How Do We Experience the Inner Self?

For many people, the first great breakthrough in meditation practice comes when they begin to contemplate their goal. Until then, it is often a rather haphazard process. We close our eyes, follow the instructions that we've been given, then hope that something happens. We wonder if we're doing it right. Does correct meditation mean sticking like a limpet to the point that we are focusing on? Is it the focus that brings results? Or is the desired experience just something that is supposed to "happen," to arise on its own? Some of the most dedicated meditators I know have wasted months or even years wondering what they should be doing or looking for the altered state, the expansion of Consciousness, to arise. When we have no real idea where we are going, we often end up in a kind of reverie instead.

Swami Muktananda liked to illustrate this problem with a story about a king who set out with a huge army in an easterly direction to meet his enemy. As the king was departing, the royal priest came running up and shouted, "Stop! Stop! Turn around! You're going in the wrong direction!" "What are you doing?" the king asked impatiently. "I have thousands of men. I have war elephants. I have siege guns. I'm completely prepared and ready to go!" "Yes, your majesty," said the priest, "but your army is marching east and the enemy is encamped in the west! You're moving in the wrong direction!"

Swami Muktananda said that in the same way, it doesn't matter what a strong meditator you are, how upright your posture, how skillful your ability to still the mind and focus. If you don't know where you are going or what you are supposed to be meditating on, you will take yourself in the opposite direction to where you really want to go. Right at the beginning of meditation, you need to understand very clearly the nature of the Self that is your goal and how you can recognize it.

When I first heard this story, I was galvanized! It was the clue I'd been looking for. I began to ask the question, "What is the Self? How can I recognize it?" Over the years, I have found that this willingness to question our experience and to explore the nature of our own Self, looking for its footprints behind the thickets of thoughts and feelings, is the single most important effort we can make in meditation.

The ultimate goal of meditation is to experience the full unfoldment of our own pure Consciousness, the inner state of luminosity, love, and wisdom that the Indian tradition calls the inner Self or the Heart. (A Buddhist might call it Buddha nature; a Christian might call it Spirit.) In fact, we want to do more than experience that state. We want to realize that we are that--not just a body or a personality, but pure Consciousness, pure Awareness. By that definition, a successful meditation is one in which we enter the Self--even if just for a moment. For this to happen, we need to approach each session of meditation with a conscious understanding that the Self is our goal and with an intention to experience it. Our intention gives directionality to our consciousness. It's like aiming an arrow. Yet even as we aim our attention toward the Self, we need to remember that we are the Self. As Ramana Maharshi said, "Knowing the Self means being the Self." When we forget this--that the Self is not only the goal of our meditation but also who we really are--we inevitably find ourselves stuck in one of the countless byways in the inner world.

The most common of these side roads is reverie--falling into the mazy realms of thought and image. We sit down to meditate and end up caught on some irrelevant thought train, letting it carry us from association to association ("Who was that blues singer? He was blind, from the Bahamas. I think his first name was John. No, Joseph. Jonathan would know. 'Gonna live that life I sing about in my song.' Jonathan's wife--Rachel? Roberta? How many children?").

Losing ourselves in thought is not the only way we can get distracted. I know people who have amazingly dynamic meditations: cascades of light, beautiful visions, and brilliant moments of insight. Yet their practice doesn't seem to change their relationship to themselves, nor does it help shift the platform on which they live their lives. This is because they treat their meditation like a light show, a play, or an entertainment. They are not looking for their ground, for the Self, for their own essence in the midst of the movement within their meditation. For this reason, despite the gifts they receive in meditation, they don't feel they have gone deep. They don't feel peace. They don't experience satisfaction.

So the first key to deepening your meditation is to become clear about your goal. To begin to look for, to identify, and to identify with your essence.

Identifying the Self
The great secret about the Self, the inner God, is that it is us. As Ramana Maharshi said, "Be as you are. See who you are and remain as the Self." This is the knowledge that all the great spiritual teachers, from Shankaracharya to Meister Eckhart to Bodhidharma, have shared. We don't have to get into an altered state to experience it. All we need to do is to become aware of the part of us that sees and knows. When we touch that inner Knower, even for a second, we touch our essence.

The way I find this easiest to understand is to think of myself as composed of two different aspects: a part that changes, that grows and ages, and a part that doesn't. The changing part of me--the body-mind-personality part--looks very different now than she did when she was a twelve-year-old playing Fox and Geese with the neighborhood kids in Princeton, New Jersey. Her occupations and preoccupations have changed radically since then. Not only has this person played all kinds of different roles through the years--student, journalist, spiritual seeker, disciple, and monk--she also has taken on several dozen inner roles. So this changing part has various outer personalities and as many secret selves. There are aspects of us that seem ancient and wise and parts that seem impulsive, undeveloped, and foolish. They assume different attitudes as well. There is vast detachment along with a large capacity for emotional turmoil; there is frivolity and depth, compassion and selfishness. There are, in short, any number of inner characters inhabiting our consciousness, each with its own set of thought patterns and emotions and each with its own voice.

