The Tao of Dark Sages - Chapter 7, Part 4

The Tao of Dark Sages
by Scott Bradley

I found that I had a choice, I could enjoy my self or I could think about enjoying myself. Only one or the other is possible at a time. When I had an intuitive sense of what this self of mine was about, I’d try and articulate it to myself and lose that special sense. The idea would be there, but not the experience.

Yes, that’s fundamental to all experience. I find because I want to share things with you guys I interrupt the process a lot by thinking about it. And, to share it with myself as a thought amounts to the same thing. At some point it is a positive thing to form the ideas by which we can share the experience both with our own mind and that of others. But, since we are so used to thinking rather than experiencing, we have to discipline ourselves to just experience. Anyone else? I think it would be great to hear a bunch of your experiences without any great elaboration.

In enjoying my self I came to realize that the self enjoying itself is the self being a self. Like this is what the self is meant to do as part of its innate nature. The self enjoying itself is what the self is meant to do.

What a wonderful realization! And how could it be otherwise? “The self enjoying itself is what the self is meant to do.” Well said!

Enjoying one’s self is a means of being aware of one’s self. So, I can appreciate, affirm, or just plain experience my self and it is all the same thing, though with a different emphasis.

Yes. All these are a way of allowing awareness to “look through the window” of self.

It’s not what I experience that is important, but that I experience. To be this self is to experience.

To enjoy my self I found that the experience was so much more exhilarating when I just let go of the self — just let it be without me grasping it.

It is only in letting go of self that we can truly know and experience it. “Whoever shall lose his life shall find it.” Surrender of self is the prerequisite to experiencing self as it is meant to be experienced.

I have to admit that I didn’t really understand how to enjoy my self.

Did you enjoy not understanding? You were aware of not understanding. And that is experiencing your self. Spend time with that, if that’s what you experience.

I found that — I don’t know if I can express this — I found that when I let go of my self and just let it be, it is as if it is the entirety of the known world. It’s like all the world arises from my self and my self is the world. Everything I experience is my self and what I do not experience does not exist for me. Yes, that’s it—my self is the world.

Alan Watts wrote that when the ego-identity is transcended, the relation of knower to known is so changed that “I have no other self than the totality of things of which I am aware.”i Perhaps this is what you have experienced.

I enjoy the emptiness of totally surrendering and ungrasping my self. Experiencing my self in this way is like with a kind of complete indifference and detachment that allows a wonderful sense of purposelessness, carefreeness, and freedom. I begin to see what Chuang-tzu was on about when he described aimlessly wandering in the void.

When you let go your self, is there still a sense of self?

Yes, but it has more of that transparency that we have been speaking of. There’s no identification with it — no me.

All these experiences must be what it is to be aware of our selves. Let’s look at them more closely. But first, I’d like to make some general statements about this whole exercise.

As Sue-tzu has frequently pounded into us: This is It. This is awaken-ing. This living of our lives, examining our experience, this adventure — this process is awakening. Let’s not get caught up in seeking elsewhere.

If you're interested in reading more from this series by Scott Bradley, go here.