How The Boundless Self Got Lost
Updated: Oct 11
A conversation on how Consciousness remembers what it always was
Q: I've had a question on my mind for months now — and you've spoken at length about it — but there's something that's missing which I don't understand. If there is only one Self, how is it possible for the Self to become the non-Self? How does it get entangled in the non-Self? I just don't understand how the Self — which there is only one of — can become two or three or four or more, and get entangled in its manifestations.
A: When Awareness becomes aware of itself, all of its total potential — the infinite reality of itself — is contained at that point. And that point is manifest as the appearance of you, of your body-mind. It was always Consciousness all along. All of this has always been Consciousness. It's just that the field of Consciousness itself needs a vehicle to experience itself. It needs a point to know itself. Otherwise, how would infinite total reality be experienced? It's experienced at a point. It experiences itself at a point, and that point is the body-mind. The manifest expression of it is the body-mind. It's always been Awareness — one field of Awareness — and this is experienced within Awareness itself.
The whole mechanics of the process of creation happens from infinity to that point. Infinity to a point. In that process of creation, the Awareness itself is constricted to a point. And it becomes ignorance — ignorant of itself in its process of knowing itself. And when it becomes ignorant of its unbounded Awareness and experiences itself at a point, the whole total potentiality of itself as infinite Consciousness is contained at that point — and that point appears as the body-mind-person.
And yet that point is absolutely necessary for Consciousness to remember the full value of itself. So you could say ignorance of the unbounded Awareness that you are is inherent in the process of creation itself. It's absolutely necessary so that Consciousness has a complete point, in order to know the full extent of its own infinity — and really the Divinity that it actually is.
And so that's it in a nutshell.
You have always been unbounded, infinite Consciousness. Only, it needs to know itself, and it knows itself at that point. It's a beautiful, beautiful thing. The point of infinity appears as the manifest expression of your body-mind. And the infinity, from the perspective of that body-mind, appears as the world and the universe in front of us.
But from the perspective of unbounded Consciousness itself — when it becomes awake to itself and experiences its perpetual self-referral, knowing of itself everywhere within itself — it experiences frequencies of its own flow, its own self-referral flow of knowing itself, which are deliciously beautiful divine flows of intelligence.
When experienced from the perspective of the individual body-mind, it is just a world. It's an incomplete perspective. That's all. So when Consciousness itself wakes up to itself at the point of the apparent body-mind and becomes awake to the frequencies of itself, then the universal value of those laws of nature — all of those frequencies and flows of intelligence that are creating the appearance of the universe — are my own Self. They're just the frequencies of my own flow, the flow of my Self that we've mistaken as the forms and phenomena in the world around us.
To really answer your question properly: there's only ever been Consciousness. And that Consciousness has always been Divine. It's been Divinity itself. There has never really been an actual manifest creation experienced through the senses — it's just an incorrect, incomplete perspective.
In Awakening, what changes is your perspective of who you are. You're no longer the person experiencing the world in front of you in that same way, even though that remains. But you — who you really are — are that unbounded Awareness. The infinity has finally been able to experience its own infinity on its own level, through the appearance of form, no longer caught in it.
But even that unbounded awareness is still an incomplete perspective. It's just a stage — a platform that, once established and stabilized, you can't fall back from. But it's also a stage for an opening to an even greater perspective. "I thought I was just this individual body. But now I'm that unbounded Awareness." And then, "Oh, forget that unbounded Awareness. I am all This. Everything is myself. Everything." Then there is no more witness.
Q: But…if there is only one Self, why does it manifest into separate little selves in the first place?
A: It doesn't. It never has. That's the mistake of the intellect. It has never been a separate little self. It's just an illusion.
And in the process of total awakening, that is exactly what happens — we remember (by direct experience) that we appeared to come into this incarnation, and now we are that one boundless Self that we have always been. We just forgot. That's all. And we see others around us as individual points of that Consciousness, but that's an illusion. Each one is its own beautiful manifestation of various laws of nature, different intelligences, different talents, different physical traits — and that's what makes the world so beautiful.
But when we remember who we are, we go back to that pre-manifestation state and realize: that never really happened. This all appears real — that's fine, that stays the same—but now I remember. This is what I am. So when this is gone, I will still be That. It's just a remembrance of what always was.
When we remember who we are, we're out of that illusion of separate points, and we look around at others and think: It's so simple. If you could just remember — you're there. You're there. You want to tell them they're there. When you first wake up, you start to see everyone around you as awake, because you realize what a simple little click it is. It was just there in front of you all the time, but you couldn't see it.
The point is, there are no other selves. That's the illusion. There's only the one Self. And the whole process of the different stages of what we call Awakening, Unity, and so on, is just the remembrance on a deeper level — all the time — of what that Being really is.
Another way to look at this: infinity is made of points. And every point is a point of the total dynamism of silence. Every point holds an opportunity to experience the full reality of the total dynamism of silence. All these people, all these objects — they are those points of infinity.
Some of those points of infinity have a human body, and in that human body, the total potentiality of that infinity is available to open up to. That potentiality — that is what humans are. That's why humans are a compilation of all the laws of nature, all the qualities of intelligence, all the infinitely dynamic intelligence that is inherent in what that silence actually is. Silence is just the maximum degree of infinite dynamism.
It's so dynamic that it initially experiences itself only as silence. It doesn't experience its own infinite dynamics. That's what opens up later, after the initial Awakening.
Every human being is an assemblage of the frequencies of Consciousness in its process of being conscious of itself, in various proportions. Different proportions, but the same universal intelligence. We all have that same infinite intelligence. We are it. We already are it.
In timelessness itself, there's no sooner or later. It's all Now. The beautiful thing about awakening is opening to the universal qualities of divine intelligence that make up the appearance of everything everywhere.
Ultimately, we find that everything everywhere is divine surrender in the appearance of form and phenomena. Everything is pure surrender. Everything is pure surrender. Just surrender. You will only wake up. That's what will happen. You only wake up, and at some point discover: all there is, is pure Divinity in the appearance of all of this, and beyond.
