There are many successful people who fear they are missing the meal. They’ve taken their personhood to a winning place, and yet so often they feel empty, disappointed, anxious, confused, alienated. They’ve done it all right, they’ve made money and raised healthy kids and kept in decent shape all the while. And now the kids are gone and doing it for themselves, the money is great but it turns out it’s no destination, and the body is slowly dying. Is this all there is? Has something been missed this whole time? And so, again, we might ask ourselves: who are we really, really?

Missing The Main Course

Psychedelics, of course, have come in vogue again, but there are a variety of practices meant to bring contact with the non-dualistic space that cannot be named – various traditions of meditation being the most well known. Each practice has its own serious-minded devotees and faddish enthusiasts: <a href="https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-breathe-your-way-to-better-health-and-transcendence">breathing</a> techniques, yoga, chanting, extreme exercise, <a href="https://aeon.co/essays/why-forests-and-rivers-are-the-most-potent-health-tonic-around">immersion</a> in the natural world, certain <a href="https://aeon.co/essays/lovemaking-for-longevity-a-recipe-from-tokyos-imperial-archives">sex</a> practices. These are all methods that might lead practitioners into undifferentiated experience, where subject and object are one.

Sex, Drugs And Mindfulness

Consider an amoeba placed under a microscope. We can adjust the focus to bring a particular plane into sharpness, and in so doing other planes become obscured. The full ‘truth’ of the specimen cannot be seen all at once, but can be approached only in the aggregate of various planes of focus. So it is for the self. To investigate the nature of the self, we might pose these three very different questions, at three particular planes of focus:<ul><li>Who are you?</li><li>Who are you, really?</li><li>Who are you, really, really?</li></ul>

The Microscope On The Amoeba

This is not a religion or an organizing cosmological story, it is a spiritual enquiry.An enquiry into who or what we are most essentially, if far less obviously - outside the frame that reifies the idea of the self as an individual unit, instead recasting it as a natural manifestation of the timeless substrate from which it arises.

A Spiritual Inquiry

Psychotherapy, for all its enormous use and beauty, is not a spiritual practiceIn seeking to understand the situation in which humans so strangely find ourselves, many of us respond with an emphatic assertion of selfhood: 'Why, I am going on here!'

Psychotherapy Isn't Holistic

The question that stays in the background.

Therapy is a valuable tool for self-understanding. But spiritual practices can unlock a more expansive view of the self

Understand yourself and those around you.

Missing The Main Course

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