Self

13 SelfSelf
Personalities are not what people are. They are adopted roles. When we let go of one personality, we are still ourselves. What remains when we let go of all our personalities? That is what is called the Self in the Eastern traditions. It is I, but not identified with personalities. The Self is the sense of "I" without any particular characteristics. It is often described in terms of what it is not: "not this, not that". It is consciousness, that which experiences.
Everyone can discover this by themselves by searching inwardly for who "I" am. As answers, all kinds of aspects of life appear. Answers like "I am: a person with this body, a child of this mother and father, person with this profession, friend of this and that person, person with these thoughts and views of life, father or mother of these children, person with this name". You can leave them out one after the other without any sense of missing "I". It may have something to do with your sense of being important in terms of job or family, but the sense of I itself remains what it is. All professions, roles and functions in life are shells. They are not what makes up the human being in the innermost core. When they are lost, one is still oneself. It is a confusion of form and content.
All the things we normally refer to as who we are, are just personalities. As Eckhart Tolle describes it: We have an inner being that is our actual self, and we have an ego that is a complex of many personalities. Schwartz calls it the Self. Eastern traditions call it the Self. It is I, but not a personal I. It's not a person. Everyone has the experience of being a stable person. When one asks if someone has changed in life, the answer is mostly "yes". But if one asks if someone has become someone else, the answer will be "no". This expresses the fact that personalities can and will change, but the innermost core of someone is unchangeable. This is the Self.
Consciousness
Consciousness is central for our being. One can strip all kinds of things from oneself without being hampered. But one cannot strip oneself from consciousness. Without consciousness there is no I.
Being
The Self has different aspects that actually go together. In Eastern philosophy, the aspects of the Self are being, knowing and loving. Human beings have an internal drive to search for the unchangeable, the eternal. A better word is timeless. We don't want to die. Practically, we live as if we will live eternally, as if we know that we don't die. The paradox is that our bodies will die. What is it in us that does not die? Everything that comes and goes is not lasting, not stable and thus it
55cannot be the essence. “Being” is the expression of what is, independent of circumstances. It is what all humans have in them. Eckhart Tolle describes this as presence, awareness, silence, being.
Knowing
The second aspect of the self is knowing. It is a knowing that can hardly be expressed, as people who have had near death experiences will tell you. But the knowing is a deep experience, that goes deeper than expressions can attain. It comes forth in normal life in the form of conscience, knowing what is good or bad. It comes in the form of intuition, knowing without any proof or rationality. It is a knowing of oneself. Lao-tze expresses this as: "Knowing others is wisdom; knowing oneself is enlightenment".
Loving
A third aspect of the Self is loving. Love is an acceptance of life, of creation, and includes compassion for everything in the universe. This love is also a love for ourselves. Some confuse this with selfishness, a love of self at the expense of others. But this is love for everything. Moreover, the Self needs nothing because it is already everything and has everything. It is expressed as empathy, compassion, love, self-love. Oscar Wilde expresses it as: "To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance".
Near death experiences
Humans search for the essence, the eternal, the foundation or origin. The idea of atoms is the same: things that are eternal, that cannot be changed, the building blocks of the universe. Unfortunately atoms turned out to be not so eternal and unchangeable. But the search for the origin remains: who are we, where do we come from and where do we go? What comes closest in our culture are the laws of nature: they are spaceless and timeless, they are valid always and everywhere. But they cannot be physically proven or measured as they are not material.
Science
Humans search for the essence, the eternal, the foundation or origin. The idea of atoms is the same: things that are eternal, that cannot be changed, the building blocks of the universe. Unfortunately atoms turned out to be not so eternal and unchangeable. But the search for the origin remains: who are we, where do we come from and where do we go? What comes closest in our culture are the laws of nature: they are spaceless and timeless, they are valid always and everywhere. But they cannot be physically proven or measured as they are not material.
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Religion
The older tradition to search for the eternal is found in religion. The core of many religions shows the same idea. Huston Smith expresses it as: "If we take the world's enduring religions at their best, we discover the distilled wisdom of the human race". God is described as eternal, ever-present, almighty, the source, the Creator, the alpha and omega, the beginning and the end. This is very similar to what science tells us, only the name is different.
We see the same qualities of eternal and omnipresence in Ramana’s saying: “All of the ‘many names for God’ are, despite their origin in different cultures, pointing ultimately to the same One, the same Absolute, the infinite and eternal omnipresence that is considered to be the ground of all being”. Ramana is an Indian guru who lived in the first half of the twentieth century. His teaching is in principle very simple. He invites one to go into inquiry: “Who am I?” This inquiry is not meant to be a mental process, but an experiential process. It is a discovery of oneself.
This idea is very old. At the entrance of the Delphi oracle temple was written “Know thyself”. One can one find the origin in oneself. Maitreya says: "The Self alone matters" and "You are that Self, an immortal Being”.
A peculiar aspect of religions is the nothingness. Zen is the striving for nothing. Nirvana is often translated as nothing, but a better translation is ‘not something’. The origin has no form, only potential.
That the form of religion is not important is expressed by Benjamin Creme: "It does not matter to the Self for one instant whether you are a Christian or a Buddhist or a Muslim or a Hindu, or of no religion at all; what matters is that you register yourself as the Self, that you identify with the Self, which is the same as God; Self-realization is God-realization". Christ tells the same: " You are gods and all of you are the sons of the most High".
Qualities
The following qualities show the differences between personalities and the Self:
Personalities: sick, future and past, limited, heavy, dark, absence, unhappy, fragmented, worried, noise.
Self: healthy, timeless, now, free, light, presence, happy, whole, at ease, silence.