SELF-ENQUIRY AND SELF-REMEMBERING
What does consciousness have to do to know itself? In order for consciousness or awareness to discover its own nature, it has to ‘look at’ itself. However, awareness cannot separate itself from itself and look at or know itself in subject–object relationship, just as the sun cannot turn round and shine on itself.
To know objective experience awareness assumes the form of mind, but to know itself awareness need not assume the form of mind; it need only remain in itself. This self-resting in and as awareness is the essence of meditation or prayer. It is the non-activity in which awareness knows its own being.
A mind that is accustomed to directing its attention exclusively towards objective experience will often object to this suggestion, saying that it does not know where to find awareness or in what direction to look. For such a mind the presence of awareness may first be accessed as the experience of simply being aware, the feeling of being or the knowledge ‘I am’. Later on, the mind will recognise that all there is to experience is the knowing of it, and therefore the only substance that awareness ever truly knows or comes in contact with is itself.
However, a mind that has been indoctrinated with the materialist paradigm from an early age will believe that it experiences a multiplicity and diversity of objects, each with its own separate and independent existence, which it seems to know from the perspective of a separate subject or self, just as the dreamed world seems to be known from the perspective of a dreamed subject within that world. Thus, as a compassionate concession to such a mind we may say, to begin with, that the presence of awareness is known as the experience of simply being aware, the feeling of being or the knowledge ‘I am’. Turning the mind towards any of these will take the mind on a unique journey, in a directionless direction, on a pathless path, in which it will gradually dissolve into the light of awareness from which it arises, like an image slowly fading, leaving the screen, its reality, visible.
In religious terms this resting of the mind in its source is referred to as the practice of the presence of God. The penultimate prayer is the directing of the mind exclusively towards God, but this prayer still leaves the mind intact as an entity separate from God. The ultimate prayer is the surrender of the very mind which considers itself to be an entity in its own right. To the mind that believes itself to be a limited entity in its own right, God is something other than itself. But if God is something other, then God must be finite, and such a God cannot be God. As the Sufi mystic Balyani said, ‘Otherness for Him is Him without otherness.’
In other words, God can only be known by Himself, and in order to know His own existence God must be self-aware. Therefore, God’s knowledge of Himself must be awareness’s knowledge of itself. Awareness’s knowledge of itself shines in each of our minds as the knowledge ‘I am’, the feeling of being or the simple experience of being aware. That is, the knowledge that each of us has of our very own being is God’s knowledge of Himself. Later we will also see that the ultimate reality – awareness’s knowledge of itself or God’s knowledge of Himself – shines in the experience of peace, happiness, love and beauty and, in fact, expresses itself in and as the totality of all experience.
Thus the knowledge ‘I am’ is God’s signature in the mind. It is the portal through which awareness localises itself as the mind and the same portal through which the mind passes in the opposite direction as it investigates its essential nature. The knowledge ‘I am’, or the knowledge of our own existence – awareness’s knowing of its own being – is our primary knowledge, upon which all other knowledge and experience depend. Until the nature of ourself is known, it is not possible to have correct knowledge about any other thing. Thus, there is no higher knowledge than to know the nature of oneself, the nature of ‘I’.
We may not know exactly what I am, but we know that I am. Before we know anything about ourself, such as our age, name, gender, nationality, height, weight and qualifications, each of us knows that ‘I am’. That is, before awareness knows any objective knowledge or experience, it knows its own being. In the experiences ‘I am young’, ‘I am old’, ‘I am sick’, ‘I am well’, ‘I am a man’, ‘I am a woman’, ‘I am sad’, ‘I am happy’, and so on, the simple knowledge of our being – the knowledge ‘I am’ – remains consistently present, although it may seem to be temporarily coloured by experience.
Our essential, self-aware being doesn’t appear or disappear. However, the mind confuses all temporary qualities, conditions, ideas, images and feelings with the basic feeling of being and thus imagines that our essential being shares their limitations and destiny, and is, as such, temporary and finite. The knowledge ‘I am’ never changes, although it sometimes seems to be obscured, veiled or coloured by experience. The states of waking, dreaming and sleeping and the qualities, conditions, ideas, images and feelings that accompany them are temporarily added to our basic being but never essentially define or modify it.
