“Did you have a good life when you died? Enough to base a movie on?” -Jim Morrison

While trying to describe the nature of emptiness and form, Ramana Maharshi once used the analogy of a movie theater: your entire life, all your experiences, thoughts, and memories, all your quiet victories and deafening defeats—everything you have ever known is something like an epic movie, being projected upon the empty screen of consciousness. This screen was present before the movie ever began, is present during the entirety of the film, and remains present long after it ends. As vivid and intense as the film ever gets, the images on the screen never affect the screen itself—if an image of fire is projected upon the screen, the screen never gets any warmer; if an image of water is projected upon the screen, the screen never gets any wetter. The screen remains radically untouched by the film, while somehow touching everything in the film. Read the rest of this entry

What do you think of when you hear the words “Unique Self”? Childhood memories of gold stars and “I am special, look at me” nursery rhymes? Stacks of self-help books intended to help bolster and reinforce the ego? The latest New Age The Secret-type fads that place the self at the center of the universe, instead of the universe at the center of the self? A particular constellation of Jungian personality types, Enneagram typologies, astrological signs, and countless “Which Battlestar Galactica character are you” quizzes on Facebook?

The Unique Self is much more than a Myers-Briggs test with a spiritual overlay. It does not refer to any of these ornaments of the self—though it is immanent to the trials and tribulations of the ego, it utterly transcends the ego, remaining forever untouched by the appetites of identity. The Unique Self represents the deepest possible expression of consciousness, a subject that can never be made object, the union of ever-present consciousness and individual perspective at a radically fundamental level. Read the rest of this entry