The idea of the true Self appears in different contexts. Spirituality, religion and philosophy use and describe it in different ways.
When the true Self is spoken of here, it does not mean the personal “I” that develops over a lifetime and is shaped by experiences, upbringing, culture and ideas about ourselves.
This does not make the personal “I” meaningless. It carries its own history, its conditioning and its individual form.
We could analyse this “I”, take it apart and explain it in ever greater detail. But in doing so, we might simply place it at the centre once again.
Almost as some religions have focused so much attention on the devil that he eventually seems to lurk around every corner.
That is not what this is about. Let us turn instead towards what already is, before all of this is added.
Before any thought, before any idea about yourself, before anything you know about yourself, you must already be.
You must be before you can think.
You must be before you can describe yourself.
You must be before you can say: I am this person or that.
And what is true of a human being on a small scale leads to the same question on a larger scale:
What is the Self of this whole?
What is, before anything else is?
Before space is?
Before time is?
Before anything appears that we call world, life, human being or universe?
But what if we do not even take space and time for granted?
Here we touch on what different spiritual traditions point towards with the word Self, and what Ramana Maharshi also spoke of.
The Self is not an object.
It is not something standing opposite something else.
But neither is it nothing.
For nothingness, too, is not the final word.
The Self is not confined to space and time. And yet it is as space and as time, in space and in time—and also where space and time can no longer be assumed.
There is nothing—nothing at all—that could stand outside this Self.
Ultimately, the Self cannot be explained.
Any explanation would already reduce it to what can be said about it.
Even the word “Self” is a concept of our mind. It is not what it points to.
What is called Self here therefore cannot be captured by a definition.
Anyone wishing to come closer to this mystery will have to explore it for themselves.
Self-inquiry
The Self is not my Self. It is the only Self.
There is not my true Self here and yours over there.
There is THE SELF.
And nothing that appears stands outside it.
What we call “I” in everyday life is the idea of a separate, autonomous being.
I think.
I decide.
I act.
I did that.
I know that.
I can do that.
Here, too, we encounter the difficulty of our concepts.
“I”, “Self” and “God” are words. None of these words is what it points to.
What is called THE SELF here could also be called God—provided this does not mean a higher being outside us.
In Hinduism, too, we encounter understandings of God that differ fundamentally from the idea, widespread in the West, of a God separate from the world.
So when God is spoken of here, it does not mean a being alongside other beings.
What is meant is THE ONE.
Nothing stands opposite this One.
Where could such a separation take place?
You cannot separate water from ice. Ice is water.
And you cannot take a wave out of the sea and set it before you as something independent.
The wave does not exist independently of the sea. It is the sea in motion.
Just as the wind is not waiting somewhere until it starts to blow. Wind is the blowing itself.
Our language readily turns appearances into separate things. We give them a name—wave, wind, I—and the impression can arise that something independently existing must stand behind that name.
But a name does not create an independent existence.
The “I”, too, can become something whose existence we take for granted in this way, without asking what the word actually points to.
And you cannot even separate yourself from your own breath.
You can say:
My breath.
But how independent is this “my”?
Take the breath away, and the one who was just claiming to possess it very soon disappears as well.
What is our own is not separate.
Our own Self is not a private Self.
Awakening
Who awakens?
The “I” cannot awaken. For the “I” is not an independent being that could awaken.
Nor is there a second, individual Self hidden behind this “I” that awakens at some point.
There are not billions of little true Selves, one of which awakens while another is still asleep.
There is THE SELF.
What, then, does it mean to speak of the Self awakening?
The Self itself has never changed.
The capacities of human consciousness allow us to look at ourselves, think about ourselves and relate experiences to ourselves.
This is precisely what makes identity possible.
And here we need to be more precise.
Up to this point, I too have repeatedly spoken of the “I” as though it named something independent. This reflects our ordinary language and helps us understand initially what is being discussed.
Yet this very language can solidify something whose independence we had actually wanted to examine.
We say:
My mind.
My consciousness.
My body.
My thoughts.
My life.
But who is this “my”?
Even when we say “the I wants”, “the I thinks” or “the I takes itself to be something”, we have already granted the “I” an independence of its own.
But the “I” does not declare:
I am I.
The human being says:
I am I.
This is a crucial distinction.
There is not an independent “I” somewhere within us that thinks, wants and decides, and then also identifies with itself.
This does not mean, however, that thinking, remembering, reacting or deciding cannot develop a momentum of their own.
Thoughts can arise and continue without our having consciously produced them. Habits can be active without our having chosen them at that moment. Even thinking we do not want can continue.
