Understanding the SELF

The title itself will give us an Idea of what this article is all about. To understand who we are, we need to have a clear understanding of how we came into existence.

The entire universe was actually created out of nothing. Meaning the planets, stars and sentient beings like us are the resultant of nothingness. This nothing was termed by our Rishis as Para Brahman or Maha Shunya (as per Buddhism).

Then out of this nothingness the SELF (Brahman) came into being. It is not important for to know why the SELF came into being, as this will not help us to get us nowhere.

Since the SELF is always perfect and because of this perfection it remained inert, hence to get the process of Creation move forward Maya/Shakthi (kinetic enery) was created out of this SELF and this Maya used the energy of the SELF and started with the process of creation by creating souls (Tiny Brahman of the larger SELF) and surrounding around it so that it can interact with the external world.

To interact with the outer world first there was a necessity of a Consciousness, Mind, Intellect and Ego to understand and discriminate activities. But the Consciousness cannot exist by itself, hence it requires a body to perceive its surrounding and interact with it.

When the body reacts with the external factors, the mind starts reacting to the stimulus on a continuous basis. When this happens the pure consciousness that is pervaded by SELF is slowly corrupted. Meaning the Mind perceives external information, for the sake of preserving the body the Mind triggers commands to the Intellect, Intellect acts on this and is moved Consciousness and finally Ego is given the command to act on the stimulus.

This action creates impressions in our sub conscious mind. When an Impression is created in our sub conscious mind, the pure consciousness pervaded by the SELF is corrupted. When this happens on a continuous basis, our consciousness is devoid of purity that it possessed earlier. Hence the link between the Mind and SELF is forgotten, due to constant interaction with the external stimulus.

Since there is constant interaction of mind and external factors, the mind keeps reacting and creating more and more sub conscious impressions in our mind, hence impressions further gets accumulated and consciousness is devoid of essence of SELF.

Once an impression is created in the sub conscious mind, it is bound to resurface again in order to clear it out from our mind. This creation of impression and resurfacing of the same is nothing but Karma.

Since we are always interacting and creating new impressions, the impressions will not get exhausted within the life time of a person. Hence when the person dies these impression gets attached to SELF and moves out of the body and gets into another body (by being born again) to exhaust and experience these impressions. So this cycle keeps continuing and hence our consciousness is always impure and because of that we forget the existence of the SELF within us. This ignorance is the root cause for all the problems in our life. This leads to creation of karma and rebirths.

Hence to avoid this cycle of birth and rebirth, our Rishis came with concept of SELF realization and GOD realization, which is nothing but cleansing of our mind and consciousness. This technique is nothing but a sort of reverse engineering of the thought process. First we have to understand what makes us to react with the outside world and what actions create these impressions and hence perform actions in such a way that new impressions are not created and we exhaust the impressions (karma) which is already there in our mind from many births.

How do we do all these things, it only through our mind we can do this. We have work through our mind and thought processes. Understand the significance of our thoughts, as our thoughts are responsible for creating impressions (karma) in our mind.

So how do we work with our mind will be the next question. Ideally we should start changing our life style by showing restraint in our life. Our thoughts should always be positive and our actions should always be good. This forms foundation for us to tame our mind and make it to think beyond the day today problems of the life.

Once we start thinking with positive thoughts and good actions. There is cleansing of the mind and consciousness. Further leading a highly restrained life, couple with positive thoughts and actions all the times will be difficult for general people like us. Hence there is a requirement for mind to be protected all the time. This protection for the mind is provided by chanting mantras. Mantras generate required vibrations in our mind and strike at appropriate places in our body, so that our mind is not influenced by the external stimulus.

Even after protecting the mind, to tame the mind we need to take control of it or at least we should have a capacity to make our mind not addicted to anything. Hence to enable more control over mind we proceed with Pranayama (breathing exercises) this helps the mind to be still and further facilitate to enforce more control on the mind.

Finally once we are good at pranayama we should proceed with meditation. It is here that we work on our mind and thought processes. All the other activities are required just to make us more equipped to analyse, discover and cleanse the thought processes and proceed towards purifying the consciousness. When the consciousness starts getting purified the SELF starts pervading again in our mind there by link is again established with our mind. Purest form of conscious will clearly understand that body and mind that have been created are just the product of the Maya and it is this which has made us to forget the source of the existence by making us to interact with the external world and trapping us in the process of rebirths.

With purest consciousness (purest awareness) we will realize that the SELF is present in our body itself and at this stage we are Self Realized.

This article is based on the teachings of Guruji V Ravi. Any mistake kindly pardon me for lack of understanding.