The ancient Greek aphorism “Know thyself”, the greatest wisdom of all time, has us desiring to understand how to achieve this powerful experience. “Where is our Self? It’s within us. It’s a very profound discovery – this silent Being inside, which physics calls the unified field. This unified field is the source of all outward expression and outward creation. Transcendental Meditation makes this inner experience a possibility by allowing the mind to actually go beyond thought, beyond intellect, and even beyond the small sense of self. We move beyond the little self, the ego, to the bigger Self – the transcendental Self.
One of the most beautiful things I experienced with Transcendental Meditation was that for the first time in my life – when I learned – I experienced the absolute, transcendental value, that which doesn’t change, inside of myself.
You close your eyes and you experience yourself. When we dive into our self we experience “transcending”, which means “to go beyond”: beyond thought, beyond the surface, beyond the relative changing world. We transcend because the nature of the mind is to search for more, and when it has a glimpse that there is something more inside – and that “more” inside is the unified field – it becomes more open to that experience. It’s an experience of totality, of wholeness. We’re experiencing consciousness by itself, pure awareness, pure Being and we say that this pure Being is what we really know to be our true Self. We experience and realize that our Self is not an entity that is limited and defined by certain characteristics – false impressions of what we think we are. We are so much more.
What is really fascinating is that we have a simple, easy, direct way to know the Self – a direct way that, instead of looking outside, is a knowledge that is inside. When you close your eyes and allow the mind to settle down, you go to the true Self that we are, without it being colored by outer things or outer definitions of an individual who has a specific role in society – an individual with a specific shape, a specific name, a specific race, with a specific nationality. That true Self is the Self that we are now discovering.
When we discover that Self we find that it is unbounded. It is absolute. It is infinite. When we say, “I am the Self,” on an intellectual level, this is one level of realization, but that can be controverted. There are different ideas about what the Self is. People have different thoughts, philosophies, and visions of who we are and what life is. Therefore, intellectually there is also a level of knowledge that is challengeable even by theories, ideas, and philosophies and all these kinds of extrapolations from the senses to the mind to the intellect. But all of these things change, and through life, we have changed, yet the sense of Self remains, “It is me. I am that.” Even though almost nothing has remained from what we have recognized as who we are previously, there is that sense of my Self.
It is that Self that is hidden in all of these different values of existence, of change. That Self ultimately is the true reality of who we are and itself is pure consciousness, it’s pure Being – Being that continues through change. When we’re living only what we can call the “relative”- the ever-changing world – we’re living only part of life, part of reality, we’re not experiencing the absolute. When we have the experience of the absolute, of our Self, it infuses us with greater intelligence, more creativity, better health, better behavioral patterns, better relationships, growth, and development in life. Don’t we deserve to give ourselves a few minutes morning and evening to go back to our Self, to go back to that infinity within us and to know who we really are?
Text by Dr Tony Nader
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