Before you have a name, before a thought or a feeling has formed, there is a knowing of being. It runs beneath everything else you might say about yourself, prior to any story of who you are. This knowing is simply ‘I’.
There is only one self, if we can call it a self: pure being or being aware. And you are that without being ‘you’.
There is nothing in pure being other than pure being with which it could be divided or limited. Thus pure being is infinite being, God’s being.
And as infinite being is all that truly is, only infinite being’s experience of itself would be true. And only infinite being’s name for itself would be the true name, the true designation of being.
If being could give itself a name, it would call itself ‘I’.
‘I’ is the name that that which knows itself gives to itself.
Infinite being shines in you as your very own self.
The knowledge ‘I’ – as long as it is not mixed with any experience – is the beacon in your mind that indicates your true nature.
Most people do not realise that when they refer to ‘I’, they refer to infinite being. Why? Because they have allowed their self to become entangled in, mixed with, and as a result seemingly limited by the content of experience.
So the personal self – the temporary, finite, limited self that you seem to be, the ego – is a mixture of the true and only self, the infinite ‘I’, with the content of experience. And this amalgam of infinite being plus the content of experience produces an illusory limited being or self, who derives its reality from infinite being, and its apparent limitations from the content of experience.
If this apparently limited self, the temporary finite person or self that you seem to be, goes deeply into itself, trying to find out who it really is, it will then be – usually gradually, but occasionally suddenly – divested of the limitations that it borrows from the content of experience and stands revealed as it essentially is: the infinite ‘I’, pure being, God’s being.
So in self-enquiry you start off investigating the self that you seem to be and end up recognising the self that you truly are. And when this recognition takes place, self-enquiry turns into self-abidance.
But self-abidance is not something that you as a separate self do or practise. In this self-abidance there is no you as a separate self, no temporary finite being.
For being, self-abidance is just being, being resting in itself as itself.
This is not something you practise; it is what you are. When you understand this, your practice comes to an end. There is no practice, there is no method, there is no path. And you have no need of any teaching.
However, if this is not clear to you, and I imply no judgement if that is the case, in other words, if you still, at least from time to time, believe and feel that you are a temporary finite self, then there is something to do. There is a method, there is a practice. And in this case the very best thing you could do would be to investigate deeply who you essentially are, or alternatively to completely surrender yourself.
Self-enquiry and self-surrender are really two ways of describing the same recognition, because in both cases, if you take them both all the way, all that remains is infinite being.
And if the content of your experience is so intense that it seems to prevent you from self-enquiry or self-surrender, then it is legitimate and necessary to choose a less radical, less direct approach, a more gradual way of coming to the same recognition.
However, in describing these three different approaches, I do not mean to imply that you should just stick to one approach. You might sometimes abide in being as being, sometimes investigate your true nature and sometimes explore your experience at a more relative level. You can go back and forth between the approaches.
But sooner or later, more or less directly, all approaches end up with the One, the one infinite being, whose name is ‘I’. And it is that one infinite being that shines in your mind as your name ‘I’. So the name ‘I’ is like a beacon in the mind that indicates your true nature. Your Christian name is the name that everybody else gives to what you call ‘I’. Infinite being shines in you as the knowledge ‘I’, and the ‘I’ in all people is the same ‘I’, just as the space in all buildings is the same space.
And thus the very nature of ‘I’, or being, is love, for in being there is no absence or separation.
There may be moments when this recognition is not yet clear, and you would like to sit with it a while longer. Living in Peace, Living as Peaceoffers a space to abide, however briefly, as the ‘I’ that was never in question.
