VISIONARY TEACHINGS
by Gill Schwartz

THE "ME" FIELD

The "me" field is an aura that surrounds and permeates my life and all my experience. It is my means of awareness and makes everything fit my personal phantasms. It colors, flavors and defines everything and gives it a sense of reality for me. These beliefs, longings, wounds, etc., are the fantasy remains of my personal history and conditioning, as I subjectively experienced it; my instinctual needs and how they were responded to; the discarded shadow remnants of my life.

The core of my "me" field is the delusion that what I seek lies outside me, as "other" than me. This myth did serve as a necessary survival assumption in my infancy. But, as I have matured and grown discerning, I recognize it as a restricting bondage and the source of suffering.

With its hypnotic powers of fear and promise, the "me" field enmeshes and keeps me captive in its childish and primitive delusions. Worst of all, being so enslaved doesn't let me quench my soul's vital longings.

 

THREE LEVELS OF RELEASING THE "ME" FIELD

1. I observe myself with kindness and meditative detachment. Not to judge or analyze, simply to recognize my "me" field's influence on my imaginings, thoughts, feelings and actions. I come to discern my habitual ways of perceiving things. I might recall relevant incidents in the past to give my observations greater depth and insight into their patterns.

Although my "me" field is shaped and colored by my moods, circumstances, dominant concerns, etc., I recognize its consistent and unique character more clearly. Rather than my usual total identification with this remnant, adapted aspect of myself as my only choice, with compassionate detachment, my relationship with it can change. A greater awareness of my fuller reality creates freedom and space for me to recognize and choose other possibilities.

Observer consciousness allows deeper self knowing and perspective to come through. If I find myself judging or justifying my subjective projections, I remember it is a favorite control ploy of the fearful, control desperate egoic self to undermine with , "Yes, but..." I'm reassured, the process of releasing my "me" field will naturally draw me closer to recognizing my true Self. I am looking for the Looker. I am the Consciousness, not its contents.

 

2. As my self-knowing deepens, I recognize that egoic level of mind, filled with fantasized circumstance and conditioning (which is the source and energizer of my "me" field), is delusional, mechanical and impersonal. The compulsion to live from that level is painful and burdensome, like having a desperate 6 year old dragging me about, or a deranged tyrant telling me how to live.

The alternative attitudes I might elect in dealing with this situation are either to have compassion for this conditioned self or to disown and reject it. Either choice has its ramifications, but both make a clear discernment between my artifact "mind" and other, realer parts of myself. I experience, too, that disengaging from my "me" field makes room for fuller experience of my Self.

 

3. With ongoing recognition of its futile mechanisms, blind identification with my "me" field gradually dissolves. At first I might image it like a kind of fog surrounding me that colors and obscures everything I experience. But its significance to me dispels as I observe its ephemeral falseness. The attitude I took towards my conditioned, egoic self in the last stage—compassion or isolating separation—becomes the means to draw me to higher Consciousness. As I am more fully absorbed into that Self, I am no longer confused into believing in that labyrinth of obsolete mirages that I thought was me.

This Light that gradually awakens and enfolds me is the sought for Truth. This is the Consciousness that contains my mind and its perceptions and Its Light reflects off them to give them an appearance of reality. Recognizing this is the beginning of awakening to the I Am Truth.

 

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Copyright Nathaniel Schwartz 2003   www.WisdomVisions.com