An Investigation into our Ultimate Identity
Self-knowledge is the ultimate purpose of life. When this has been attained, bliss, universal love, selflessness, peace and fulfilment come automatically. Self-knowledge is not having an intellectual understanding of some philosophical concept, but gaining the spiritual realisation of what exactly our true identity is through experience, having separated ourselves from the elements around, such as body and mind, that we are not. Spiritual practices are designed to enable us to attain that realisation.
How, then does the aspirant sage attain that knowledge? Self-knowledge is unique among all the types of knowledge that can be gathered up. To get other kinds of knowledge, the mind is sent outwards in order to know the object of knowledge. To gain self-knowledge, however, the mind must be turned inwards, back on itself, and ultimately dissolved. This is because, as long as the mind, an objectifying instrument is present, we can only know the object, and not the subject. The sage, however, wishes to know the subject, the perceiver, not the perceived.
The sage looks out at the world. The consciousness of the sage is located in the eye, therefore the eye is the subject, and the world the object.
He sits for meditation and shuts his eyes. If he wishes, he can place the consciousness in different parts of the body or run it along the skin. The consciousness, however, does not seem to extend much beyond, if at all, and is therefore limited by the body, thus making it appear that he is the body.
As the sage interiorises, the consciousness is pulled back from the eye and the rest of the physical body into the mind. The mind now appears to be the subject, and the body the object. After a time, the body is no longer properly perceived. At this point, if the sage tries to determine the exact location of, say, his arm, it will be very difficult to do so exactly, and will mostly be based on guesswork. To do it properly, he will have to become body-conscious again, letting the energies carry the consciousness back into the body, but that means coming out of meditation. This shows that the body is not our true identity, but a sort of vehicle through which we perceive, when the consciousness inhabits it.
The consciousness also leaves the body when we go to sleep and enter the dream state. Clearly, all consciousness does not shut down completely when we enter the dream state, as we are still present, experiencing the dream.
When the sage goes deeper still into meditation, the consciousness is pulled out of the mind, which now becomes the object of the sage’s observation. The consciousness is no longer within the thoughts, but watching them. Eventually, no longer driven by the energies, the mind will go silent, thereby falling away. It is now seen that the mind cannot be our identity, that it, too, is merely a variable element, an instrument of something behind, as the body is. The level of meditation at which it is obvious you are not the mind is advanced, and cannot realistically be attained in a short time. To beginners, it will probably not be obvious at all. Although there are no longer thoughts at this stage, there is still the ego or awareness of ‘I’. This is the new subject, and it is the form the consciousness now adopts.
The mind also falls away when we enter deep sleep from the dream state.
When the sage pulls his consciousness deeper, the ego, too, falls away, and all that is left is consciousness. The point at which the ego falls away is the point at which samadhi is entered. Body consciousness is lost here, as the body and mind are projections of the ego and therefore cannot continue to operate as vehicles of perception if the ego switches off. If there is still a little vibration, a small element of mind, the samadhi is savikalpa. Experiences of savikalpa samadhis can vary a bit from person to person and from time to time. If there is no mind, the samadhi is nirvikalpa. There is no world, no vibration, only Brahman, which is Existence, Consciousness, Bliss Absolute. There are no body, mind, ego, other people’s consciousnesses or any other second element whose form it comes across, so it is infinite, and all these seconds are shown to be ultimately unreal as they are nowhere to be apprehended. Bodies seem many when we are body-conscious, but there is only one Consciousness, one Brahman, and we are all That.
The difference between deep sleep and samadhi is that in sleep our awareness is covered in avidya, ignorance, so we are unaware, whereas in samadhi, that ignorance is not there. The sage is in waking sleep, sleep with full awareness of his identity. In sleep, the consciousness is still present, experiencing through the ego. When someone wakes up, he may say, “I did not know anything,” so ‘I,’ the ego, was still there. There is an entity witnessing the passage of time. When we wake up from deep sleep we can normally make an estimate of how long we slept, whether it was a long time or a short one. In a deep samadhi, there is no awareness of time. There being no mind or ego watching, there is nowhere for the memory of the experience to be stored. There is only the Consciousness, and as there is no second, time cannot be experienced, as there is no duality within which it can exist. We wake up, see the clock, and are surprised, because it seems that time just disappeared. However, we are certainly still present in a deep samadhi, because we get realisations from it, and later bliss manifests, and the knowledge reflects on the mind. It is clearly observable that people change after experiencing samadhi. If they had experienced nothing, if they had simply switched off for some time, there would be no reason why changes would appear. Pure souls can sense the qualities that come from samadhi, which is why they tend to congregate around saints. Brahman, pure Consciousness, is unchanging, eternal, the witness of the states of waking, dreaming and sleeping, and also of birth and death, by which it remains untouched.
In the subtle body, there is a channel called the jivanadi that goes from the heart to the top of the head. When we are in the waking state, the energy is located in the heart. As we go into the dream state, and the body switches off, the energy rises to the throat. As we go into deep sleep, and the mind switches off, the energy goes to the brow. Here it remains, under the influence of avidya, until we start waking up again. In meditation, we remain in the waking state, keeping the energy in the heart, but making the body, mind and avidya switch off. It is necessary to remain in the waking state, because then we can exert an effort to make the avidya drop off, whereas no-one can make any effort to do anything in deep sleep, and one remains stranded there, sleeping. If we can indeed make the avidya drop off, then the energy goes to the top of the head, we are launched into samadhi and thereby realise our ultimate identity.