In my blog post last week, I included a portion of an interview with a contemporary Zen Buddhist teacher. He made two main points. He said that we are all one and complete as we are but that truth is covered up by our personal identity. So, to find our true self we need to give up our imagined identity.

Imagined? Do you think of your identity as imaginary? As being “all in your head?” On first hearing, most people would push back pretty strongly at such a notion. “Of course, my identity isn’t just my imagination!” But if not, then what or where is it?

To pursue such questions is known in some spiritual traditions as “self-inquiry.” It is to ask the most fundamental question, “Who am I?” This is not just to find an intellectual answer, however, but an experiential one, to have a felt knowledge of your true self. This is one of the primary purposes and discoveries of meditation.

Most people know that meditation has something to do with silence, with becoming silent, with being silent. And that’s where many get hung up. “I can’t do it! There’s too much going on in my head and I can’t make it stop.” And after a few frustrating attempts, they give up.

The voice in our head is completely natural. It’s what our mind does. We can’t quiet it, not directly, and usually the more we try, the worse it gets.

Instead, rather than engaging with it, just notice it. And then, rather than asking whose voice it is or where it’s coming from or what it means, pay attention to who it is that’s listening to that voice. Because that’s you, the real you. That voice isn’t you. How could it be? When you say, “I’m taking to myself,” that’s not actually true. How could it be? It’s your mind’s way of tricking you into thinking that voice is yours. But it’s not. The real you is the consciousness, the awareness, of that voice.

Discovering that you are not your thoughts, you are not the voice in your head, is a huge spiritual breakthrough. It is one of the primary teachings of Eckhart Tolle’s bestseller, The Power of Now. Here are a few relevant quotes from that book.

The good news is that you can free yourself from your mind. This is the only true liberation. You can take the first step right now. Start listening to the voice in your head as often as you can. Pay particular attention to any repetitive thought patterns, those old gramophone records that have been playing in your head perhaps for many years. This is what I mean by ‘watching the thinker,’ which is another way of saying: listen to the voice in your head, be there as the witnessing presence….

When you listen to that voice, listen to it impartially. That is to say, do not judge. Do not judge or condemn what you hear, for doing so would mean that the same voice has come in again through the back door. You’ll soon realize: there is the voice and here I am listening to it, watching it. This ‘I am’ realization, this sense of your own presence, is not a thought. It arises from beyond the mind….

So when you listen to a thought, you are aware not only of the thought but also of yourself as the witness of the thought. A new dimension of consciousness has come in. As you listen to the thought, you feel a conscious presence – your deeper self – behind or underneath the thought, as it were. The thought then loses its power over you and quickly subsides, because you are no longer energizing the mind through identification with it….

So the single most vital step on your journey toward enlightenment is this: learn to dis-identify from your mind. Every time you create a gap in the stream of mind, the light of your consciousness grows stronger.

And that “growing stronger” is important because consciousness is our true nature, what we really are.

Our mind claims to be who we are. Its voice tells us endless stories about our selves and our relationship with the world. Our supposed identity is composed of those stories, many of which, as Tolle says, have been playing in our head for years like “old gramophone records.”

The voice tells us that I’m attractive, or not. I’m intelligent, or not. I’m lucky, or not. I’m loved, or not. And on and on. But none of it is real because it is all just thoughts in our head. And all the memories that support those stories are also just thoughts, having no reality in the present. Yet we listen to them and believe them, trapping us into a mind-created identity we feel must be true and blocking us from life’s true freedom. As the Zen teacher’s quote from last week’s post concludes,

The more you keep the past in the mind, the stronger your identity is…. The more you keep past elements inside your mind, the less likely you will be able to break free into the future and open up for the possibilities that this lifetime might still have for you.

In John 8, Jesus says that those who live in his teachings “will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” Freedom is the consequence of spiritually awakening to our true nature. It is why Jesus says that we have to lose our life, our imagined identity, to find real life and our oneness with God and the whole creation.

Consciousness itself—not consciousness of any particular thing—is our experience of this oneness with God and the universe. It is where we know God. It is what the Bible calls Spirit. It is what Meister Eckhart is pointing to in a quote I have used many times. Here he uses the metaphor of the eye, our primary organ of perception. You can substitute the word “consciousness” for Eckhart’s “eye.”

The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.

The oneness of consciousness, sometimes called the Eternal Self, is a common theme in Eastern and indigenous religion and spirituality. It is also central to the mystical traditions of the biblical religions, as Eckhart demonstrates. But that’s not all. Since the Enlightenment, both philosophers and scientists have also explored this idea. In the 20^th century, quantum physics gave a new basis for taking consciousness seriously. Max Planck, the father of quantum theory, shocked his fellow scientists when he said: “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness.”

Planck and others following him are pointing the way to finally bridging the gap between matter and spirit, between science and religion. It’s not science or theology that’s important, however, but experience. Our own personal knowing of this truth and this reality. For that we need only turn to our own awareness. In doing so, we can find our true self, the identity which we call “I am.” And by practicing resting (or “abiding” as the Bible says) in this “I am-ness”, we come to know our union with the I AM that is the foundation of all things, and experience what Paul calls “the peace that surpasses all understanding.”

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