How can returning the attention to the sense of 'I am' lead to enlightenment?
— decades of self-enquiry led me to find out
Vic Shayne
author
13 Pillars of Enlightenment: How to realize your true nature and end suffering
Since I was a child I wanted to end the insanity of life. It’s not that I had a terrible life full of pain, suffering, and abuse. Not at all. I had two loving parents, an older brother who watched out for me, and two wonderful grandparents who were a close part of my life. But something was amiss. Life made little sense and I felt trapped inside a body and brain. It wouldn’t be another fifty years before I would begin in earnest to figure out what I really am, but in doing so I came across concepts that defied any intellectual understanding. And yet they seemed worth pursuing, so that became my spiritual path.
There are three teachers who stand out in my search for some ultimate Truth and understanding of what I am: Jiddu Krishnamurti, Nisargadatta Maharaj, and Ramana Maharshi. All three were considered to be spiritually enlightened.
After spending decades chasing around ideas in the realms of New Age beliefs, psychic phenomena, philosophy, and even cult-like teachings, by my forties I drifted into atheism as a way to clear my head of ideas that were unprovable and too often absurd. A couple of years went by before I discovered Nisgardatta, a seemingly boisterous, impassioned, and direct guru with a message that even an atheist could embrace.
Admitting what I didn’t know
I dropped my rather close-minded atheist stance for the more suitable “I just don’t know, so why should I take sides about anything at all?” So I opened my mind and listened to what Nisargadatta had to say. Above all, he taught that if you want to know your true self, keep returning your thoughts to the primal thought “I am.” After all, it was his experience of doing this, prescribed by his guru Siddharameshwar, that led to his own permanent awakening.
But I struggled with what he was talking about. What does it mean to turn the thoughts to the “I am”? What does “I am” imply? And, how can this seemingly simply method bypass the ego and its cluttered mind?
I spent decades observing my own egoic self, which was the person I had thought I was. And I enquired into this self to see — not to analyze or judge — exactly what the “I” was made of. My three teachers, Krishnamurti, Nisargadatta, and Ramana, were in agreement about this enquiry, so I felt I was onto something even though I didn’t grasp what the “I” really was.
The ‘I’ is an idea
One of the most important things to remember is that the “I,” or sense of self, is an idea, a belief created out of an accretion of thoughts that bear upon consciousness to form the idea of a “me” who is the doer, experiencer, thinker, seer, meditator, and so on. And so I decided to stop believing in anything. This freed up a lot of energy and attention. Belief did not serve me in the psychological sense, because to believe means to not know and yet accept an idea as the truth anyway. Believing was tossed aside in favor of self-enquiry.
My personal discovery about the ‘I am’
The statement “I am” is one in which we realize we exist, yet at the same time it conveys a sense that we are apart from all else. This is what I sometimes call the original sin, because it is the beginning and cause of all suffering, both psychological and physical. The moment we believe we are separate we create internal and external conflict, and this conflict leads to other conflicts. If we were to identify as the totality of consciousness then we would know that we do not need anything, thus eliminating anger, greed, frustration, jealousy, attachments, and other issues that cause so much suffering. But because we identify as a body that is separate from all else, we are driven by desire and fear.
Turning the attention inward
If we can continually bring thoughts back to the “I am” thought, we are changing our attention from the objective to the subjective. The objective world “out there” that we call reality is fleeting, impermanent, unreliable, unstable, and illusory in myriad ways. The subjective, which is where the “I” is formed, is the source of permanence. The “I” itself is not permanent, but rather it arises from that which is permanent.
Just by attending to the single fact that you exist, you begin to dissolve the ego self that believes it is the thinker, doer, seer, experiencer, and creator. Once the self is dissolved it becomes obvious that the real thinker, and all the rest, is unbounded consciousness.
If you truly want to know what you really are beyond the self, keep returning the attention to the “I am.” Meditation in the popular sense is unnecessary, because it is of itself not attending to the fact that you exist. For this realization, you need no meditation of focus, concentration, trying to be still and quiet, or any of the other common attempts to direct or gain control over the mind.
Knowing that you exist and placing the attention on this simple fact of “I am” is enough.
If you are trying to find the essence of what you are, then I am open to help you. I’ll share what I have found for myself through my 50 years of experience, to guide you to find it for yourself. I am not looking for money, followers, or praise. No price can be placed on this. If you are serious and interested enough to listen, then I am here for you. This is not an open-ended dialog, but rather a conversation in which I share what I have personally experienced. All I ask is that you drop everything you believe and think you know so that we are not speaking from secondhand information. Just email me to get things started: shaynemindbody@gmail.com.