Notice What About You Remains the Same

For some people this recognition that we are awareness itself may seem quite abstract. For those who have realized it, it's not abstract at all. It is their living experience. If it feels abstract to you, I can suggest something very simple: try to notice what about you has always been there, throughout your lifespan. No matter how old or young you are, notice that throughout your life things have changed: your body has changed, your mind has changed, your ego has changed, your beliefs have changed, your personality has changed. All of it has been in a state of flux over many years. But all along, from the time you attained language, you always referred back to yourself as 'I': 'I am this. I think that. I believe this. I believe that. I want this. I want that.' While everything else has changed and continues to change, the 'I' that you refer to has always been there. When you say 'I,' it is the same 'I' now as when you were a little child. The exteriors have changed. The thoughts have changed. The body has changed. The feelings have changed. But the 'I' has not. On the level of intuition, there is a knowing that remains the same as it ever was, and you refer to it every time you say 'I.' Without you even recognizing it, that's the part of you that's divine. That's the sacred part. That's your essential nature. But that 'I' has no form and no shape. It is of the nature of awareness and spirit. And so anybody can notice for themselves and within themselves that this sense of 'I' has been there all along.

But this 'I' is not what the mind thinks it is. Meditative self-inquiry allows you to discover for yourself who and what this 'I' really is. I call it 'meditative self-inquiry' because it is very experiential. It is not philosophical. It is not intellectual. Here, 'meditative' means 'experiential.' Inquiry is only powerful when it is meditative, when we are looking in a sustained and focused and quiet way into our own experience.

Nobody can force this flash of recognition into being. It happens spontaneously. It happens by itself. But what we can do is cultivate the ground and create the conditions under which this flash of recognition happens. We can open our minds to deeper possibilities and start to investigate for ourselves what we really and truly are.

When this awakening to our true nature happens, it may happen for a moment, or it may happen for a longer period of time, or it may happen permanently. Whichever way it occurs, it is perfectly okay. Who you are is who you are. You cannot lose who you are, no matter what your experience is. Even if you have a certain opening and you realize your true nature, and then later you think you've forgotten it, you haven't lost anything. Therefore the invitation is always to rest more and more deeply, to not grasp at an insight or an experience, to not try and hold on to it, but to recognize the underlying reality, that which never changes. The great twentieth-century Indian sage Ramana Maharshi had a saying, 'Let what comes come; let what goes go. Find out what remains.' Meditative self-inquiry is a way of finding out what remains, what has always been.