Yet this momentum does not in itself imply an independent, conscious “I” standing behind these processes and carrying them out.
Rather, what we call “I” has become so deeply taken for granted that almost everything is related to it: my experience, my thoughts, my history, my decisions, my body, my life.
Here we see the power of conditioning.
What is repeatedly referred back to this single point of reference can eventually seem so self-evident that its reality is no longer questioned.
We must therefore be careful not to grant the “I”, through our language alone, the very independence whose reality we are examining.
The illusion is not that a genuinely existing “I” somehow needs to be eliminated.
The illusion lies in the independence we attribute to it.
Within human consciousness, this “I” can become an object of identification.
A person identifies with it and eventually takes it to be what they themselves are.
They can free themselves from this identification.
Not because an “I” disappears in the process.
But because it becomes clear that this supposedly independent “I” was never what it was taken to be.
Awakening therefore does not mean that the “I” disappears and the true Self takes its place.
It means the release of consciousness from identification with this “I”.
What remains was never absent.
THE SELF.
It is THE SELF that appears as a human being, as life and as consciousness.
Yet its appearances do not stand opposite it.
Appearance is not separate from the Self. It is the Self appearing.
Nothing that appears can stand outside what is called THE SELF here.
When identification with the supposedly independent “I” falls away, “you” no longer exist in the way you previously took yourself to exist.
And yet everything continues to be experienced through YOU.
Outwardly, everything may seem completely unchanged.
But for you, nothing is the same any more.
What happened?
Here I can no longer speak theoretically or by way of explanation. Here I have to share the experience itself as directly as possible.
The sky opened.
And I do not mean that only figuratively.
Space came alive.
It was no longer an empty place in which things are put and life unfolds.
It was itself alive.
Something utterly intrinsic, eternal, was there.
Soham?
The I-am?
Nothingness?
That which eternally prevails?
It cannot be done.
It cannot be put into words.
And then my mind became still.
A seemingly endless stillness I had known nothing of until then.
Still, as perhaps only an unborn star could experience.
Still as the deepest waters.
Still as life itself, as though even sounds were held within this stillness.
And at the same time, free.
Full of confidence.
Full of knowing.
And nothing that needed to be known.
What I did not know before
Much of what I say and write today, I did not know before this event.
The questions and themes explored here were not unfamiliar to me. They had been with me for a long time.
But I could not previously have drawn from this well that has been present to me ever since.
This well was entirely unknown to me.
And when this experience happened, there was no one with whom I could really make sense of it or unravel it.
Years of profound doubt followed.
Not because the experience had not been powerful enough.
But because an experience does not automatically come with its own explanation.
What was that?
What in it is experience?
What in it is interpretation?
What am I adding to it myself?
What can I really say?
I had to put it to the test.
Yet throughout all those years, the experience itself never left me.
Doubts arose. Pain, despair and ever more questions could enter into it. But what had opened in that experience remained present.
It remained present as an enduring awareness.
Not as a memory of something that had once happened, but as something that could no longer be separated from my life.
Today I also understand what has remained present in it.
It is not something that was added to life.
It is life itself.
It is the nature of what is alive, the nature of space, something always present that does not itself become changeable through changing experiences.
You cannot think it away.
But neither can you think it into being.
No one can produce it through a thought or a wish.
And that is precisely why I do not have to pretend today that I do not know what I experienced just to remain open.
Openness does not mean uncertainty.
A certainty can be questioned without having to become a conjecture.
Questioning does not take the experience away from me.
And the experience does not take away my freedom to examine everything that has been said again.
Much of what I say today, I did not know before.
It is not first thought out and then put into words.
For me, this is an essential difference between wisdom and ordinary thinking.
It does not announce itself.
It is not thought out beforehand.
It is there.
Sometimes I encounter what I am saying only in the very moment it is being said.
That is why what I say is not an invitation to believe.
I can say:
This is what I experienced.
This is what I recognise in it.
This is what I am speaking of.
And all of it can be questioned.
More than that:
You can look for yourself.
Not a hair’s breadth
When Meister Eckhart says:
“The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me”,
this means something very simple to me, and at the same time something almost impossible to express:
Not a hair’s breadth of separation.
Not me here and God there.
Not my consciousness with another, greater consciousness behind it.
Not my Self and the Self.
Not the One with the many things beside it.
For the many do not stand opposite the One.
They were never separate from it.
This is what the idea of the true Self points to for me.
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Perhaps the star is being born now.
It will take its course,
and a long tail will follow it.
And full of joy it will sink back
into the same stillness
from which it …
IS.