What is the Self? Vedanta and the Power of Self-Knowledge
The Self is Ordinary, Ever-Present Awareness
As we’ll see, the Upanishads, the source texts of Vedanta, talk of the Self in a poetic, grandiose and exalted way. This can make it seem that the Self is something cosmic, lofty and transcendent; something far removed from the everyday little person we’re all so intimately familiar with.
In actual fact, the Self is your ordinary, everyday awareness. It’s the awareness that has been looking out of your eyes your entire life and in which every sight, sound, object, thought, emotion, desire and fear has been experienced.
“The self that you are, the self that you are going to realise, is totally ordinary,” James Swartz writes. “It is the awareness that is observing your mind take in these words, nothing more. It is not inaccessible at all. It is hidden in plain sight. It is always present and greatly unappreciated for no other reason than lack of understanding.”
The Self is pure awareness. It is the awareness in which the world of objects, including the gross and subtle bodies, exist as objects of perception.
In everyday conversation, the word ‘awareness’ is often used in reference to being aware of something. You might say, “I’m aware of the tree,” or “I’m aware of what happened at work this morning.” This implies that awareness is inconstant; that it comes and goes; that it can potentially be absent. Such awareness might seem to be a scarce commodity, otherwise, campaigners wouldn’t need to ‘raise awareness’ of various things!
Awareness, however, is independent of content. It is the eternal context in which the content appears. Regardless of what you are or aren’t aware of, awareness is constant. It’s always there. There’s no way to either gain or lose awareness.
As a side note, in this context, awareness and consciousness are synonymous. I generally tend to use the word awareness, because, for many, ‘consciousness’ tends to be equated with the content of one’s psyche, such as thoughts, memories, beliefs, etc.
(Additionally, you might notice the capitalisation of the word ‘Self’. This is simply to distinguish the Self as pure awareness from the ‘self’ that most people take themselves to be by identifying with the body-mind-sense complex (ie., the ego). In actual fact, there’s only self and it is not separate from what you are.)
