The longing to become free of suffering, to rest in peaceful well-being, gives rise to various approaches, not all of which bear fruit. Here are three common ones:
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Work on the familiar self, in the hope that it will improve all the way to awakening
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Pursue a heightened experience or state
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Master spiritual ideas and terminology (equating mental understanding with visceral knowing)
All of these approaches are misguided. They are undertaken by the ego, aimed at improving itself. As if the ego could be perfected.
If so much of what passes for spiritual work is wheel-spinning, what might a person profitably focus on instead?
The seed of fruitful effort lies in the question What am I? When everything changes, the answer to that question is different from what it was before. Not the intellectually known answer but the one that comes viscerally. You literally no longer experience what you are the way you used to.
What you wake up to is that you are not (and never were) your ego. The problem is not that your ego suffers; it’s that you mistake it for what you are.
(In case you’re telling yourself that you already “know” you aren’t your ego, please realize this is probably a mental knowing — and not all that transformative, as you may have noticed. Only bodied knowing indicates real change. When the change in perspective has occurred, you experience yourself differently.)
When you look back to before, you will see (such a revelation!) that what you once absolutely believed to be you was just a hodgepodge of memories, conditioning, personality, physical features, stories, ideas and beliefs, and fleeting emotional states. All of it one big unwieldy blob, having enormous weight and stickiness and emitting a foul odor. This blob was carried along in the suitcase of your mind through every adventure, as if without it all, you would cease to be.
It sure did seem like what you really were. Now, relieved of it, you can hardly believe you once invested it with reality, exhausting yourself trying to make the thing workable and impressive.
After everything changes, really just one thing has changed: your sense of identity has shifted from all of that to something else. The blob-filled suitcase has been abandoned by the side of the road. The something else is not as easy to describe as the prior mess, where the familiar satisfaction and suffering have flourished.
It’s easier to portray the after by saying what’s missing. Time no longer feels real to you. It doesn’t occur to you to resist, or to make up a story about anything. You’ve stopped grousing. No matter what, you’re content. Since all of that other stuff about “you” no longer has substance, you — the newly-experienced you — cannot be harmed or threatened or made to feel insecure. You no longer have the machinery to get your dander up, or to be embarrassed, or to feel especially pleased with yourself. Your mind is quiet, unless you need to think about something.
You no longer take seriously that person you once thought you were.
What does it feel like you are, then? Consciousness. Spaciousness. Beingness.
It’s unmistakable that this exquisite reality has been here all along. That you have come home. There is nothing new about it. It’s just newly . . . recognized. Occupied.
Your sense of self includes present-moment reality — the now — whatever that may be. You don’t feel separate from what’s happening. The reason it doesn’t occur to you to resist anything is that you don’t experience reality as if it were “over there” and “you” are here, making assessments about it. (The assessor has gone missing.)
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The compelling question to pose to yourself is What am I? What do you experience yourself as being?
The question is not How can I improve myself? or How can I experience higher consciousness (or get it to last)? or What more do I need to learn?
As for pursuing the longed-for condition, rest from that. It’s the ego that’s seeking a certain kind of imagined pleasant experience. Consciousness itself wants for nothing. Only the ego can want. When wanting comes, recognize it for what it is: there it is, the ego doing its thing. Then leave it be. Don’t let it lead you around by the nose.
The memory of a period of blissful or peaceful consciousness can become a torment, a thing to attempt to re-create. You may have an idea of what it would be like to get beyond ego, and you’ve made it your goal to “get there.” It’s safe to assume that your imagining of freedom is no predictor of what it will actually be like. See that the image in your head is a thought, nothing more. You are pursuing an idea, and it’s located in some possible future, which has no existence independent of your picture of it.
A huge amount of misdirected spiritual work is aimed at trying to fix the ego, to make it more comfortable. The idea of “working on yourself,” that cherished project of the self-help industry, seems to have infected contemporary spirituality.
The ego, for many, has become spiritualized. It’s cloaked in spiritual affectation, adorned in practices and lofty ideas that thrive radically disconnected from real life. The spiritual ego takes on the tortured vocabulary of nonduality — “the character,” “this body-mind” — as if the scrupulous avoidance of the first-person pronoun will engender the experience of no-self. Intent on awakening, a well-meaning person will assume a spiritual name, give up meat, adopt a certain lingo or practice, affect “sweetness and light” as a way to keep a lid on anger and fear. Denial flourishes like an invasive plant form. People wonder why they get stuck.
If you are taking offense at this, let a light come on. The “you” that’s capable of taking offense (like the you that’s cultivated a spiritual identity) is not what you deeply are. Only the ego can be offended. As it’s said in A Course in Miracles, “Nothing real can be threatened.” If you feel threatened by what someone says or does, by definition what’s enlivened is your ego.
Don’t try to change your ego or cultivate a certain identity. Rather than judging the misdeeds of your mind-made self, simply become acquainted with how it operates. See the strength of identification with your history and beliefs. See how easily you get sucked into your thoughts, as if they were the truth. As if they were you.
If you focus on trying to eliminate your negativity, weed out your cherished beliefs, peel away your conditioning, manage your anger, or distance yourself from your difficult history, your precious attention is being squandered. What you’re trying to do is spruce up your familiar self. As if it could be improved all the way to awake.
Do you see the folly of this?
There’s nothing “wrong” with taking on a spiritual identity . . . so long as you don’t imagine it will set you free. No matter how the ego is clothed, how it dances or speaks, underneath it’s still its same reactive, fearful, defensive self. That wolf in sheep’s clothing, you might say. A spiritual identity is no better than any other kind of identity. An identity that’s got to do with higher consciousness seems to set it apart (above), but this is just one more illusion — an especially deceptive one. It’s around every corner, waiting to trick you once more.
