yourself.  Look inside that internal darkness, that internal emptiness, that internal void and ask if you find a self therein.  Then I ask you, what is your sense of self?  Who are you?  How do you describe your experience of self?  How is your self different from the rest of your world of experience?

Now try this for a few days or a few weeks, perhaps a few minutes each day. Then tell me what is your experience of self. 

I think like all of the neoAdvaitins point out, you will find no sense of self within, you have only suspected that there was a self, but you cannot find one.

Are you emptiness?  Are you a sense of energy?  Are you your body or are you your mind?  Are you that which watches all of this?  Or are you the throbbing, glistening, moving, Lifeforce within?  This is what I call my sense of self: the divine within who cognizing’s the world around me. 

The world around me, I do not experience as me, like some who claim that that self is everything.  I experience the world around me as “other.”  I experience other people around me, not as me, or as no person, or as an appearance in consciousness, but as another sentient being, another bag of flesh within whom the Lifeforce looks outwards, feels outwards and acts outwardly, but is also intensely aware of its own existence within that bag of flesh, as the Energizer the creator of all movement, all loving, all actions, and all wisdom. 

Yes, although the Lifeforce is the same in all of us, so very few people actually know firsthand from their own experience the Lifeforce within, that which I call myself. This recognition came to me because I loved someone, and she love me back with all of her heart and soul.  We loved each other and in that love, myself was found.  It exploded out of my own emptiness.  But few people even know this emptiness, this Void within, the container and sustainer of the entire universe.

This is how I know without question that you cannot love yourself until you have completely, and deeply loved another.  When you find a so-called “soulmate,” one to whom you can completely surrender in utter and complete devotion, in complete and almost desperate love, which afterwards leaves only love in you, as you, you become love itself, only then will the Lifeforce reveal itself to you, as you.  In a sense, you as a separate bag of flesh with consciousness, becomes aware of the universal Lifeforce within, and you identify with that, you are the divine dynamo within that awakens your flesh, gives you life, and allows you to love both yourself and another.

Before this time, no matter how long you look within, how deeply you go, how much you witness yourself, how much you practice self-inquiry, no matter how much psychotherapy you get, you will never know that self within.

So those who ask what was your experience of yourself and the world like prior to your experience of the self through divine love, I only suggest look at your own life now, in this moment, in your own experience of your body and yourself and in relationships.  Can you tell me with complete conviction who and what you are?  Can you tell me about your own self versus everything else in your experiential universe?  I doubt it. 

I doubt you will find anything you can call yourself.  You may call the I thought yourself but it is not.  It is only a thought.  You may call the sense of I-ness inside of you yourself, but it is not, it is only a sensation that can lead to recognition of yourself through love.  But it is not self itself.

You have assumed that you have a self within, but you cannot find it, you cannot feel it, you do not know it.  Therefore, how can you say with any degree of certitude, that you cannot love another without first loving yourself? 

Come, let me take you into that void, a place where you are absent to yourself but not consciously so, that will allow you to be open to that external love which will awaken the self within you in an explosion of light, energy, bliss and love, and you will know your own divine origin.  We will go into that void every Sunday after the talking part of Satsang, and there you can know the God within.