Finding Your Self

Inner Frontier
Fourth Way Spiritual Practice

Inner Work

For the week of December 12, 2016

Finding Your Self

We may spend many years looking for ourselves, trying to discover who we are. To want to find ourselves seems natural, wholesome. But our inability to do so, to be certain about who we are, seems perplexing, even paralyzing. Are we so hidden that we cannot see who we are? Or perhaps, as the Buddhists say, we do not even exist, we have no self. Or are we here, but unrecognized? This fundamental conundrum can cause a great deal of grief, especially if we substitute some unconstructive pose for who we really are.

In trying to know ourselves, it is difficult to know where to start, where to look, because so much stands in the way. We have an ever-growing heap of memories, but they are not us. We can know our endless stream of thoughts, but they are not us. We can know our body, with all of its actions and sensations. It is our life, but it is not us. We can know our emotions, but they are not us. We can know the many desires whispering and tugging at us, but they are not us. We can even see and direct our awareness itself, but we are not our awareness. It is not possible to know our self in the same way we know anything else. We cannot know ourselves that way for a simple reason: we are the one who knows. We cannot see ourselves, because we are the one who sees.

We can, however, be ourselves. We are our will. The most direct way into being our self, our will, is to be our attention. That is something we can experiment with. For example, we can hold our attention steady on an object, a thought, or a part of our body. Then as we do so, we get behind and into our attention itself. We become our attention. We become the one directing and focusing our awareness. The stronger our attention is, the stronger we are.

We work to discover, in our own direct experience, what it actually means to be our attention. And then we practice that. And we can practice being the one who sees what we see, the one who does what we do, the one who thinks when we intentionally think and the one who feels what we feel. In short, we are the one who is present when we are present, the one who experiences what we experience.

We may spend years trying to discover our true calling, what we are meant to do. Yet our first calling is to become ourselves, to be ourselves. Everything else flows from that. How can we know what to do, if we do not know who we are? We begin to see what we are not, but had believed ourselves to be. We see that we are not our thoughts, desires, or personality patterns, and we see, with the Buddhists, that all of that is not our self. And we practice being our self, our will, our attention, our I. We practice presence, and being the one who is present. Life flows. We practice love, and being the one who allows love to flow through us.

For this week, be your self.