August 22, 2025
To embrace a higher sense of self, we must release our grip on the self we currently believe ourselves to be. That release begins by placing our attention in the space of not knowing.
Resting in not knowing can feel deeply uncomfortable. It generates a profound insecurity for the personality we’re accustomed to. The identity we call Jeff—or any personal self—exists only through self-referencing.
That identity maintains its existence by continuously narrating itself:
“I’m the one who does this.”
“I’m the kind of person who doesn’t do that.”
“I feel this way.”
“I would never feel that way.”
These inner commentaries pinpoint the self in a specific location and generate a sense of continuity that makes us feel like we exist. But when we shift attention beyond this loop of self-reference, we begin to feel a subtle, existential unease. We are touching the edge of a frightening possibility. We might not exist at all—at least not in the way we thought.
You can test this directly by finding the place of not knowing within your own awareness. Notice what happens when you try to rest there. You’ll feel your mind scramble to reassert some kind of knowing about yourself. You’ll dip into the unknown, but your attention skips off the surface.
You might say: “I’ve done it! I’m in the space of not knowing.” But in that very moment, you’ve turned the unknown into another known, another self-referential idea: “I am now the person who has entered not knowing.”
This is the subtle trap. Even the miracle of awareness beyond self-concept can become a new identity anchor. This is the challenge experienced meditators face. Being good at meditating is not always helpful. Because being good at meditation can become just another identity that says, “I am a good meditator.” And the mind has won again.
The personality we take ourselves to be, Jeff or otherwise, is a self-concept: a bundle of ideas living in the mind. Some spiritual experiences can temporarily, and in rare cases, permanently, disentangle our awareness from those ideas.
When this happens, we may find ourselves floating in what feels like an infinite expanse of being. We are no longer tethered to the gravitational center of self-narrative. We are free. This is the first real threshold of spiritual transformation: the shift of awareness beyond the limits of personality, beyond the boundary of the mind altogether.
When we rest in this expanded awareness, abiding beyond thought and identity, our center of gravity moves into a new dimension of being altogether. This is the realm of intuitive knowing where seeing and knowing arise together. We’re no longer thinking through logic or deduction. We are perceiving directly with the soul.
In this subtle realm, our awareness expands, and if we learn to stabilize there, a cosmic sense of self begins to emerge. This self is not an enhanced personality. It is an entirely new vehicle of being that has access to higher awareness and mystical perception in subtle realms that our personality self could never perceive.
But even this cosmic self is not the final destination. As we embody our cosmic self, we must remember: this is not the end of the path. The cosmic self is a vehicle, a portal for even higher expressions of spirit. It grants access to expanded wisdom, love, and clarity, but it is not the final resting place of the soul.
If the great traditions are correct—and I believe they are— our true spiritual destiny lies beyond even the cosmic self. It lies in perfect union with divinity itself. And our embodiment of the cosmic self is not the culmination of the journey but the means by which that final union becomes possible.
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