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August 11

Layers of the Self 

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"And... if there's only one thing, is ego really a separate entity?"

Well, no. It's not. But then, neither is the table on which my computer rests, or the computer itself, or Adele, working in the other room, or Butler, lying here at my feet. There's only one thing, but it expresses Itself in all these different forms and shapes and ideas. Much like the colorless sap of a rose. The rose obviously is made up of a stem, thorns, leaves, petals, pistil, stamens, each of them separate and different, but all of them formed from the same colorless sap.

Like this, we all are formed from the oneness--Brahman, as it is called in Sanskrit. Each of us is an expression of the Self, capital 'S'. That is the 'truth' of us--that we are, at bottom, this one, formless, boundless thing. The Veda speaks about the structure of how we think of ourselves as a series of sheaths, or KOSHAS, which cover the Self at the center of our being, progressively. They can be visualized as a series of lampshades, covering our light; as the layers of an onion; or as nesting Russian dolls, one inside the other, inside the next.

There are a few different systems one can talk about, with different divisions and a different number of layers, but the simplest one for the purposes of this conversation would be:

The first sheath, or layer, and the first one with which we tend to identify, is our physical body, the ANNAMAYAKOSHA, ANNA referring to food, from which the body comes and to which it will return;

second layer, identified with the breath, or the vital force by which the body is animated, is the PRANAMAYAKOSHA, PRANA = life force;

third, made up of the thinking mind and the organs of perception, is the MANOMAYAKOSHA, MANAS meaning 'mind';

fourth, the discriminating mind, or what we might call the intellect and which the Veda calls BUDDHI, makes up the BUDDHIMAYAKOSHA; and

fifth, a place sometimes we observe in meditation, is the ANANDAMAYAKOSHA, or the body of bliss, ANANDA.

Now in truth, I am a man, you are a woman, each of us a whole, complete expression of this oneness, individual expressions of nature itself. Yet we could talk about these separate aspects of ourself. I could tell you how my body feels right now, that I feel better in it since I started working out again. You could tell me what you are thinking, and we could dissect that thinking to see which parts of it are of the lower mind and which of the higher, more discerning mind, and so on with each of these layers. Speaking of ourselves in this way allows us perhaps to understand more about ourselves and about the human condition.  

The problem of ego arises as we find ourselves identifying with the a layer or with parts of these layers. The ego will shift and change, adding a bit of this and a bit of that, opinions and beliefs from the lower mind, level of energy or enthusiasm from the vital layer, how much bliss I may or may not have in comparison to how much I had last week or yesterday, etc. It will tell me I am these things in order that I will know how to react to other people and experiences in my world. And if I forget that I am this Self deep within all these layers, and believe I am the ego, then I will be at the mercy of whatever the ego has thrown into its bag of identity for today. I'm the low-energy guy with repetitive thinking, or I'm the blissful meditator who is terribly discerning and sensitive, any of which ideas may be true at a certain time from a particular point of view, but none of which are true about Me. None of them describe the I that I truly am. The Self. That I am. That you are.

Today I will question my idea of who and what I am, and remind myself that there is a truth deep within that never is touched by anything I have done or anything that has been done to me.

View of LA, from Hollywood Hills