We didn’t always have a Sense of Self: infants are born without it and exist for months in a state thought-free awareness.
The infant is born conscious, aware and experiencing. In the absence on an “I” there is no internal “me” or external “you”. Without an “I” the infant does not experience an inner or outer world.
This is pure consciousness: This original state of doesn’t last for too long. After a few months the Sense of Self begins to develop and the feeling of an individual identity emerges.
The Sense of Self that creates the feeling of separation between inner and outer, between me and you – it’s the way we normally experience the world. The original state of pure consciousness is still there, but is buried beneath the Sense of Self and inaccessible. Most adults will never experience pure consciousness again.
Fortunately it’s possible to re-experience the original state of “no me or you, no inner or outer” by practising the spiritual enquiry exercise detailed in the following pages. For millennia pure consciousness has been regarded as a significant spiritual state: Patanjali, the Indian sage, wrote about it 2000 years ago (see Extras) and called it the essence of spirituality.
I discovered the regular experience of pure consciousness, even for brief periods, has a cumulative effect on the human organism that leads to the organic sense of inner peace and happiness that is the subject of this brief guide.
Spiritual enquiry
Stumbling into it
Some extras
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