This elegant satsang was written by one of our Vedanta teacher/writers, Dave Reid. Feel free to contact him with your questions – James
A simple meditation
Imagine yourself minus everything. As if falling asleep, allow yourself to sink away from anything that ever appeared until this imagination itself disappears. Feel what it is like just to be you before any movement of thought or emotion.
Notice two things:
1. That while this imagination points at you, it is not actually you. Whatever you are is present, fully, prior to the exercise.
2. That whatever quality or feeling you associate with the experience of being you, is added by you. You turn your attention to yourself, feel certain qualities, and report them as being “what you are like.”
With that in mind, now imagine yourself plus everything. Everything includes the world, but for now, notice everything you take to be part of you: your body, your memories, your hunger level, your concerns, your desires, how your body feels, how you slept last night, your to-do list, how you feel about yourself, etc. Obviously, this is now a more complex picture once attention turns outwards, but the two factors that remain are you and experience.
When pressed to describe yourself minus everything, even though you cannot put your finger on it, somehow you are able to find words. It is as if what is not actually locate-able nonetheless appears as a fragrance. It is not nothing, it is you, but what you actually are cannot be pinned down.
Notice what changes when your attention turns outward to all the parts of you:
1. Unlike the imagination of yourself minus everything, the experience of you recedes into the background – even seeming to disappear – and an infinite field of objects and discrete experiences fills the gap. You are not gone, but you are easily and even likely “forgotten.”
2. This imagination inclusive of everything consists of infinite factors, all of which always change, and over which you have precious little influence.
Superficially, the main difference between these viewpoints seems to be the direction of attention, inwards or outwards (so to speak), and often that is as far as it is taken. Mediation practice an hour a day, church on Sunday, and bedtime prayers are just a few examples of how we turn inwards to “relocate” ourselves. These activities serve as oases of peace and “self care” within our “real” lives, and they are effective, but why do we need them? Why are these oases of introspection so important to us? After all, we have things to do!
We all know the answer to this, even if we may not have words for it. We know the answer because we are the answer. Meaning, we are the one that takes this time out to pay homage and attention to “what is.” We still may not know what that is, but by our actions – which are devoted to making ourselves happy – we acknowledge ourself as the beloved. We acknowledge the existence of a part of ourselves that is both most intimate and most unacknowledged, your “you.”
Your “you” is not you, since no amount of words or experiences can be you. If your “you” was you, you would be a word (thought). Yet, your “you” is the irremovable locus of every single moment of every single experience you have ever had, as well as of your own content-less “experience” such as in sleep or in the moment(s) before you first appeared to yourself as a baby or small child.
But even though your “you” is not actually you, it is non-different from you in the sense that it is the tangible appearance of you. Just as a reflection in a mirror is how your face appears to you, your “you” is how you appear. This simple, most ordinary “you” is all that matters. It is all you care about. It is why we retreat to the oases of conscious devotion that we do. Without you, even “nothingness” is impossible.
There’s not a single thing spiritual about this inquiry. If there is a spiritual life, it is finding and identifying with what is most beloved and bringing it into the foreground. This does not mean adding or sprucing up a spiritual identity, but simply that rather than my “me” landing on any single idea or imagined part of myself, it lands on that unknowable self-evident beloved. In that way, what could otherwise be a flight of spiritual fantasy or quest for experience, becomes an entirely practical, grounded, unsupported life of doing what is to be done, whatever that may be. Only now, as Ramji says often, doing it happily rather than for happiness.
Take some time to pay attention to your “you.” You’re never not there after all, so you may as well take notice. Don’t worry about being selfish, or doing it wrong, or being too serious, or not being serious enough. At all costs, reject what Sundari calls the voices of diminishment in all possible forms. Finding “you” is not the be all end all, but because you never change, your you is like a giant parachute that allows you to float effortlessly rather than plummet uncontrollably through life. In that gentle drifting is where the qualities associated with you minus everything never need depart from the activity of you plus everything.
