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Getting Back to Your Old Self,

Defining Your New Self,

Finding Your True Self

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Psychological Meditation integrates research-based techniques and meditational practices to reduce negative and increase positive experience, and work toward ultimately going beyond dualistic experience (I as a subject experiencing the external environment, body or mind) to nondual awareness, Being ItSelf, which may be best described by the Sanskrit formula Sat Chit Ananda, in which Being = Consciousness = Bliss (describing the goal as such does not imply that it need be attained by the practice of Hindu or other religiospiritual techniques).

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Sometimes when in a funk, depressed, anxious or irritable, we simply want to get back to our old, happy go lucky selves.

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Alternatively, due to being raised in unhelpful environments, maybe we can't really remember a time when we felt good, but know that it is possible, and finally want to take matters into our own hands and define ourselves anew. We're not necessarily interested in some sort of spiritual transcendance, we just want to wake up in the morning and feel like getting out of bed, perhaps looking forward to our day and to our future if that is not too much to ask.

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Others of us have caught the "enlightenment bug" and have a strong suspicion that things in this seemingly very imperfect physical, psychological and social "consensual" or agreed-upon reality that we live in each day is not what it appears. We are the "seekers," attracted to books on spirituality, consciousness exploration and certain types of science fiction such as The Matrix in which ancient teachings are represented with technological metaphors.

 

Seekers often do not have many people to share their questions and tentative answers with, partly because most people have not been exposed to the wisdom traditions, and have not had the experiences that eventually accompany meditational practices. Others who have had their own experiences of consciousness expansion often don't talk about these even to friends or family as they are afraid others will think they are losing their minds (and they themselves may think so as well, if they are not familiar with the literature and haven't met other seekers).

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I have created Still Silent Space and offer Webcam Training in the Psychological Tradition in order to teach what I have learned from my own education and training, as well as from my own personal experiences of the integration of psychological and meditational practices.

 

One of my primary inspirations is the Hindu sage Ramana Maharshi (1879-1950), whose core teaching is purely psychological. According to Ramana:

 

"That bliss of the Self is always with you, and you will find it for yourself, if you would seek it earnestly. The cause of your misery is not in the life without; it is in you as the ego. You impose limitations on yourself and then make a vain struggle to transcend them. All unhappiness is due to the ego; with it comes all your trouble. What does it avail you to attribute to the happenings in life the cause of misery which is really within you? What happiness can you get from things extraneous to yourself? When you get it, how long will it last?"

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"If you would deny the ego and scorch it by ignorning it, you would be free. If you accept it, it will impose limitations on you and throw you into a vain struggle to transcend them. That was how the thief sought to 'ruin' King Janaka.* To be the Self that you really are is the only means to realise the bliss that is ever yours." (Cited in Padamalai, Teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi Recorded by Muruganar, p. 164. Italics mine).

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*In the Hindu Yoga Vasishtha King Janaka says:

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"I have woken up, I have woken up. I have seen the thief who steals my Self. He is the mind . . . I shall now go in search of my Self, the object of supreme bliss. I shall abandon false notions like 'this is I' and 'this is mine' which persistently arise . . .  After remaining silent for a long time he who was the soul of his subjects got up with his mind completely disciplined. He said to himself : 'What is there to be obtained ? What am I going to accomplish through my efforts ? I am constant and pure Awareness. Why should I imagine anything ? I shall not hanker for what I have not got, nor reject what I have got. I shall remain as my pure Self, come what may.' Thinking thus Janaka began to attend to the tasks which came to him in the usual course, working dispassionately like the Sun (producing) the day. He did not contemplate the future, nor did he think of the past. He lived cheerfully in the present moment . . ." (Recounted here in The Mountain Path, Vol. 11, No. 2, April 1974,  p. 105)

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