Great site and resource for those who wish to realize the
I AM: http://www.happinessofbeing.com/articles.html
Tuesday, 25 January 2011
Experiencing the pure ‘I’ here and now
In a comment on my previous article, How to avoid creating fresh
karma (āgāmya)?, an anonymous friend quoted the following passage
from Lucy Cornelssen’s book Hunting the ‘I’ (5th edition, 2003, pp.
20-21):
There are other opportunities, when we could experience this
pure ‘I’ consciously. One such is during the tiny gap between two
thoughts, when the attention has given up its hold on one thought
and not yet caught the next one. But since we never tried our
attention is not trained this way, and we will hardly succeed in
the attempt.
There is a better chance to catch it between sleeping and
awaking. It is very important to try it, if you are serious in your
hunting the ‘I’. Take care of a few conditions: Try at night just
before you fall asleep to keep as the last thought your intention
to catch as the first thing of all on waking in the morning the
experience of your true ‘I’.
What Lucy describes here as the pure ‘I’ or true ‘I’ is simply the
one and only ‘I’ as it really is — in other words, ourself as we
really are. Therefore the pure ‘I’ is not something distant (in
either time or space) or other than ourself, but is simply what we
always actually are. It appears to be something unknown to us only
because we have obscured it by confusing it with adjuncts such as a
physical body and a thinking mind.
However, though it now appears to us to be obscured, it is
actually the essence of what we always experience as ‘I’ — our
pristine and non-dual consciousness of our own being. Therefore
self-investigation (ātma-vicāra) is not really a matter of
‘hunting’ the pure ‘I’ (as if it were something distant or not now
experienced) but is simply the practice of attending to and thereby
being what we always truly are — our own essential self, ‘I
am’.
Since this pure ‘I’ is ever-present — never removed from or
distant to us in either time or space — we can experience it as it
really is only here and now. Therefore we should not think of it as
something that we do not experience now but will experience in
future, because as soon as we anticipate experiencing it in future,
we have in our imagination created a distance between it and us, as
if it were something objective or other than ourself.
Therefore Lucy’s suggestion in this passage that we should try
at night just before falling asleep to keep as our last thought the
intention to catch as the first thing of all on waking in the
morning the experience of our true ‘I’ is potentially
counter-productive, because the experience of ‘I’ that we would
then be anticipating catching on waking is in the future and is
therefore removed from what we actually are here and now.
Therefore, rather than intending to catch some future
experience, we should try to experience ourself as we actually are
here and now. The intention or anticipation to experience anything
in future is a thought that we are thinking now, so it is a
distraction of our attention from experiencing our true ‘I’ as it
is at present (which is as it always has been and always will be,
if at all there is really any such thing as the past or
future).
If we are to experience our true ‘I’ in the present moment —
which is the only moment in which we ever can actually experience
it — we should not intend to experience it at any moment other than
now, at this precise present moment, because every other moment is
only a thought, and every thought is a distraction from pure
self-attentiveness, which is the state that we should be aiming to
experience.
If our pure ‘I’ can be experienced at the moment between
sleeping and awaking, as Lucy suggests, it can equally well be
experienced at the moment between being awake and falling asleep.
Therefore, rather than wasting that precious moment just before
falling asleep trying ‘to keep as the last thought your intention
to catch’ the experience of ‘I’ on waking the next morning, we
should utilise it to fix our attention only on ‘I’ to the exclusion
of all other thoughts.
If we fall asleep being self-attentive, we stand a better chance
of waking up in a self-attentive state than if we fall asleep with
the thought that we should be self-attentive when we wake up. If we
fall asleep with the latter thought, we will probably wake up with
the same thought, and this thought that we should be self-attentive
at some time in the future is not the same as actually being
self-attentive in the present moment, here and now.
Our pure ‘I’ is ever-present, so in order to experience it as it
is we do not have to wait for any gap such as between two thoughts
or between two states. All thoughts (including thoughts of the past
or future, or of gaps between thoughts or states) and all states
(such as waking, dream and sleep) appear to exist only because we
attend to them, so if we ignore them by attending only to ‘I’ they
will cease to exist, being mere illusions created by māyā, our own
self-deceptive power of imagination.
Though Sri Ramana taught us that we experience ‘I’ in its pure
state in the tiny gap between any two consecutive thoughts or
between any two consecutive states, he did not expect us to wait in
anticipation for such a gap at any time in future, but only urged
us to attend to ‘I’ now (and at every other moment — as and when we
experience it as ‘now’), because so long as we are deeply
self-attentive and thereby ignoring all thoughts, states and
passing times, we are truly experiencing the gap to which he was
referring.
Unless we are deeply self-attentive (and thereby completely
devoid of all thoughts) at this present moment, we cannot actually
experience the pure ‘I’ that shines in the gap between each two
consecutive thoughts or states. Therefore, without thinking of
anything else whatsoever, we should here and now attend wholly and
exclusively to ‘I’ alone, as Sri Ramana instructs us emphatically
in the last two lines of verse 27 of Bhagavad Gītā Sāram (which is
his Tamil rendering of Bhagavad Gītā 6.25):
சித்தத்தை யான்மாவிற் சேர்த்திடுக மற்றெதுவு
மித்தனையு மெண்ணிடா தே.
cittattai y-āṉmāviṯ sērttiḍuka maṯṟeduvu
m-ittaṉaiyu m-eṇṇiḍā dē.
Fix the mind [your power of attention] in ātman [your essential
self]; do not think even in the least of anything else
whatsoever.
What we need to experience is only one moment of absolutely
thought-free and therefore perfectly clear self-attentiveness,
because that alone will be sufficient to destroy forever the
illusion that we are this mind or anything else other than what we
really are (the pure and true ‘I’), and until we experience such a
moment of pure self-attentiveness we will remain tightly bound in
the grips of this illusion — and of all the troubles that it brings
in its wake.
Posted by Michael James (www.happinessofbeing.com) at
09:05