Unlike all other knowledge and experience that is known by ‘I’, the knowledge ‘I am’ is known by itself. It is I that knows that I am, or, as God said to Moses in the Old Testament, ‘I am that I am.’ The knowledge ‘I am’ is a trace in the mind of the vast ocean of awareness that lies beyond and prior to the mind, and indeed in which the mind appears. In the same way, a patch of blue sky that at first seems to appear within the clouds is itself a hint of the vast sky that lies beyond and prior to them, and indeed in which they are located.
The knowledge ‘I am’ is the only knowledge that remains the same under all circumstances, at all times and for all people, and is thus a hint in the finite mind as to its essential, irreducible reality. No other knowledge satisfies these requirements, and therefore no knowledge other than awareness’s knowing of its own infinite being can be said to be absolute. This knowledge is known in religious terms as the Absolute or God’s infinite being. The knowledge ‘I am’ is the first form of God in the finite mind. ‘I am’ is thus said to be God’s holy name. God Himself has no name, but in the mind He shines as the name ‘I’ or ‘I am’.
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At this stage, the mind may legitimately ask how it can turn the light of its knowing away from the objects that it seems to know and towards its own essence. This turning around of the mind is not an activity that the mind can undertake, but rather the cessation of an activity of which it was previously unaware. However, as a concession to the mind’s belief that this turning around is something it can do, the teaching may now elaborate a process in which the attention that the mind normally gives to objects that are conceived as other than itself is instead turned around and focused upon itself, the subject or knower.
All objects of knowledge and experience are known from the perspective of the finite mind, the apparently separate subject of experience, and everything the mind knows or experiences is a reflection of and appears in accordance with its own limitations. Therefore, in order to know what anything truly is, the mind must first turn the light of its knowing upon itself. That is, before attending to objects so as to know what they truly are, it must first attend to itself to know what it truly is. The mind must shine the light of its knowing away from the objects it seems to know, towards itself, towards the very knowing with which it knows its knowledge. Attention must attend to attention itself.
The nature of the knowing or awareness with which the mind knows its knowledge is simply to be and to know. It is for this reason that it is called pure knowing or pure awareness, in the sense that its knowing is not mixed with anything other than itself; it is like the colourless light in all colour. Therefore, in knowing itself the mind does not acquire any new knowledge, in the way that it might discover a new species, mathematical equation or recipe. The realisation of the nature of the knowing or awareness with which the mind knows its knowledge is not a new form of objective knowledge. Rather, it is the remembering, recognising or knowing again of the pure knowing that is seemingly veiled, forgotten or overlooked as a result of the mind’s focusing on objective experience.
Thus, to know itself as it is, the mind need only relax the focus of its attention from the objects that it seems to know and allow its knowing to fall or flow back into itself. In fact, it is not so much that the mind focuses on things that are ‘other than itself’, but rather that it becomes mixed with or lost in its knowledge of things, in the same way that a screen seems to get mixed with or lost in the movie.
The mind’s knowledge and experience are never separate from itself. The mind never knows anything at a distance from itself, just as the movie never takes place at a distance from the screen. The self-aware screen does not need to separate itself from the objects or characters in the movie to realise it doesn’t share their limitations or destiny. Indeed, it cannot separate itself from them, because they are only a modulation of its own being. All that is necessary is for the screen to simply ‘see’ that its essential nature is not inherently limited by the forms that it assumes.
Likewise, the mind does not need to separate itself from or reject any experience. It need only understand that the knowing with which it knows its knowledge and experience is already and always inherently free of anything that it knows or experiences.
When the knowing or pure awareness with which all knowledge and experience are known gives its attention to itself rather than to objective experience, its essential, irreducible nature, which previously seemed to be obscured or veiled by objective experience, seems suddenly to shine as it is. In fact, it was always shining as it is, but it was previously mixed with and thus coloured by objective experience and, as a result, seemed to be missing or obscured.
