In Silence
You find peace not by rearranging the circumstances of your life, but by realizing who you are at the deepest level.’
The truth is that you cannot know your true self. You are your true self – already. It’s difficult to put into words, but when you know who you really are, it is not the same as knowing how tall Mount Everest is or knowing what your favourite colour is. These worldly things are known with the mind, with thought, with the intellect. These things are known by ‘you’, the ego who knows, the false non-existent self. Your true self is not known in that way.
It is ‘known’ without use of the mind or senses. That may sound preposterous and illogical, but that’s the way it is, and once you have experienced it for yourself it becomes an obvious fact.
If like many seekers you are trying to find your ‘true self’, it is simply the ego trying to accumulate some kind of knowledge or experience. This is no different to how the ego accumulates other worldly knowledge to help us in our daily lives such as learning to drive. If however you just stay still and allow thoughts to subside, then this ego-sense eventually disappears. This is because the ego-sense continues itself through thought (and the associated sensations and feelings it strings together).
The disappearance of the ego when thoughts subside is temporary but it creates space for a deeper ‘knowing’. In Silence, when the ego is not present and acting, when thoughts have become quiet, it can be sensed intuitively (non-verbally) that the ego is not the true-self. It can be seen that you still exist even when the ego doesn’t.
In the extended experience of no thoughts it starts to become obvious that the real you is not the pattern of thoughts, habitual desires and fears, quirks and personality traits that we commonly take ourselves to be. The ego starts to collapse. The impersonal process of identifying as the ego starts to fall away. It is revealed that our true self is a deeper sense of Presence or Being that is constant, ever-present, loving, warm, clear-seeing and whole.
