ON BEING WHO YOU ARE NOT

It begins at birth.  We are given a name.  Then we learn that the persons looking down at us warmly are our parents.  We then learn that certain of our behaviors are acceptable and certain of them are not.  And on and on.  Soon we find that we have identified with what is an emerging sense of self, reinforced by others around us who also appear to be identifying with the selves, the egoic selves, that they are experiencing.

The egoic self is the character we will play throughout our lives.  No one can convince us that we are other than this egoic self.  Indeed, anyone who attempts to alter the perception, we shun right away.  For to suggest that we are other than our egoic self is to suggest that we have a split personality somehow, disconcerting indeed.  

The only way that we could accept that we are other than our egoic self is to be convinced that this self is actually an illusion, part of a larger illusion that is the world of form itself.

By illusion is not meant that this world is unreal.  We experience the world by way of our senses, and to our senses the world is surely real.  But our senses are themselves of this world, so naturally they would perceive the world as real.  So our senses are relative in this way; they relate only to this world.  And they are time bound, are changing, ever changing, hence are non-eternal, as Vedantists put it, as opposed to eternal, the divine state. It is in this sense that the world, including the egoic self, is an illusion.

Sri Ramana Maharshi, the Hindu spiritual master, asks, "Who are you?"  Who is a person really?  His answer is that we are consciousness itself, pure consciousness, the screen upon which our lives are being played out.  This ground consciousness is, finally, the Atman, the personal aspect of Brahman.

The Atman is a witnessing consciousness, furthermore.  It watches, observes.  Observing, though, is all that it does.  It does not participate in our lives, has nothing to do with this world of form beyond looking at it only.  It is not responsible for events in the world.

This universal mind can be experienced in meditation, typically in turiya, the fourth level of consciousness.  The feeling of it is supreme bliss. This is who we truly are, as opposed to who we think we are.