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What is described as the turning around of the mind upon itself is not so much a ‘turning around’ of the mind as a sinking, falling back or relaxing into itself. The phrase ‘turning around’ is used only in contrast and as a concession to the previous, object-facing direction of the mind. To a mind that is facing outwards to know objects, the non-dual teaching suggests turning itself around towards its source or essence in order to know itself.
However, anyone who has ever tried to turn their attention around in this way knows that it cannot be done. The mind cannot ‘turn around’ towards the objectless source of its own knowing, for it can only know or be directed towards an object. Anything the mind turns towards, even if it turns in the opposite direction of the objects or thoughts that it normally knows, would necessarily be in the direction of another object. Thus, in the same way that one cannot stand up and take a step towards oneself, so the mind cannot turn around and direct itself towards its own source.
The suggestion to turn the mind around upon its source is a concession to the separate, mind-made self – the temporary, limited and ultimately illusory form of awareness that knows itself in each one of us as the belief and feeling ‘I am the body’ – and to its belief that it is a real entity that is in control of its own destiny.
This turning of the mind around upon its source is sometimes known as self-enquiry, which is a translation of the Sanskrit term atma vichara. However, self-enquiry is a unique kind of investigation which does not involve an exploration of any kind of objective knowledge but rather investigates the subjective knower of all objective knowledge and experience. As such, the term ‘self-enquiry’ is, again, at best a concession to the mind that initially imagines it can explore its own nature in the same way that it explores objects.
To such a mind the teaching suggests enquiring into its own nature, an investigation that may be initiated by a thought such as, ‘What is it that knows or is aware of my experience?’, ‘What is the nature of the knowing with which all knowledge and experience are known?’ or ‘Who am I?’ However, this investigation does not require the mind to direct itself towards any kind of objective knowledge or experience. It is rather a falling, sinking or relaxing back of the attention, or the focus of the mind’s knowing, into its source.
The meaning of the word ‘attention’ gives us a hint as to the nature of this investigation into our true nature. The word ‘attention’ comes from the Latin attendere, a compound of ad-, meaning ‘to’ or ‘towards’, and tendere, meaning ‘to stretch’. Thus, attention is a stretching of the knowing that is the essence of the mind towards a thought or object.
When we know a thought, the knowing with which that thought is known proceeds from its source towards that object. When we know a sound, the same light of knowing proceeds from the same source towards the sound. When we attend to any object – whether it seems to be something within ourself, such as a thought or feeling, or something outside ourself, such as a sight or sound – the light of knowing proceeds from our self, the subject, towards that object.
This experience of being a subject that knows or attends to an object is expressed in our language in conventional dualistic terms such as, ‘I know a thought’. That is, ‘I’, the subject of experience, shines its light of knowing towards the object that it knows. Our attention or light of knowing is stretched from its source, the subject ‘I’, towards its object. But what happens to attention when it no longer has anything to stretch itself towards? What happens when a piece of elastic that is stretched between two points is released from one of those points? Having nothing else to attach itself to, it springs back to its original, unstretched position.
In most people attention moves perpetually from one object or experience to another, with only brief periods of respite in the interval between two thoughts or perceptions, in moments of peace or happiness, and during deep sleep, when the mind is at rest in its source. But when, through interest in its own essential nature, the mind ceases to direct itself towards objective experience, it begins to sink or relax back into the source from which it has arisen. This source is pure knowing or awareness, before it knows or becomes mixed with any objective knowledge.
This falling back of the attention into its source is the means by which the mind comes to know its original nature. In fact, this is not an activity of the mind, although it may seem as such to begin with, but rather the cessation of a previous activity – the activity of overlooking the knowing of its own objectless, self-aware being in favour of objective knowledge and experience.
