Our true self, the true essence of our being is pure consciousness, infinite, ever present and unchanging.  We simply are.

 

This is a deeper, more nuanced, truer understanding of our self identity.   This core insight is not merely an intellectual understanding.  It is brought about by meditation and self inquiry, by looking inward and asking the question, Who am I?  

 

At first, this question reveals the common feeling of “I-me” arising as our everyday sense of self.  This “I-me” sense starts with our earliest identification with the body.  It solidifies as we mature, stabilizing in the belief that we are a separate, egoic person.   This egoic identity carries with it all of our accumulated life conditioning, our fears, insecurities, preferences, aspirations, moods, reactions, desires, emotions, etc. and this egoic “I” consequently expresses itself with tremendous instability and is dominated by vulnerability and tremendous self concern.

 

This same inquiry, as it goes deeper and becomes more subtle, reveals that there is also a sense of “I” arising as pure awareness.  This “I-consciousness” simply is.  It alone is infinite and unchanging.  This universal “I”, felt as a vastness arising alone, prior to everything.  This vast emptiness that we are, is prior to the whole of the phenomenal world.  The world is witnessed to arise within it.  

 

The vastness of pure consciousness can only be known by consciousness observing itself.  It cannot be directly known by the mind or by “other” because all other, including the mind, arises within it.  As such, everything but itself is content, observed to be arising in itself.   

 

Unlike the egoic “I”, this universal “I” has no conditioning, no past, no identity, no thought, no age, no story, no gender, no form, no attribute, quality or limitation.  It simply is, as a gentle, intelligent, spaciousness, a peaceful presence.  Complete equanimity.  Felt as the intuitive sense, “I am”  or  “I consciousness exist”.