The First Self

To get to the core of understanding what this existence is, is to get to the core of ourselves and recognise that there has never been anyone better to see this than ourselves, because everyone else is our self at our core.

I know who you were at the beginning, because there is no individual there then — that comes later — and your being there was me being there too. I know who you are now too, at your very core, because I am there too, just as you are here within me. But your 'self' is the individual that exists in the physical together with its mental peculiarities developed from its existence. This is also who you are, and that 'you' I do not know directly; I can only surmise who you are in that being by drawing upon similar experiences from my own life. The whole of you, physical and original, is unique. The core of you is the same in everyone.

The accessing of this core knowledge lies in our very early lives and our memories from this era are our pure source to find our true story. I have a hundred memories of being a baby, but my earliest memory is perhaps the most important to me, because it is a window to who I am without any clutter getting in the way. It exposes consciousness, bared and separate from the mind which grows from it.

My first extended memory was becoming aware of something building up and getting stronger within an otherwise black void. As it intensified, I recognized that it had happened before (possibly more than once) and knew that with its continuation, I had previously lost awareness of it. I was determined that this time I would follow it completely to see what happens next. It was a deliberate effort to follow this sensation and remain aware of it as it grew stronger, but I persevered until the result: being ejected into a crying baby.

There were people in the room, though they seemed to me like aliens, and it was very bright, and I thought oh, this again!, though without the words, obviously. I sort of knew it, even though it was very strange. I observed the whole of this process dispassionately, with a recognition and a sort of aha! feeling, as my perseverance paid off. It was certainly familiar; I had been here before.

I believe it was the act of crying that had led to the cessation of awareness on the previous occasion, like losing consciousness during extreme pain; which was why it took such great effort to follow the sensation. There was no experience of discomfort, however. My consciousness was entirely separate from the experience, and the crying was entirely an automatic biological response to whatever the cause was.There was no suffering there as we know it. It was as if the baby that was crying was not me, more of a portal.

My awareness during the entire process was utterly distinct from the physical being; I did not even know that I was a baby. I did not identify the human being as being me, though later I would do, and now I have difficulty not doing so. From the perspective of the baby it is not yet a human being; it is just a being, a point of consciousness. The rest of its life is about being human.

What is amazing is that even at this time of life we are curious, and my determination to follow the sensation was probably my first thought: a recognition of something triggering an action of purposefulness. The base of ourselves is inquisitiveness. This must have been my first desire. I must also have been aware at this time of the transience of awareness. This nascent experience is the arising of the mind, and with it the experiencing of time. The realization that change was occurring (past), and something else was about to happen (future).

It is the mind which compares and consequently produces the concept of time and the continuity, and with it the dichotomy that produces the ego. The base beneath the mind is endless, blissful void, that is necessarily timeless. This is 'with the knowing' — consciousness (con = with, scio = knowing).

Base consciousness is the state without sensory information. The mind arises with the processing of the senses. The mind creates an experience which is a construction of continuity; and I access this as memory and this memory is me.

~

I am sure that many others have had this memory and equate it with being born, except I know that it wasn't the first time because of my preceding thought to follow it. Which for others again, may strengthen their belief in reincarnation precisely because it isn't the first time, or it may be that these experiences gave rise to their concept of reincarnation in the first place! It must be realized that no one has a clear empirical understanding of reincarnation, death, etc. — it is all indoctrinated supposition, garnered and collated from fleeting glimpses of unverifiable experience.

The backdrop landscape that this occurs in, the blackness of base consciousness, seems infinite. It seems like aeons pass. There is so much time because there is no time, and no worry, no care at all. This is limbo or purgatory, and not at all unpleasant. Whether this is just the beginnings of life and the experience of existence without the mind's comparisons, and so seems infinite due to a lack of boundary, or if it is a period between lives in the reincarnation story, is possibly unknowable. I prefer the former however, as all the stories of reincarnation involve an adult mind in the storytelling, with the inevitable societal indoctrination permeating the experience.

This prior first experience with infinite existence and no care, is the base consciousness that is the divine and the place to just be. Return to this first state for salvation; this is the sacred state which cannot be desecrated and where we go when we meditate and are in deep sleep. It is always there waiting for us. It is there right now, happening beneath all our happenings. Everything else in our lives has all been about acquiring skills to better be. It is the watcher that is completely independent of it that is the original, and possibly the most important thing.

