The primary aim of meditation is to go beyond the narrow confines of our ordinary self and experience the immensity of life’s possibilities. We aim to free ourself from the tenacious grip of individualism and to awaken to our full humanity.
Individualism, with its accompanying habitual and limiting patterns of perception, afflictive and disturbing emotions, imprisons us in a narrow and contracted life. Our personal psychology, chained to the past, traps us in tenacious conditioning, denying us access to our essential humanity and its full possibilities.
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 an authentic and natural serenity, freedom, wholeness, and compassion that paradoxically is already and always available as our fundamental humanity. We know there is more to life than what appears on the surface. We know this by heart.
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 our 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, we open our mind and heart to a clear and expansive awareness, allowing the vitality of our essential truth, freedom, and “otherness” to be known.
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.
We have all tasted fleeting moments of this experience – an immersion in nature, selfless intimacy, uplifting art, beauty, music, dance, meditation, and so on. Each of these moments shares a similar dissolution of our personal self. For a precious moment we forget who we have become and experience who we have always been.
Rarely does one understand or recognize the 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. 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.
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 your 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 moment experience, cultivate what supports your essential self, and finally - open your heart. Fallbacks will occur, but just get up, dust yourself off, and continue. Measure your achievements not by the duration of your touch into the deeper self, but rather by how your practices transform your life over time.
Slowly, or perhaps quite quickly, a time will surely come when what you have become as an ego self will fade in importance and you will have gone beyond, far beyond, to the other shore, to an awakening which is irreversible.