Understanding the SELF

This article is based on the teachings of Guruji V Ravi. Any mistake kindly pardon
me for lack of understanding.
The title itself will give us an Idea of what this article is all about. To understand who
we are, we need to have a clear understanding of how we came into existence.
The entire universe was actually created out of nothing. Meaning the planets, stars
and sentient beings like us are the resultant of nothingness. This nothing was
termed by our Rishis as Para Brahman or Maha Shunya (as per Buddhism).
Then out of this nothingness the SELF (Brahman) came into being. It is not
important for to know why the SELF came into being, as this will not help us to get
us nowhere.
Since the SELF is always perfect and because of this perfection it remained inert,
hence to get the process of Creation move forward Maya/Shakthi (kinetic enery) was
created out of this SELF and this Maya used the energy of the SELF and started with
the process of creation by creating souls (Tiny Brahman of the larger SELF) and
surrounding around it so that it can interact with the external world.
To interact with the outer world first there was a necessity of a Consciousness, Mind,
Intellect and Ego to understand and discriminate activities. But the Consciousness
cannot exist by itself, hence it requires a body to perceive its surrounding and
interact with it.
When the body reacts with the external factors, the mind starts reacting to the
stimulus on a continuous basis. When this happens the pure consciousness that is
pervaded by SELF is slowly corrupted. Meaning the Mind perceives external
information, for the sake of preserving the body the Mind triggers commands to the
Intellect, Intellect acts on this and is moved Consciousness and finally Ego is given
the command to act on the stimulus.
This action creates impressions in our sub conscious mind. When an Impression is
created in our sub conscious mind, the pure consciousness pervaded by the SELF is
corrupted. When this happens on a continuous basis, our consciousness is devoid of
purity that it possessed earlier. Hence the link between the Mind and SELF is
forgotten, due to constant interaction with the external stimulus.
Since there is constant interaction of mind and external factors, the mind keeps
reacting and creating more and more sub conscious impressions in our mind, hence
impressions further gets accumulated and consciousness is devoid of essence of
SELF.

Once an impression is created in the sub conscious mind, it is bound to resurface

again in order to clear it out from our mind. This creation of impression and
resurfacing of the same is nothing but Karma.
Since we are always interacting and creating new impressions, the impressions will
not get exhausted within the life time of a person. Hence when the person dies
these impression gets attached to SELF and moves out of the body and gets into
another body (by being born again) to exhaust and experience these impressions.
So this cycle keeps continuing and hence our consciousness is always impure and
because of that we forget the existence of the SELF within us. This ignorance is the
root cause for all the problems in our life. This leads to creation of karma and
rebirths.
Hence to avoid this cycle of birth and rebirth, our Rishis came with concept of SELF
realization and GOD realization, which is nothing but cleansing of our mind and
consciousness. This technique is nothing but a sort of reverse engineering of the
thought process. First we have to understand what makes us to react with the
outside world and what actions create these impressions and hence perform actions
in such a way that new impressions are not created and we exhaust the impressions
(karma) which is already there in our mind from many births.
How do we do all these things, it only through our mind we can do this. We have
work through our mind and thought processes. Understand the significance of our
thoughts, as our thoughts are responsible for creating impressions (karma) in our
mind.
So how do we work with our mind will be the next question. Ideally we should start
changing our life style by showing restraint in our life. Our thoughts should always
be positive and our actions should always be good. This forms foundation for us to
tame our mind and make it to think beyond the day today problems of the life.
Once we start thinking with positive thoughts and good actions. There is cleansing
of the mind and consciousness. Further leading a highly restrained life, couple with
positive thoughts and actions all the times will be difficult for general people like us.
Hence there is a requirement for mind to be protected all the time. This protection
for the mind is provided by chanting mantras. Mantras generate required vibrations
in our mind and strike at appropriate places in our body, so that our mind is not
influenced by the external stimulus.
Even after protecting the mind, to tame the mind we need to take control of it or at
least we should have a capacity to make our mind not addicted to anything. Hence
to enable more control over mind we proceed with Pranayama (breathing exercises)
this helps the mind to be still and further facilitate to enforce more control on the
mind.

Finally once we are good at pranayama we should proceed with meditation. It is

here that we work on our mind and thought processes. All the other activities are
required just to make us more equipped to analyse, discover and cleanse the
thought processes and proceed towards purifying the consciousness. When the
consciousness starts getting purified the SELF starts pervading again in our mind
there by link is again established with our mind. Purest form of conscious will clearly
understand that body and mind that have been created are just the product of the
Maya and it is this which has made us to forget the source of the existence by
making us to interact with the external world and trapping us in the process of
rebirths.
With purest consciousness (purest awareness) we will realize that the SELF is
present in our body itself and at this stage we are Self Realized.