Self-Inquiry and the Obliteration of “Me”

Self-Inquiry has been so powerful for me in obliterating my egoic identity and in turning my attention towards it’s source.  Just by asking ‘who am I’ makes the tendencies of the mind, or of the ‘psychological me’ immediately bob to the surface where they can be seen so clearly.  “I’m me, Laura Shaw, a mom who is off work right now, I have a master’s degree, oh, and remember the time I carried a canoe for 14 kms?  (such an ego in the ego hey?!!) I’m married to Nick, I live in this house…..” This “I” that claims to be so real immediately starts making a case for itself based on it’s personal biological history and it’s dreams and ambitions for the future. It gives a sense of being real.  It is who I’ve been trained to consider myself to be, and this training is (or seems to be) reinforced by our interactions with others, by our culture, and most powerfuly by our own thoughts about ourselves! So the next question of inquiry for me is ‘who is this I’ (that is giving me answers) – and the mind starts to quieten down a bit. And then “Who is asking?”

Eventually, or more often right away, I find myself in this space of experiencing a ‘not-knowing’ of who “I am”.  It is an experience of the pure awareness that is there – beyond the thinking mind, beyond the emotions.  It is an everpresent awareness that just is.  It is vast and spacious and there is nothing in there.  There is also nothing outside of it.  There is no ‘it’.  This is who I am.    So from this place (which isn’t any place other than who and what I am) when a thought arises, I can see it.  Oh, a thought. And I can stay in the space of awareness – rather, I can recognize that I am that space of awareness and a thought has bubbled up within me. I can see that the thought isn’t the totality of me…. this has been pivotal for my experience of Self.  Again, this can’t just be read – it must be experienced for it to mean something.

It should be said too that I deeply realize that thoughts are not an enemy.  They are not something to get rid of or try to ‘outsmart’.  They are simply forms that appear (and disappear) in the vastness of who I am.  The problem for me was that I thought I was my thoughts…I deeply believed that I was a ‘me’ who was in the driver’s seat of my life. I thought I had to make decisions about the future based on well-plotted schemes wherein I could carry out my ambitions, create some plan that would make us safe and secure, or find or create excitement.  I thought there was a ‘me’ that was in charge.  Now I see through this so clearly.  That ‘me’ is imaginary…. it is an idea – a brilliant, complex, multi-layered figment of my imagination.  What is real is only what is Here and Now.  The pure awareness that is simply and profoundly present – in fact, it is the only thing that IS present!  In this way, “I’m” not who has to control or manage the situation in any way, rather, I am the one who is here, unfolded only in the now, who responds spontaneously, who participates actively but in a completely un pre-meditated way……

At some point recently in my journey of awakening, I still went back to the perception that ‘my’ vantage point was from a particular body, from this particular lived experience (including a personal and biological history, etc.).  I thought that this is where consciousness ‘sees’ and ‘operates’ from.  But there was still fear (egoic ‘me’ identification) in that – that meant that once this body mind dies, that experience of consciousness that we can all sense (the very feeling and knowing that we are alive, there is something here) would also be extinguished.  Now I experience something else.  Now I see that the true vantage point of consciousness is from the present moment – which is always here.  In this way, I experience something eternal – not the mind’s interpretation of eternal, which is attached to time.. but a deeper sense –  coming completely undone into these reverberations of eternity that are so incredibly sublime, ancient, familiar and pulsing with aliveness.  There is nowhere else to go. It’s coming home to the place where I’ve been seeing from all this time.  And astonishingly, that seer is peace itself.