The falling or sinking back of the mind into its source is the essence of meditation and prayer and can be found, in one form or another, in all the great religious and spiritual traditions. Ramana Maharshi referred to it as the sinking of the mind into the heart of awareness. Nisargadatta Maharaj referred to it as focusing on the experience ‘I am’. The Russian philosopher P. D. Ouspensky referred to it as self-remembering. The poet Tennyson suggested seeking the ultimate nature of the mind as one would follow a ‘sinking star, beyond the utmost reach of human thought’.*
Referring to the same non-practice, St. Matthew tells us, ‘When thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.’ The Kashmir Shaivite mystic Lalla referred to this turning around of the mind when she said, ‘I have travelled a long way seeking God, but when I finally gave up and turned back, there He was, within me.’
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To better understand the return of the mind to its source of pure awareness, let us take a new metaphor. Imagine an actor called John Smith who leads a fulfilled and happy life. One day John Smith is assigned the role of King Lear, which involves learning a set of lines and putting on a costume. On the first night of the performance, John Smith leaves home and goes to the theatre. He dresses up in King Lear’s clothes and assumes his thoughts and feelings. John Smith is an excellent actor, so he completely forgets his own thoughts and feelings and, as it were, becomes King Lear.
The performance begins and John Smith now thinks, feels, acts, perceives and relates as King Lear. As the play develops, John Smith becomes more and more unhappy, thinking that everyone and everything is against him. In fact, so completely does John Smith forget his own nature that when the performance ends, he forgets to take off King Lear’s words and clothes when he returns to his dressing room.
Several friends come into his dressing room to congratulate him on his performance and, finding him utterly miserable, try to persuade him that he has forgotten who he truly is, but to no avail. After a few minutes a friendly stranger comes in and sits beside him, and they start conversing. The friendly stranger asks him to tell him about himself, and King Lear starts to describe himself: ‘I am King of England. I am eighty years old. I am the father of three daughters.’
King Lear goes on to describe the problem of dividing his kingdom between his three daughters, and about the conflicts in which he is embroiled. The friendly stranger asks him to keep going. King Lear begins to describe his thoughts and feelings: ‘I am intelligent, kind, confused, lonely, restless, anxious…’ The stranger asks him again to keep going. King Lear begins to falter as he tries to find words to describe the subtler qualities of himself. Pauses begin to appear in his description as King Lear reflects back through deeper and deeper layers of himself.
Without realising it, King Lear has ceased giving attention to the thoughts, feelings and circumstances with which he is usually occupied and is instead giving attention to that part of himself that lies below them, a nameless, formless well of barely discernible feelings. ‘There is a dissatisfaction in me, but I am not sure exactly what I am dissatisfied with. There is a longing in me, but I am not sure what I am longing for.’
The friendly stranger remains silent, which King Lear takes as an invitation to continue. He keeps going deeper into himself until he can go no further. There is a long silence. ‘I am… I am…’ Nothing follows. He waits. From time to time a memory of his daughters disturbs him, but so interested has he become in discovering who he essentially is that he gives the memory no attention, and in due course it leaves.
‘I am what?’ the stranger asks, to help King Lear further focus the essential feeling of being in his mind.
‘I am… I am… There is…’ A long silence follows.
King Lear is experiencing the most essential, irreducible element of himself – unqualified being – before it is mixed with any thoughts or feelings. He cannot describe it because none of the words he is accustomed to using in relation to thoughts, feelings, sensations and perceptions are applicable. They all seem too crude for the purpose.
He remains in silence for some time without the need or ability to describe his experience. When a thought arises, it is only to comment on the unusual and yet, at the same time, strangely familiar peace that he now feels. It is a peace that has no obvious cause in his external circumstances. It is prior to and independent of anything that he previously believed himself to be. He remains silent, and he has no idea how long he remains at rest in this way, for thought is no longer active and therefore he cannot take account of time.
At some point it occurs to King Lear that the peace he now feels has not been added to him as a result of anything that is or is not taking place in his life. The friendly stranger did not give it to him, nor can he take it away from him. It seems to come from within himself. He realises that the peace he now feels is, in fact, always present in the depths of his being. He recognises that his own inherently peaceful being is always available, lying just behind or underneath the turbulent flow of his thoughts and feelings, and is independent of the drama of his life and the conflicts in his relationships.
