Who, or what is the Self?

There are some profound truths abut the self, or who we have come to identify with the self, accessed as a result of ‘clearing.’

In order to begin to access and understand these ‘truths’ though we must practice ‘clearing’ aka ‘acceptance’ often. It is only by continued practice can we even begin to grasp the powerful nature of the path that we are walking.
Fortunately there are milestones along the way to indicate, if we are listening, our progress. For each of us this varies according to several factors, they could loosely be defined as;

When we began this journey of introspection and self discovery.
How long we have been on this path.
Our readiness to be open to new ways of thinking and being.

Yet, no matter where this journey into the self began, the milestones still exist. My milestones came thick and fast in the early days of the journey, before even ‘clearing’ came along. As I suspect they have for you.
As this article is more centred around clearing I will restrict my steps along the way since clearing.

The mostly occurred while I was teaching others. As I was sharing my ‘story’ “Ah Ha” moments came, sometimes emotional, sometimes even physical but mostly mental, as in it was like watching a movie. In the early days of teaching these moments were quite profound, yet, as the journey progressed they became more and more subtle, until they were barely noticeable.

I can only attribute this reducing of intensity to the fact that I was breaking down old patterns in the early days of the journey, having broken down many, more subtle patterns showed up, requiring less energy to move through them, because of the earlier breakthroughs.

This process has not stopped, indeed if anything it has become more profound. As a result of the moving through the past, I appear to have opened up to a much deeper understanding of our true nature. Maybe I am not at the end of the road yet, but if I were to compare myself to that which I ‘thought’ I understood a few years ago, then that self was truly naive. (What does that say for the self now!)

My current understanding has arisen as a result of the clearing of (self) others and the environment greatly assisted by the many workshops I have presented over the years. By constantly repeating information and answering the same old questions time and time again it is not possible to remain in the past. A benefit for those who return often to the workshops, for they are exposed to the same information but always hear it from a different view point.
Now, my perception of the self.

If we look at how our path has unfolded over the years we will see that our early years were very formative. We appeared to have no control over the patterning of those years, our brain being in a receptive state, yet to develop the ability to discern.

As we grew our lives unfolded based on the course already established during this first 6 years. Then, as we perceived the world through those conditioned eyes, we developed expectations based upon that early conditioning. One of the most important parts of that expectation was to take ourselves seriously, to assume that the thoughts, feelings and emotions were ours, we were trained to believe this. Trained by parents, siblings, educators who in their turn were trained to believe this.

So then we see ourselves giving energy to certain thoughts, to particular feelings. The more energy we gave to any thought or feeling the more that feeling took on a sense of reality, as though it were indeed ours. This happens on a biological level when we associate, or give energy to an emotion, for example, we are simply instructing the brain to produce more of a certain chemical which eventually becomes that which we call a feeling, or emotion. The more energy we give that the more intense it becomes, the more intense it gets the more we think this is mine, this is who I am.

Yet the majority of information that we are exposed to is simply energetic transmissions given off my others or environmental factors. We feel something, we identify with that feeling and we become that feeling.
A quick example, I was in an elevator many years ago, there were two other people in the elevator. One was complaining a sprained ankle he hurt whilst skiing. The elevator reached the ground the other two went off in one direction, I left for the exit. After three steps my ankle collapsed and I managed to limp along for three steps before I realised that the ankle pain was not mine, it belonged to the guy in the elevator. Immediately the pain vanished and I was able to continue my day without suffering with a sprained ankle.

This is just one example of many, it is happening to us all the time, and dependant upon our understanding, we will continue to identify with all phenomena that we experience. We do this without any real awareness, victims to that early conditioning.

Now, imagine that all of your life has been like this, you have taken on symptoms and feelings, even thoughts, that have been ‘created’ by environmental or personal interactions with others. None of that which you previously identified with was yours, it became yours as a result of the energy you gave to those thoughts or feelings.

Our reality then, has been built on a house of cards. Deconstructing this house should be a goal for all of us, to see beyond the limited reality that we have bought into, through no-fault of our own. It seems though, that our attachment to that which we believe about ourselves is so strong that few people begin the path out of this particular rabbit hole.