The World as Self, Part 12: The Limits of Self-Awareness

So you have here a marvelous microcosm. You have a political and social analog of the manifestation and withdrawal of the worlds. Of the Lord playing the game—or the Self—playing the game of being all of us, and then, as each individual reaches mokṣa, the Self realizes in terms of an individual life that it is the Self.

So, exactly in this way, the child representing the Self on the way in comes into this world, plays around for a while, there are four castes just as there are four yugas to the kalpa cycle—you remember?—and then out it goes, back to the forest. We would say back to nature. But, you see, the outgoing stage of vanaprastha is a much higher state in the course of evolution than the hunting society person, who is primitive. He isn’t simply going back to where he came from; he’s spiraled, he’s come round to an equivalent position, but at a higher level. And what he has gained in the interim is Self-awareness.

I mean that, too, in the ordinary sense, when we speak of self-consciousness. See, it’s not much fun to be happy and not know it. We need a certain resonance; self-consciousness is an echo in our heads, an echo of what we do, but wouldn’t be aware of doing it if there wasn’t an echo. When you see yourself in a mirror, that mirror is a visual echo of your face. And that’s why, in a room such as this, it’s a very comfortable room for me to talk in because it has resonance. And so, self-consciousness is neurological resonance.

Now, you know how troublesome resonance can get if it’s not properly worked out. You can get echoes that just won’t stop, so you go into a great cave somewhere and you say, Hi! And it goes, Hi! Hi! Hi! Hi! Hi! Hi! Hi! Hi! Hi! Hi! Hi! Hi! Hi! all off in the distance, see? That’s very confusing. That’s the sort of snarl that self-consciousness can get into, and we call it anxiety. When I keep, keep, keep thinking. Did I do the right thing? In the course of some performance, if I’m constantly aware of myself in a kind of anxious, critical way, my resonance becomes too high. And so I get confused and jittery.

But if you learn that self-consciousness has limits, that self-awareness cannot possibly enable you to be free of making mistakes, you can learn to be spontaneous in spite of being self-aware, and enjoy the echo. So what happens—that, having developed self-consciousness through education, through work with other people, having developed all the disciplines of the culture, the vanaprastha then becomes again as a child. But then, you see, he has what Freud says the child has from the beginning; Freud called it the oceanic feeling. And the oceanic feeling is the sensation of being one with the universe. The vanaprastha gets that back, but it’s not a child’s oceanic feeling, it’s an adult’s oceanic feeling—something which the psychoanalysts don’t discuss, because, according to them, all oceanic feelings are aggressive. But there is a mature oceanic feeling, as contrasted with the immature oceanic feeling of the child, which is as different as the oak is from the acorn. And so you can have this sensation, you see, of total unity with the cosmos, of the—shall I call it expansion to infinity, or contraction to infinity?—of your identity without forgetting society’s game rules with regard to you. In other words, it doesn’t mean that you forget your address, telephone number, social security number, and the name you were given. You remember all that, and you can play that game when necessary, but you know it’s a game.

So there is no way, as a matter of fact, of escaping from playing these games. And the only thing is that when you find out, you see, that you are thoroughly selfish, you inquire, What is it—what is the self that I love? What is this thing that I’m so interested in advancing and in protecting? And you look very closely into what you feel when you think you feel yourself. And you know what you find out? That your self is everything that you thought was someone else, or something else. You have no knowledge of yourself, you see, except in relation to others. Self and other are as inseparable as back and front. There is no knowledge of self without the knowledge of otherness, there is no knowledge of the voluntary without the knowledge of the involuntary, of can without can’t. So they go together, and that going together of self and other is non-duality, that’s Advaita, that is the Self.

So through Self one finds deliverance from self.