Consciousness means 'with knowing' because it is the mind that knows, and this consciousness is just with it. It doesn't play any part, it's like it's just along for the ride. The base of it. Your consciousness is always pure, and inquisitiveness arises from it — the mind. It is not separate from the mind, but the basest part of it, the intensive root. With no past or future and therefore no physical link, it is indistinguishable from any other person’s consciousness and consequently has no individuality.

The meaning of consciousness is this 'with' the 'knowing'. It is the 'with' that is the defining part of consciousness. It is this that forms the core or base of the later building of the ego and self-awareness and the concept maker. The separation of the 'with' and the 'knowing' is key to this.

Consciousness experiences sensation as an indistinct spiritual thing. It is the mind that intellectualises (inter-lego — between the gathering) and modularises experiences, later forming them into words. Behind the words, below the mind, before mental awareness (pre-sentia, the present), is the spiritual experience called consciousness.

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It could be that the very first awareness of something is not rememberable. Perhaps it is only the second time that it happens that there is the actual means of remembering it. This only occurs very early on in our lives, as all new experiences are now just a variation of already-experienced phenomena, and there are enough neural connections to do the job. But the very first time is the first laying down of a neural pathway, and it takes a repetition of it for it to become the memory. This memory occurs because there was a previous occasion and is only existent because of it, and is, in fact, it, because memory is ultimately just a replaying of a neural pattern.

My first memory of being aware of sensation, and the anticipation and concept-forming, is the First Self — the unpolluted individualized awareness arising from pure consciousness. The 'waiting' that is before it, seems eternal and is the base state, but it is not 'self'. This is identical to all sentient life (some say even to everything, though without qualification). Base consciousness is identical in every human being. Here there is absolutely no individual. When there is an individual, that self is in the physical which then allows there to be a comparison with another. Therefore, the self is not base consciousness. The self is the physical body, and the mind that arises from it. The word self is personal by definition, not something that is common to everybody. That word would be soul.

It is the sensation that unlocks the individuality and produces a mind of comparisons. The mind forms from the neural pathways that are laid down from the sensation that comes from exposure to living. It is this mind that is the self, each of which is unique. The awareness of sensation and the curiosity to follow it, is the First Self. The First Self does not have control of the body at this point. It can only follow and cannot lead; it just observes. My memory of it is that it doesn't even care if it takes part or not. The choice of following the sensation, the baby that was crying, and the world outside of it, was nothing more than a side-track; an idle curiosity. It didn't have to participate, and actually couldn't anyway.

~

Science (the stem 'scie' is the same as 'scio' in consciousness, meaning knowing) says that because the hippocampus (a part of the brain involved in memory) is not developed in the baby, it is not possible to remember anything from this era of our lives. I know that is not correct, and I believe this is because the hippocampus is used for the ego, and the ego has no purpose for existing until societal interaction kicks in. Everything grows according to its usage. This is probably why so few others can remember being a baby, because they are locked within the matrix of a society and the ego that is created for it. My extreme level of isolation has allowed me to bypass this aspect to a certain extent.

It is further complicated by the fact that imagination uses the same neural pathways as memory, and you can therefore create false memories. There is a difficulty in investigating it without contaminating it, which makes it necessary for a very careful approach in memory retrieval. But perhaps my discovery of this room with people in it, which I emerged into as a crying baby, was a bit of a disappointment to me.

My thought might have been "oh, not this again! I don't want to do this again!". But this would be my attitude now, like it is for all the gurus who wish to transcend the reincarnation cycles, and might be a retrospective addition to the experience. Once we have had this interpretation, it is impossible to know whether we are making it up or not. To separate memory from imagination might not be possible.

From other experiences I have had of this First Self though, I am sure there would actually have been no judgement whatsoever, and I wouldn't even have cared. Life is not something to cling to at this stage or reject. It really just doesn't matter; it is so unimportant.

The reason I think why I can remember being a baby is that I can remember meditating when I was a baby, by becoming aware that I was getting carried away by experience and deliberately refraining from it. This centring of awareness is a detachment from being lost in it, and possibly preserves some of the neurological pathways for memory of that era.