King Lear hears a voice inside himself say, ‘Turn towards me and I will take you into myself.’ He realises that it is his own deepest intelligence that is speaking to himself. He recalls the words of Isaiah in the Old Testament, ‘Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on Thee.’
He sits in silence again, allowing the full implications of this recognition to unfold in his mind. ‘If this peace is inherent in what I essentially am, then I must take it with me wherever I go. This peace cannot be disturbed by my changing thoughts and feelings or the troubling circumstances in which I find myself.’ An inner smile lights up inside him and an immense joy – an ancient joy that he knew as a child and yet is now experiencing as if for the first time – floods his being. It is the joy of recognising his essential, unassailable being, its freedom, its availability, its imperturbability, its unconditioned nature.
At that moment he remembers he is John Smith. This remembering of himself is not a memory of something that he once knew in the past and subsequently forgot, but a memory of something that lies ever-present within him and that was simply obscured or ignored due to his fascination with and absorption in the life of King Lear. He looks around and realises that the friendly stranger has disappeared.
* * *
John Smith ponders King Lear and the friendly stranger who came to him: ‘In order to become King Lear I had to forget myself, and this forgetting caused me pain and anguish. This pain initiated a great search for peace and happiness, and such was the intensity of the search that the latent intelligence of my own mind appeared in the form of the friendly stranger who asked me about the essential nature of myself.’
John Smith realises that King Lear was simply a self-assumed limitation of his own being. This self-forgetting enabled John Smith to assume the character of King Lear. King Lear and John Smith think, feel, act, perceive and relate in different ways, and yet they are essentially the same person. The ‘I’ of each of them is the same ‘I’. The essential self in King Lear is the same as the self of John Smith. King Lear does not have his own self. The ‘I’ is common to them both. The ‘I’ of King Lear is the ‘I’ of John Smith, with an imaginary, self-assumed limit attached to it. All King Lear had to do was to question the nature of this ‘I’.
When John Smith recognises or remembers he is John Smith, he wakes up as if from a dream. But King Lear did not suddenly become John Smith when he woke up. King Lear was never King Lear. He was always only John Smith with a self-assumed limit. John Smith simply ceased imagining that he was King Lear. John Smith realises that he is always only John Smith but that his essential, irreducible being had become so mixed up with the thoughts and feelings of King Lear as to make it seem as if he had forgotten who he was. And with the forgetting or overlooking of his own being, its innate qualities of peace, fulfilment and love were eclipsed. However, John Smith did not cease being John Smith and become King Lear, and King Lear did not cease being King Lear and become John Smith. King Lear was simply an imaginary, self-assumed limitation on the true and only self of John Smith.
Only from King Lear’s illusory point of view was he King Lear. Believing himself to be King Lear, he found himself miserable, and having failed to secure the peace and happiness for which he longed in his circumstances and relationships, he turned within at the suggestion of a friendly stranger. Without realising it King Lear was spontaneously engaging in what would later be formalised as a practice of self-remembering or self-enquiry: a sinking or relaxing of his attention through deeper and deeper layers of himself until he could go no further, that is, until he arrived at his own unqualified and inherently peaceful being.
There is another long pause as John Smith ponders his experience: ‘If King Lear’s mind was a limitation of my own mind, could it be that my own mind is a self-assumed limitation of a greater, unlimited mind, which is, at the same time, who I essentially am?’ John Smith begins to contemplate the nature of his own mind. Without realising it, he too is now spontaneously practicing self-enquiry.
John Smith sits quietly in his chair after everyone else has gone home. Half an hour passes by without his noticing, during which time his mind sinks more and more deeply into itself, and then, suddenly, quietly, he realises that even John Smith is a self-assumed limitation on his essential being. As if from nowhere, he feels a flood of peace and joy. He opens his eyes and notices that the room too is saturated with peace. He smiles to himself, remembers his family with great love, and walks home.
* Alfred, Lord Tennyson, ‘Ulysses’ (1833).