The Pure Self - Your True Identity
Summary: The pure self represents consciousness in its original, unconditioned state—free from ego, memories, and learned identities. While ego constructs personality from experiences and social roles, pure self remains unchanged witness to all mental phenomena. Most people never discover this dimension, identifying entirely with conditioned self created through life experiences. Recognizing pure self requires distinguishing between awareness and objects of awareness, observer and observed. This eternal aspect transcends birth and death, untouched by success or failure, pleasure or pain. Spiritual practice aims at shifting identification from temporary ego-self to permanent pure consciousness. Realization brings liberation from fear, suffering, and limited self-concept. Pure self is not attained but recognized as what you've always been beneath accumulated conditioning.
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Meditate on this: “I am infinite. I am formless, incorporeal, and pure consciousness.”
You may have a form, but the sense of “I am” in you has no form, no shape, no limits. You have consciousness, but it is mixed up with many thoughts, feelings, emotions, desires, attachments, and so on. What happens if you silence them all and become still? You can achieve this by focusing on your breath, repeating a mantra, or observing your thoughts without getting involved in them. What remains? What is it? What can you call it?
It is pure consciousness or your expansive awareness of the state of being. It is pure because it is without all that you accumulated in your mind over the years as thoughts, desires, etc. It is what you learned from life, from your interaction with others, from your observation and experience. It is what you can call your memorial mind (manus). From that consciousness, your individuality, egoism, or feeling of separation arises. They both reinforce each other and prevent you from finding the pure Self in you. Only in meditation do you have a chance to reach that pure Self or the feeling of “I am” without all the accumulations you gather from life and the world, experiencing a state of clarity and peace.
Let us call that sense of pure ‘I am’ the person in the body. It is your state of being, in contrast to your state of having or being this and that, which limits you and confines to a specific identity, name and form. Now, focus on yourself as this pure awareness, the being without definition but pure awareness. If you meditate and enter a deeper state of silence, you will realize that this I am can be extended to as far as your awareness goes. It can be limitless and infinite as the universe. While your body is firmly seated somewhere, this pure awareness does not have any limits, form, or shape. You can extend it into the space around you as far as your eyes, ears, and thoughts can go, feeling the freedom and expansiveness of this realization.
The illusion that you are limited to your body makes you think that you are limited. If you overcome that attachment, much of the noise in your mind disappears. Indeed, it is difficult to sustain that feeling because every experience in your life will try to pull you back into your habitual mode of thinking, the feeling, and the conviction that you are an individual, different and separate from others.
When you use your speech, mind, intelligence, knowledge, and awareness, or when you interact with others, desire something, depend upon something, or focus on something, you become a limited person, a person with a name and form, and a person who has to fend for himself. You become small. You become an atom in the vastness of creation. It is Anavatvam, the feeling of being small, separate, and distinct. It is the altered self or the not-self that puts you in conflict with the world around you and confines you to the boundaries of your mind and body. It arises due to delusion and is reinforced by desires. Overcoming this attachment is a journey towards self-discovery, inspiring and motivating you to reach your true potential.
True liberation is liberation from this limited self, from the ignorance and delusion that it is your true self or your true identity. When all the things that separate you from the Creator and give you the illusion of a small and separate person disappear and your mind falls into silence, you become one with the universe, the Cosmic Self, with the infinite universe as your body.