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We expect the core consciousness — the enlightened state of awareness, to be holy and penetrating, but it is possible to visualize it being a disinterested slob, who has no opinion whatsoever, and just sits there vacantly, hardly paying any attention at all. Or is that just me!

It is the mind that brings the intensity of interest to the party. The core cannot appreciate anything. It has no judgement; it is the mind that does all that. The word interest (inter = between, est = to be: between being), refers to the activity of the mind bouncing about upon the backdrop of base consciousness, and it is that that we try to control during meditation. We will try to fill every moment of our day with this interest, but we are always inevitably forced into sleep, and a return to base consciousness, to just being. This state of dreamless deep sleep is rarely remembered because it is only the 'interest' that the mind does, that is the actual 'remembering'. There are no 'members' to make again (re), in the state of base consciousness.

But I can be aware during deep sleep, and as a child was always aware through these unconscious periods. I was always confused by what the adults were talking about when they said "unconscious", as it is the same as conscious. It is just without the ability to do anything, think anything, or care about anything. There is just nothing to remember of it except its amazing nothing.

That which is truly sacred is incapable of being desecrated. This is the true centre; the absolute present where no stories are being told.

The 'self' is a personal pronoun that refers to the physical being and the awareness that is generated from that, and is an autonomous entity of being which is individual, and not the core awareness which exists throughout all sentient beings, which is called consciousness. It is important to understand and maintain the boundaries of these words.

Base consciousness is the base neural mechanism at work without any sensory input or activity, or using previous sensory input in the network. It is the idling of an engine not in gear. It is important to note that this consciousness is the core of experience and not the core of the universe. All that can be experienced is consciousness, but this does not mean that everything is consciousness. The concepts that are perpetuated by this misunderstanding are caused by gurus repeating their gurus words. I have not had a guru; I have trusted that the universe will reveal all to me. I am my own Hogwarts!

~

Everyone has to come to terms with the discovery that they are not the only divine being in the universe. It's a memory that can be buried deep, but somewhere in your early life the realization was there, and had to be deferred to such a degree that all knowledge of it is lost in the societal shroud. And so, if rediscovered, it will be realized that we all have access to this divine memory, before we were restricted to just our social selves. Some have kept this knowing, but always have to keep quiet about it.

You really need to get back to your first experience of it to fully understand it. It is only through actual experience that there can be knowing in this case. To know who we are, it is really helpful to remember our first experiences because they are untainted by later influences.

You have to start with a true seed. If your seed comes from someone else, it is tainted by their society and that person's habits and beliefs, and even by the attempted communication of it. It is just not good enough. The true seed is within yourself. There is no one else who has a truer seed. No one else can tell you who you are. The purity of it is in the first 2 or 3 years of your life, after that it is contaminated with the false understandings of others. You cannot trust them. None of them have anything else more than you at your core self — that unblemished individuality tied to pure awareness — and unpolluted self: the First Self. Anyone saying something holy that comes from another, is not being holy; they are pretending.

What I know is extracted from the very source. There is no clear truth in the eclectic assemblage of other's concepts; what a nightmare of disambiguating and unravelling that would be. Impossible! It is a ridiculous thing to do to tell someone else's story. There is only one story — yourself. There is nothing out there but the mechanism that is creating it. That is why it doesn't matter if you die, because the same life is effectively happening to all the same beings out there, just in a different location and time. This is what is meant by consciousness being eternal — it carries on in other individual units like yourself, as it already is doing. Time is not strictly linear in this context, and future and past get jumbled together by the brain into a story which doesn't always quite fit.

If you cannot remember the first two years of your life — the two foremost and most important years upon which the whole of your life is built, the foundation of all your emotions and the root definition of who you are — if you cannot remember this, how can you know who you truly are? You have amnesia!

My First Self would have been your experience too. There is no individual developed at this point. That is created by the sequence of events that happens to the physical individual afterwards, and the responses that that core individual makes in interaction to those events. Your unique DNA will influence this building of you and create the individual character and person that you have become, but it will not affect the core consciousness.

The 'First Self' experience that I can remember must be identical for everyone. That is why it is significant, and I can't believe it is not at the core of every religion or philosophy, because it is pure and divine. It is the start point for everything that happens to you afterwards. It is unpolluted, it is the true you, who you really are. It is devoid of any social indoctrination, which cannot be said for any later experiences.