how can we define ourselves - spira

Rupert Spira
How Can We Define Ourselves?

Look in your own experience and ask yourself what qualities are inseparable from the experience of yourself. What do we refer to when we say ‘I?’

The first one is obviously Presence. ‘I, by definition, am.’ There is Being.

Now in order to be able to say from experience, ‘I am,’ we must know that ‘I am,’ that is, we must know our own Being. In other words, to be sure that ‘I am’ (and we are sure that ‘I am’) we must know it. So, knowing is also inherent in or inseparable from ‘I.’

Therefore ‘I’ is both Knowing and Present. What else can we say about it?

Normally we add all kinds of accretions to this Knowing Presence. We assign it a location, a colour, a shape, an age, an gender, a size, beliefs, abilities, characteristics etc. However, all these are intermittent and as ‘I’ is not intermittent, they cannot be qualities that are inherent in our self.

If we look again at this experience of our self, there are other things we can say. For instance, whilst it is undoubtedly knowing and present, we have never experienced its appearance, disappearance, birth, death or change because we, as Knowing Presence, would have to be there, present and knowing, in order to register such an experience. Therefore ever-presence, birthless, deathless and changeless are qualities of our self.

Our self is not known by anything other than its own self. It is ‘I’ that knows that ‘I am.’ The self knows itself by itself. It does not need any other agent, such as a mind or a body, to know itself. Therefore ‘I’ is self-knowing or self-luminous.

Because ‘I’ is the only ‘thing’ that knows itself, it is its own evidence. It cannot be proven by anything other than its own experience of itself.

‘I,’ Knowing Presence, being present and knowing but without objective qualities, cannot move, change or become anything other than what it always already is.

It cannot increase or diminish. Nothing can be added to it or removed from it. It is fullness itself and is therefore known as Happiness or Fulfilment.

It cannot be disturbed, because only an apparent object can be disturbed and it therefore knows itself as Peace.

When any apparent object appears, the object is found to be made only out of Knowing Presence. It gives its own substance intimately and utterly to every appearance. For this reason it is known as Love.

Although it is always itself it can take all possible apparent forms, including the form of ignorance, and freedom is therefore inherent within it.

All these qualities may seem to imply that ‘I’ is one thing and not another - for instance that it is limitless rather then limited - and from an intellectual point of view some may argue that this is an expression of duality. It is not!

These qualities, such as changeless, birthless, deathless, ever-presence etc., are given only in response to the implicit belief some of us have that ‘I’ changes, is born, dies, disappears etc.

If we superimpose no qualities on ‘I’ such as objective, limited, located, birth, death, change, then there is no need to counter this with qualities such as non-objective, unlimited, unlocated, birthless, deathless etc.

If we superimpose no qualities onto Presence, there is no need to define it in a any way. We simply leave it free to be what it is, knowing and being its own self alone, beyond all such defining qualities such as limited or unlimited, changing or unchanging etc.