Yet amidst all these different and often conflicting outer roles and inner characters, one thing remains constant: the Awareness that holds them. Our awareness of our own existence is the same at this moment as it was when we were two years old. That awareness of being is utterly impersonal. It has no agenda. It doesn't favor one type of personality over another. It looks through them all as if through different windows, but it is never limited by them. Sometimes we experience that Awareness as a detached observer--the witness of our thoughts and actions. Sometimes we simply experience it as our felt sense of being: we exist and we feel we exist. The unknown author of The Cloud of Unknowing, a fourteenth-century Christian text, describes it as "the naked, stark, elemental Awareness that you are as you are." In Kashmir Shaivism, it is called purno'ham vimarsha, the "pure awareness of I-am"--the true I that is free of the body and continues to exist even after death.

When we focus in and get to know that Awareness, that "I-am," it becomes the doorway to our deeper Consciousness.

Exercise: Become Aware of Your Awareness
You might like to close your eyes. Sitting comfortably, listen to the sounds in the room. Be aware of all the ambient noises, even the sounds of your own breath, or the gurgling in your stomach.
Now, become aware of how the backs of your thighs feel against your chair. Notice the feeling of the air on your face and the texture of your clothes against your skin.
Become aware of the internal sensations in your body. Perhaps your stomach is rumbling. Maybe there is some tightness in your forehead, heat or cold somewhere in your body. Become aware of the flow of your breath. Notice the coolness of the breath coming into your nostrils and its slight tickling warmth as it goes out.
Be aware of what is in your mind. Notice the thoughts and images darting through it as well as the deeper currents of emotion that run beneath these thoughts.
Now become aware of the Awareness, the inner knowingness, that lets you perceive all this, the inner space that holds your experience of this moment. Perhaps you sense it as a knowingness or as a spaciousness that surrounds and contains your thoughts and other sensations. Perhaps it is an experience of energy, your felt sense of being, or simply a sensation of openness and clarity. Focus on your Awareness. See if you can sense how it is and how it feels: its qualities and texture. Then let yourself be that Awareness.
You may find that you can keep your awareness on Awareness only for a few seconds. That's fine. When your attention skitters off or becomes thought-full, gently return it to Awareness itself. Keep up the practice for as long as you like or as long as you can.

If you keep exploring Awareness in meditation, it begins to emerge more and more distinctly. Thoughts and other sensations gradually recede, and you begin to experience the still, yet fluid field of bare Consciousness that is the underlying ground of you. Eventually, the Awareness that was at first only perceptible in snatches will reveal itself to be a huge expanse of being. "No words are necessary to see into that Reality," Rumi wrote. "Just be, and It is."

According to most of the Eastern spiritual traditions, our inner awareness/energy, or consciousness, is actually a limited, contracted form of the great Awareness/energy that underlies, creates, and sustains all things. The Upanishads call it Brahman, the Vastness. The sages of Kashmir Shaivism called it Chiti (universal Consciousness ), Paramashiva (supreme auspiciousness), Parama Chaitanya (supreme Consciousness), or Paramatma (supreme Self). The great Shaivite philosopher Abhinavagupta called it hridaya, the Heart. Physicists today call it the quantum field. In Buddhism it is called the Dharmakaya, the "body" of truth. And, of course, we also call it God.

In its original, expanded form, that vast creative intelligence encompasses and underlies everything. In one of its limited forms, it is the mind-stuff (in Sanskrit, chitta) that forms the background of our thoughts, perceptions, and feelings. Kashmir Shaivism, which elaborately describes the different stages that this creative intelligence passes through in the process of becoming the material world, in the end has a simple formula for it: "Supreme Consciousness (chiti), descending from its state of complete freedom and power, becomes the mind-stuff of a human being (chitta) when it begins contracting into the form of objects of perception." In other words, the moment we begin to focus on objects--including thoughts, perceptions, and ideas--we lose touch with the underlying vastness within us. And because thoughts, feelings, sensations, and perceptions fill our awareness almost every moment of our existence, it is no wonder that we rarely see the ocean of Consciousness inside us.

Some years ago, a friend of mine had an automobile accident. She was thrown clear of the car. As she lay on the ground, she found herself in a subtle state of awareness that was new to her, yet strangely familiar. She felt bodiless, yet very secure, joyful, and free. For what seemed like a long time, she simply rested in a vast expanded space of love. Then, as slowly as an ant crawling across a windowpane, words began to trickle into her mind: "I . . . wonder . . . if . . . they'll . . . think . . . this . . . was . . . my . . . fault"

The moment she grasped that thought, she was back in her body, in her so-called normal state. She was amazed. She had actually experienced how the contents of the mind limit Awareness. It is not only thoughts that are limiting. The very act of perceiving something as a separate object contracts Awareness, as do the energy patterns created inside us by desires and their attendant emotions or the waves set up by dreams and fantasies. Everything, in short, that coagulates the subtle energy of the mind, or makes it undulate into waves and ripples instead of remaining steady and calm, helps to disguise the luminosity and openness of our inner Consciousness.

The work of yoga is to coax the mind into letting go of the perceptions and ideas that keep it stuck so it can expand and reveal itself as it really is. As vast creative Awareness. Pure light and ecstasy. An ocean of peace and power. The Self.