Who Is Your Self?
I guess I’ve already made it quite obvious by now, but I cannot stress enough that I see a clear distinction between person and an individual. Some may use terms such as Self (or higher self when speaking because spoken language is generally case insensitive), and self (or lower self) respectively.
I’d say that it’s also where the rather misleading ideas of divine and animal nature of man (or soul and body) originate, but that is beside the point. In any case, I am talking about that which you are and never changes and that which you are too but is never the same and is what you know (yourself as).
Suffice to say, the latter can be suspended. If only for a split second.
When that happens, many folks insist that there is no one there. Anatman. No self. And that is correct because the self dissolves, completely stops, or is, at the very least, seen for what it is — a conglomerate of functionality, a wave in the ocean. Ecstatic, however, these people quite often and rather quickly jump to a mistaken conclusion that no one suffers because there is no one there to suffer in the first place.
Mistaken, because it ignores the observation that suffering is, if anything, exactly as illusory as that illusory self that by definition cannot suffer. Enter obsession with empty nothingness, absence of awareness, or illusion of consciousness. Well, that’s what you get when you don’t realize that that individual self is seen by personal Self, the same unchanging Self who sees the potential total absence (of individuality).
Hence, God is personal but not (an) individual. It’s also why it is said, I am Brahman, or Self, and this Atman, or self, is Brahman. Even though Atman is technically Anatman, or no-self — the form is empty of intrinsic existence and qualities — and Brahman (or God) better be not named as the Tao that can be spoken is not the true Tao because suchness simply cannot be expressed (or even grasped, either intellectually or intuitively) despite emptiness being the form. (Moreover, words are always just words not what they denote.)
A natural implication is of course that, just because of its complexity, what you know as self is not more alive than other (bundles of) biological or even physical processes. From a different perspective, it’s also not less dead. But to be exact as much as possible, categories such as life and death simply don’t apply. There is change and that’s it.
Even so, if we equate life with conscious existence as we generally do anyway, there clearly can be no death. Simply because Self, Absolute, Brahman, God, you name it (is) I am, that is to say consciousness-existence (or I and am implying each other), which intimately knows itself as the singular unchanging first person. Person who knows everything what is there to know, one who those two words point at, and, quite obviously, the only person there is.
That is why God is said to be living God (or God of the living) and is also person. The very person you fundamentally are and refer to as I. That’s also why every individuality is so-called child of God, even though you are in fact Elohim despite God still not being an individual (form) that is subject to change.
Taking all of that into account, how stupid is the idea that a tribe has to mutilate themselves in order for God to recognize them? How ignorant is the belief that God had to become a particular individual in order to suffer, die, and reconcile man with himself? God is born and dies every second with each and every individual he knows (himself as). God is doing everything to himself. Of course that God recognizes every individuality for what it is, even if that individuality cannot generate understanding of its true nature.
That’s also why everything you do you literally do to yourself (hence also Matthew 25:40 and 25:45).
And that is true whether you are aware of it or not.
