Stop feeding the separate self, and it will drop. In this video, I’m going to talk about why that matters, give a couple of little suggestions on how to stop feeding it, and then at the end, we’ll have a moment of stopping so that you can experience it for yourself.
So why does it matter?
You’ve come upon this video because you probably have an interest in non-duality, spirituality, Eastern mysticism. And the reason that we have that kind of interest is because we have a sense that something is amiss with the way that we live our lives. To be more specific, something is amiss with the way we’ve been taught to live our lives.
We’ve been taught to live with this sense of separation, and we’ve been taught to constantly feed it so that it can never get a crack that we can see through. More than likely, if you’ve come on this video, you’ve had a little crack, and you’ve seen through it, and you’ve seen that something—something—isn’t quite right with the way it feels to be a human being. Like, why are we here at all?
Why are we like this? Right? Why does your brain just keep churning and churning and churning with all kinds of dissatisfactions and desires and lack of self-esteem and just all those painful things that exist for us as human beings? Why are we built that way?
First tip: we are not built that way. We are built to be whole.
That’s— I mean, if evolution, millions of years of evolution, has built us to be whole, integrated, interconnected beings, anything else simply is not possible. We’ve just, in these past few years that we call “civilization,” taken a wrong turn in our way of managing our humanity.
So really, if you’re interested in a spiritual search, you are interested in a new way to manage your humanity. You are wanting to step out of this separate self. That’s huge.
If you’ve come anywhere near understanding that—like, if you’ve watched this video to this point—you probably understand it pretty well: that there’s a separate self. There’s a separate sense of self that we all suffer with. And there’s the key right there.
This separate sense of self is painful and it’s suffering, and it doesn’t quite feel right, right? It feels like something’s off. So here’s the trick:
We have been taught—through schooling, our friends and our family, TV, music—we’ve been taught to constantly feed this separate sense of self. And we live in a society where we can get away with that. Like, 50,000 years ago, all of our ancestors would have been living as hunter-gatherers all around the world. We had traveled all around the world, and we lived in groups, and having a separate sense of self simply would not have worked for anyone.
And life would have been happier. People would have been more satisfied because they would know who they are as part of their whole environment. So this separate sense of self is a horrible thing.
The fact that we create it and teach each other to create it is very, very sad.
So let’s teach ourselves not to continually create it. The very first thing is to identify it.
What is that separate sense of self? And it’s really easy. The really good meditation teachers tell us that this separate sense of self is gone during a moment of super-quiet meditation. So, right there’s your clue:
That separate sense of self is all that noise that’s in your head. I mean, it’s literally the language and the self-talk that goes through your head. And you don’t need that.
And you can’t cure it. All of modern psychology and most of modern spirituality are about trying to take that separate sense of self and make it feel better about itself. But it can’t feel better about itself because it’s false.
So here’s the secret: you can drop it. And if you stop feeding it, it becomes very, very easy to drop it, because there will come a moment where you simply see through it—where you’re like, “Oh, wait.” Actually, you don’t see through it;
you see who you are. The second you recognize who you actually are, there’s nothing for that false sense of self to hold onto any longer.
So just know this:
We can stop feeding it, and the less we feed it, the easier it’s going to be to see who you are and let it fall.
So how do we stop feeding it? Well, it’s just all that really nasty stuff about yourself.
Next time you are sitting around feeling really bad about something or other, notice how your brain just churns out thoughts—things that have happened to you, bad things you’ve done, everything that’s unfair, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Actually, this is true even if you do affirmations. If you sit there and tell yourself all the wonderful things—“I’m so grateful,” “I’m this,” “I’m that”—that’s still feeding that separate sense of self. So just know that constant yakking in your head is not necessary.
And think about this: if you can change negative self-thought to positive self-thought, that means it’s malleable, right? So practice with that.
You’re churning away in your head—“I’m so terrible”—and then turn it around and go, “Oh, well, wait, just think about all the good things I’ve done,” and start thinking that. And you can take that sense and change it.
So if you can change it, there is a you who can change it, and it is not a solid, real thing. So the less you keep messing around with it, the more it’s going to fade and drop.
And in the end, the big secret is to stop minding what you are.
Stop worrying about the imperfect disaster that you are. We’re all that. And this is why awakened people become so wise—because they stop fighting their inner disaster and instead use that to learn about human nature and learn about themselves.
So you can step beyond it—not really by seeing it, because it doesn’t exist—but by seeing yourself, stepping into yourself, becoming who you are: a solid, real life, the life that animates you. It’s nothing, and it’s everything.
So stop and feel that inner being. Did you stop for just a second? Let’s do it again.
Stop. It kind of comes back really quickly, right? But you can just suddenly stop and then—boom.
So if you can just stop, that’s real. The chatter is gone. Let’s do it one more time and then call it good.
Stop. Ah, there we were together.