The primary aim of meditation is to go beyond the narrow confines of our ordinary self and experience the immensity of life’s possibilities. It is to free ourself from the tenacious grip of individualism and be born again into our full humanity.
Individualism, with its accompanying habitual and limiting patterns of perception, afflictive and disturbing emotions, ruminating mental chatter, automated reactivity, and an unquestioned false belief that we are this “personal self,” imprisons us in a narrow and contracted life. This does not reject the necessary intellectual and cognitive skills that support and allow us to navigate day-to-day life. Rather it highlights the dilemma of our personal learned psychology which chained to the past and projected into an imaginary future traps us in a tenacious individualism, denying us access to our essential humanity.
Our mentally constructed personal self does not come with birth. We are born as humans, not as individuals. We are born without distinctive names, personalities, patterns of thought and action. That is all acquired, learned. It is who we become, not who we truly are. And try as we do, utilizing an endless array of self-development strategies the personal self - including the improved version - cannot bring us to the authentic and natural serenity, freedom, wholeness, and compassion that is already and always available in our fundamental humanity. We know this by heart. We know there is more to life than what appears on the surface.
Our choice is simple. Either we live a lifetime cultivating the illusion that we are merely this limited individual self - filled with self-doubt, anxiety, fear, and narrowness of thought and action – or we awaken to the resilient eternal truth that there is more to life than our ordinary self can imagine. That knowing provokes us, if fortunate, to go beyond to another dimension, to our natural self, to our humanity. The mantra of the ancient Buddhist Heart Sutra reminds us over and over:
Gate, Gate, Paragate, Parasaṃgate, Bodhi Svaha
(Gone, Gone, Gone Utterly Beyond, Gone to the other Shore, Oh What an Awakening)
That “other” shore is our shore. The “otherness,” which lies beyond our recalcitrant individualism is our home, our true nature, our human being. Here we find our authentic and grace-giving self, which is seamlessly interwoven with serenity, joy, wisdom, love, and freedom. Beyond our fabricated man-made personal “I” lies the heart center of life.
In the western tradition The Oracle of Delphi conveys it as such:
Once you have touched it
There is no division:
No tearing your heart away
For it knows no separation.
How do we re-experience, sustain, and live our true and full humanity? How do we bring this “otherness” into daily life? First, we are told, become aware of your tenacious conditioning – your narrow habits of perception, learned reactivity, biased judgements, and interpretations, and then let go of this false learning. Do not feed these ghosts of times past with your attention. We are then asked to give up the clinging attachment to our constantly shifting identities and mental chatter. And finally, open our mind and heart to a clear and expansive perception/awareness, allowing the vitality of our essential truth, freedom, and “otherness” to be known, when you have disinvested from the unchallenged influence of your surface “I.” Then, rest in the stillness and all-knowing of your essential self, which is foundational and unchanging. Be satisfied with nothing less than who you are and have always been.
Is that difficult? Consider the words of Anais Nin:
And the day came
When the risk to remain tight in a bud
Was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
The alternative is indeed far more difficult. Enmeshed in daily existence, our vision turned outwards, we cannot observe the limitations of our personal “I.” The smaller cannot see the larger. Learned habits serve as thick veils obscuring truth. The cost to us is life itself. The imagined individual is “dead,” a mere reflection of the past. The human is a living thing.
Where do we begin. We begin at the end. We begin by simply and effortlessly dropping into our natural state of “flow,” presence, and being. There are many ways to accomplish this. We all know them through experience – an immersion in nature, selfless intimacy, uplifting art, beauty, music, dance, meditation, and so on. Each of these moments, however momentary, shares a similar dissolution of our personal self. These precious moments of selflessness, however fleeting, reveal the experience of our underlying natural self, flow, and basic humanity. For a precious moment we forget who we have become and experience who we have always been.
Rarely does one understand or recognize the total significance of these moments. It is essential not to take them as mere fleeting pleasures, serendipitous moments to grasp onto, possess, conceptualize, or merely relax into. That would be a costly error, an error that may be at the cost of your life. These fleeting glimpses are intimations of the “other,” of your natural self. When you drop into these moments stop, rest with awareness of this experience of flow and “otherness,” sense it, feel it, know it, and trust it as your essence. But don’t stop there.
If you recognize and cherish these spontaneous experiences as intimations of your authentic self, they may serve as a signpost or reminder, directing you towards time-tested approaches to re-claiming, stabilizing, and owning your essential human beingness. If you are fortunate in your deepest yearnings, these will no longer be mere fleeting pleasures. They will progressively endure as the unchanging essence of who you are.
So we rest in these moments when they naturally and spontaneously occur, recognizing them as our true self and devoting ourself to overcoming our individual self and re-experiencing ourself as a human being. We acknowledge the inner dialogue of our personal self that wants to pull us back to the old ways. “It is not possible to live from this space of beingness and presence.” “It is just a passing moment.” “Get back down to earth.” That’s our old voice, which is unwilling to surrender its authority to that which is greater. So we may need some mentoring, approaches, and practices that will slowly create accessibility, trust, and stability of our natural self.
We begin by cleaning up our psychological room. We become aware of our conditioning, our patterns, our reactivity, our afflictive emotions, and our ego-centricity, and progressively act from kindness, discernment, virtue, and stillness. Cleaning up your “room” will not take you to the “other,” but it will allow more of an opportunity to live with inner stillness, less conditioning, greater peace, and heart. And this ground will progressively open the possibility that moments of otherness will spontaneously appear and in time coalesce into a more sustained experience.
We explore this more intensively in formal meditation and progressively integrate it into daily life. We remember the precious glimpses, drop into them for moments here and there, bring clear awareness to the present experience, abandon what encourages your old life, and cultivate what supports your essential self, and finally - open your heart. Fallbacks will occur, but just get up, dust yourself off, and continue.
Slowly, or perhaps quite quickly, a time will surely come when what you have become will fade in importance and you will have gone beyond, far beyond, to the other shore, an awakening which is irreversible.