The Commanding Self

Understanding Oneness is about opening the possibility of a new way of living based on trust and love rather than fear. It naturally invites us to take a roots and branches look at the strategies and habits of a mind and body driven by the need for survival, devoid of any broader context of existence other than physical survival. We can call these a collection of behaviours and habits, as the Sufi teacher Idies Shah did, “The Commanding Self”. (A recommended read!). Non-duality often refers to this as the “Separate Self”. Of course, there is no Separate Self or Commanding Self in reality. We created an illusory belief because we lost sight of the experiential context of our true self as Awareness. The instant we do that, we lend our sense of reality to the thoughts and feelings of our body, and it appears to us we are these thoughts and feelings.   We lose our ability to stand back and act with higher intelligence, compassion and love. We become driven by fear and a sense of our impermanence. These are mighty forces, as we can see as we look at the state of the world. Even in our own lives, in the past, before awakening to an experience of the constant self, that is, the ever-present reality, watching all our thoughts, feelings and perceptions, we have laid down habits of survival. As the sediment in waterfalls to the bottom, these habitual reactions get stirred if a situation triggers us. We can find ourselves reacting irrationally, selfishly, even abusively.   The guilt and shame this often triggers only serve to embed and suppress from view these behavioural patterns. However, the instant we experience that version of our self that is free of all of this, we are liberated from the thinking and patterns and over time, we can elect to act from love and intelligence each moment more and more.   The experience of entering the liberated place is so powerful it can undoubtedly, unravel all these trends. As we open to this way of seeing, we can see that the Universe is an experience of beautiful “super-ordinary” serendipity that answers our survival needs, and, though, in our forgetful state, we lack trust in it, we can instantly regain it once our eyes are opened to the oneness of Self and environment. Gradually and naturally, over time, we can do our best to act from what is an impersonal detached place of love rather than a unique personal place of fear, drawing on the inner experience of peace in our hearts. This is not a systematic process. Each moment is a process of artistry to discern a more intelligent solution to our problems rather than react from fear in controlling ways. Once this is realised, we can forgive ourselves for the time we may have acted as the illusory Commanding Self and not compound the problem by feeling personal shame, for all this was just the true self flowing and not a personal matter. We must firmly take our stand to face any thoughts to the contrary that create a known closed self with the truth of the not known open self. In this way, every moment is fresh. What has gone has gone, and we discover that consciousness, which is what we are, is in an ever-present source of renewal and potential, and what matters is to live true to that.

Love,

Freyja