Your fundamental nature — that which you long to dwell in, as — has no identity at all. Any attempt to embody its enormity in a name, a mere word, is inevitably reductive. No collection of ideas can hope to account for it. You’re much better off ceasing to maintain any identity. Only then can it get quiet enough inside to sense what you are apart from all definition.
Don’t let the apparently spiritual nature of your familiar self deceive you into supposing this is anything but another project of the ego. The wolf may have changed its clothing, but the animal is the same.
It’s the most natural thing in the world to want to soothe or strengthen the ego. The deep motivator is to feel better. (This — not the longing to know the truth — is what leads most people to the spiritual life.) Since the ego is both the cause and the victim of suffering, it looks as though “fixing” the ego would be the way to suffer less.
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The real answer comes alive at a more fundamental level. Investigate the enduring impression that the ego is what you are. It’s the identification with ego that keeps the suffering going. That identification must occur first, before the familiar pattern of thought-induced suffering can continue to run. If you don’t mistake the ego for what you are — if you don’t take it seriously — it will unwind quite naturally. It will no longer so enthrall you.
To linger in the ego itself, to focus on “improving” it, is only to continue to feed and clothe and house it. As if it were the ultimate reality. As if it could hope to traverse the vast distance between itself and whatever is beyond it.
When the ego gets your attention, and you become dissatisfied (frustrated, afraid, whatever), instead of going where you usually go, which is to try to improve your reaction, thought patterns, emotions, or make an intention to “do better” in the future, simply remind yourself that this thing that suffers, tries harder, gets discouraged, and intends, is not what you are. When you let it engross you, when you believe its thoughts with an eye to solving its “problems,” you are saying you believe it’s what you are, that it’s worthy of attention.
It is not fixable, not radically. The level on which it’s fixable is psychological, not existential. (Psychological improvements are not worthless, but they will not set you free.)
The ego does not evolve into unencumbered consciousness. Beingness is here already, in spite of the ego, entirely independent of its force field. Your true nature has nothing whatever to do with the concerns of the mind-made self. All that changes is that at some point one stops feeling real and the other assumes vitality, like an organ that’s always been with you but is only now getting blood to it.
The illusion that you can improve all the way to waking up is rooted in the illusion that you are not already the longed-for thing. You have to believe you’re not already That in order to suppose that fixing your ego could lead you to awakeness. The whole thing is merely a perception problem. You don’t need time to fix your ego. (There isn’t enough time in eternity to fix an ego.) If there’s a need for time, it’s so you can discover what you’ve been distracted from all along. Not so you can “attain” something. You’ve already attained it. You just can’t see it. This is because the thing you think you are has been holding all of your attention, your entire life.
Trying to improve your ego may result in superficial improvements to the invented self, but it will never haul you out of the world of illusion. The ego does not become lighter until it ultimately awakens. Yet this fond hope is what drives many a seeker. The ego does not awaken. The primary goal of the ego, ever and always, is self-preservation. You will never convince the ego to get out of its own way, to walk to the edge of a cliff and step off.
What you wake up to is that you are not (and never were) your ego. The problem is not that your ego suffers; it’s that you mistake it for what you are.
Focus on the nature of what you appear to be. Become intensely curious about how this you functions. How it is generated, how it maintains and defends and asserts and consoles itself. What it clings to for self-definition. So that you can recognize it for what it is, immediately, each time it stirs itself — instead of engaging with its picture of reality, instead of cringing at its antics and trying to make it behave better.
What you’re learning about — a truly fruitful endeavor — is what you are not.
As you observe this invented self functioning, as you see your investment in it, ceaselessly remind yourself — Not this. It — the truth of what I am — is not this. Whatever it is, it isn’t this blob, this ceaseless loop of stories, this emotional stew, a head full of spiritual ideas. However well-meaning it might all be, however noble its aspirations. This isn’t it.
Nor is it this. You are getting a mountain’s worth of evidence of what you are not, even as it continues to enthrall.
At least don’t score points for the other side. Stop telling yourself that all this stuff inside the suitcase is what a human life is meant to be about, the thing we’re all here to discover. Keep reminding yourself: Not this, not this. Don’t get sucked in (for the millionth time) to trying to remold your ego.
See how much you want to identify with the familiar self. It will constantly fool you into thinking surely this is real. At some point the thought will come . . . Well, if THIS isn’t what I really am, then what AM I? Which may be scary.
But now you are standing in front of the door that’s been waiting for you. So patiently, all your precious life.
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What am I? This is what you ultimately come to. The way to prepare yourself to pose that question — not intellectually, but in your body, existentially — is to consistently recognize the ego for what it is and to withdraw attention from its concerns. You must be pressed to the question What am I? It’s only by the devoted Not this, not this that you can become clear of all the distraction of the suffering ego that has appeared to be fixable, that has pursued a certain kind of experience or “state.”
Nisargadatta’s teacher told him, “You are not what you take yourself to be. Find out what you are. Watch the sense ‘I am.’ Find your real Self.”
Here’s Nisargadatta’s description of what happened: “This brought an end to the mind; in the stillness of the mind I saw myself as I am — unbound. I used to sit for hours together, with nothing but the ‘I am’ in my mind, and soon peace and joy and a deep all-embracing love became my normal state. In it all disappeared — myself, my Guru, the life I lived, the world around me. Only peace remained and an unfathomable silence.”
One fine moment of electric stillness, it will dawn on you what you actually are. To prepare the ground for this revelation, devote yourself to the scrupulous, gutsy recognition of what you are not.