Awakening to the True Self is the path home for each of us. It is the path of leaving behind illusions of separation and identification with the mind, body, and emotions for true knowledge of our oneness with the Divine. To awaken to the True Self is to know the divine truth of God. It is to be self-realized and enlightened. There are many words and paths describing this same state of being, which is the one state of being that exists in everything, everywhere, and in all times. We are this! We are infinite, boundless, pure consciousness. Yet, even these words do not fully express the truth of the Divine, which is beyond definitions. “Most of us live in the world thinking and acting as if we are the child of a barren woman―as if we were born. At some point in our evolution, we wake up and realize we are not the illusion of the body-mind complex, but THAT which exists as prior to consciousness, time, space, and Being―we were never born and will never die,” states Gabriel Counsens in Spiritual Nutrition: Six Foundations for Spiritual Life and the Awakening of Kundalini (2005).

How do we make the journey from separation consciousness to that of being awakened to the True Self? In the words of Paramahansa Yogananda from Gabriel Cousens’ book Spiritual Nutrition (2005), “Self-realization is the knowing- in the body, mind, and soul- that we are one with the omnipresence of God; that we do not have to pray that it comes to us, that we are not merely near it at all times, but that God’s omnipresence is our omnipresence; that we are just as much a part of Him now as we will ever be. All we have to do is improve our knowing.” There are many paths of self-realization that teach us how to awaken. Today’s vast amount of knowledge about self-realization is a result of many people taking the quest inward to know the True Self throughout the ages. Those who have succeeded in awakening to the Divine have offered answers to the questions surrounding the nature of our True Self. Within these answers lays a central message: there is a True Self that is the same for all of life; it is eternal, perfect, and certainly can be known.

Although spiritual teachers offer answers to the question of who we really are and paths of how to come to know our true nature, people need to take the journey inward and experience the nature of the Divine themselves. In this way, each person is her/his own liberator and spiritual teacher. Devotion to the path of awakening to the True Self, openness to the grace of becoming self-realized, and cultivation of spiritual energy are states of being which help us to experience the nature of the True Self. The paradox of the situation is that even though we are the True Self right now and thus do not need to go outside of ourselves to find it, we can not know it with a mind that is constantly racing between thoughts of the past and future. This is why spiritual teachers offer us practices as a foundation for realizing the True Self. Such practices prepare the body and mind to perceive the True Self. The body and mind can be likened to antennas, which are slightly altered here and there in order to be better conductors for tuning into the frequency of the Divine. As Ellen Grace O’Brien notes in Living the Eternal Way: Spiritual Meaning and Practice for Daily Life (1998), spiritual practices are “nutrients for the seed of realization which already exists within us to bloom.” To become self-realized is a natural process of our True Self unfolding, the same process that a flower undergoes in blooming. O’Brian states, “One has simply journeyed home to the exquisite flowering of the Divine in and as one’s own Self.”

Course Continued…