As we have seen, there are different ways of experiencing the individual self. You can experience it as ego self—a separate self that believes it exists on its own. You can experience it as a soul, either as a separate soul (a version of the ego self) or as an organ of reality (a wave in the ocean). When the soul experiences herself as a separate soul, the ego self is still patterning the soul. But when the soul experiences herself without being patterned by the ego self, then she is simply an organ of reality. And the soul can also be present in an implicit way, in the sense that you don’t experience yourself as a soul at all. Instead, you experience yourself as the living reality—your identity, your nature, and your center of perception moves from the individual to the formless. In that condition, the soul is not explicit as an individual soul, so it is not an individual experience—there is no experience of individuality. It is the universe experiencing itself through the individual soul without experiencing an individual soul. As reality itself, as Living Being, you can recognize enlightenment as your realization, but as an individual—regardless of how you are experiencing the individual—you cannot recognize it as your enlightenment. The individual is simply an organ through which reality experiences its own purity, which is a condition of realization. – A. H. Almaas, Runaway Realization: Living a Life of Ceaseless, Ch. 10
What is conventionally known as the psyche is part of this self. The mind is part of the self, manifesting the capacity to remember, to think, to imagine, to construct and integrate images, to discriminate, analyze, synthesize and so on. The feelings are part of the self: the capacity to desire, to choose, to value to love. – A. H. Almaas, The Point of Existence: Transformations of Narcissism in Self-Realization, Ch. 2
For instance, you could have an experience when you are meditating: after two hours of meditation, suddenly you have a certain perception, and you recognize that the truth is the center, the nature, and the value of all existence. You might have that realization, but what does it mean to live according to it? If you want to live according to that realization, you will be confronted with giving up your life. You know from what you perceived that you are not giving up your life, but when you get up from meditation, how can you do it without giving up your life? The superficial self, the worldly self, is still there. It is going to assert itself, and there will be conflict. Although you had that enlightenment, you will still struggle because you are so convinced that you are the superficial self. It’s true that the understanding, the direct experience, is ultimately what is needed. But a lot of the Work is going to be a kind of sacrifice. The self we need to give up is not the body; it is a concept in the mind. It is a psychological belief. But the mind cannot distinguish that psychological belief from the body. Giving it up will feel like the death of the body. So to live according to the truth, we have to accept, we have to be willing to let go of the body and the life of the body. – A. H. Almaas, Diamond Heart Book Four: Indestructible Innocence, pg. 363
To be oneself is to question, to ask, “What is this is about? I don’t want to listen to other people’s explanations and stories, I want to know myself. I want to satisfy myself by my own experience, by my own investigation. It doesn’t matter what authorities or teachers say if it doesn’t make any sense in my own experience.” The more you question and think for yourself, the more you become yourself. To be oneself means not to be conditioned by others, by the external, not to be an extension of the past, yours or anyone else’s past. To be oneself means to be an original – A. H. Almaas, Diamond Heart Book Two: The Freedom to Be, pg. 199