Who Am I

Who Am I ?

By Kieran Comerford

Ramana Maharshi a great Indian saint had one main teaching. That was to ask yourself “Who Am I”? By constant enquiry and meditating on this idea he enabled his pupils to become aware that they were more than just their body and their mind, to become aware of something beyond the purely physical. A few weeks ago Bill surprised me in one of his sermons by saying that many Unitarians did not believe in an afterlife. He explained this by saying that they were rationalists. Now I don’t think Bill was referring to this congregation but what he said had a special relevance for me as it is one of the subjects I have been working on for a few years. That is how to use the tools of rationalists to convince the rationalists. For example can you use science to convince the scientists of the existence of an afterlife. Today I want to take a somewhat broader sweep. How can I use reason to convince you that you are much more than your body or your mind. If I am successful, I may be able to convince you that you are much more than you think you are, that you are everything. That you are divine. The present problems in society arise from the perception of the individual as a separate entity having no connection or relationship with anyone or anything else. This limiting and selfish perspective arises from the identification with the ego and the body. Many spiritual writers, notably Deepak Chopra, Eckhart Tolle and Ram Dass, are showing us that we are much more than just a skin-encapsulated ego. Deepak Chopra, the author of The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success, says that we lack a sense of connectedness or an awareness of a unifying level of existence. "The ego”, he says, “is not who you really are. The ego is your self image; it is your social mask; it is the role you are playing. Eckhart Tolle wrote his book The Power of Now after experiencing a period of mental anguish. One night in his deep despair he cried out “I cannot live with myself any longer”. Suddenly he stopped. “Wait a minute”, he said “who is this “myself” that I cannot live with? Who is the “I” and who is the “myself?”” He realised that he was really the “I” and that the “myself “ was his restless mind that was tricking him into seeing everything as separate from himself and out of his control. He realised that he was creating his own problems by his negative attitude. His mind was tricking him into dwelling in the past or the future. The answer was to be in the present, to access the Power of Now. In has later book A New Earth he describes the use of the concept “I” and writes, “In normal everyday usage “I” embodies the primordial error, a misperception of who you are, an illusory sense of identity. This is the ego”. He then refers to Einstein who described this illusory sense of self as “an optical illusion of consciousness”. Richard Alpert, later to become Ram Dass, was the youngest ever professor of psychology at Harvard. With Timothy Leary he started a research programme on altered states of consciousness. They found that by taking psychedelic drugs they could experience a different version of reality which they started to study and document. However, their programme fell foul of the college authorities and Alpert and Leary were asked to leave. Alpert was aware that drugs only gave a temporary ‘high’ and was seeking a better way to carry out his research. He found that the states of consciousness or alternative realities he and his colleagues had experienced were remarkably similar to the ‘bardo’ states described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead to which he had been introduced by Aldous Huxley. He then decided to set out for the East and travelled through Iran and Afghanistan to India where he started looking for yogis who used meditation to reach higher states of consciousness. He eventually found a remarkable Indian saint who became his guru. His name was Neem Karoli Baba and he participated in an experiment for Alpert by taking a huge dose of LSD. It did not have the slightest effect on him, thus proving to Alpert that his guru was already and permanently in a state where he was able to experience more than one reality simultaneously! Alpert decided to stay in India and study higher states of consciousness and was renamed Ram Dass or ‘Servant of God’ by his guru. He has been a spiritual teacher in the West for the last forty years. In one taped lecture he describes his first experience of taking psilocybin, the magic mushrooms obtained by Timothy Leary from a Mexican shaman. He had an out of body experience, objectively seeing himself in his various roles and identities. He saw himself as a teacher, a cellist, a pilot and as a child. Gradually these all fell away until there was nothing there. He then looked down and he could actually see the chair underneath him. His body had disappeared! The only certainty he had left was that he was conscious. He realised that taking psilocybin had altered his consciousness so that he now accessed his fundamental state, that of pure awareness independent of any ego, identity or body. He and Timothy Leary then conducted a blind study with twenty divinity students where half of them took psilocybin and half took a placebo. Their experiences were then documented and references to taking a drug were removed. These reports were sent to religious scholars who rated them on a scale of genuine religious experience with reference to the Bible. Those that took the psilocybin scored consistently in the range of highly evolved spiritual practitioner, while those who took the placebo had a low score. This confirms what we already know, that many ancient peoples have been exploring spiritual development through mind altering drugs, meditation or fasting and maybe we have something to learn here, although I am not recommending that you go out and experiment with drugs. Alpert was thrown out of Harvard but a remarkable basis for research in consciousness was also thrown out with him. Clearly, the validity of similar experiences by numbers of people resulting from properly and safely conducted research should be recognised. I have been struck by the rejection of experiences as a basis for research when these experiences relate to unusual subjects such as those I have just mentioned. Thus it has proved to be impossible to fund and organise larger numbers of subjects for such research projects. Yet experience is used in testing drugs and in carrying out large scale research projects funded by pharmaceutical drug companies. The participants are asked to fill in a questionnaire giving their subjective experiences after taking the drugs. They are asked how did they feel? Did they experience anything unusual? It seems that experiences obtained in drug taking are valid for the purposes of curing illness but not for research in consciousness. So what if thousands of people have had similar near death experiences, or if they have memories of previous lives. In my previous talk I told you about the research carried out By Dr. Ian Stevenson, a physician and psychiatrist at the University of Virginia. Dr Stevenson has looked into over 3,000 cases of children recalling previous lives. He has spent the last 40 years meticulously examining and verifying these cases from all over the world. He has published over twenty books and many more articles about his work, in academic journals. He has recounted thousands of cases where children have remembered where they lived in a previous life. They remembered the names of their previous husbands or wives and other relatives, and details of their family situations or even family secrets. These details have been verified by the living relatives. In many cases children have met their relatives and identified them by name. However his research has been ignored by the academic establishment. Many people have demonstrated the ability to see things which are remote from them in an activity called remote viewing. Remote viewing was funded by the US government for thirteen years. They used this technique to find out what was happening at locations in the Soviet Union and elsewhere during the Cold War. I had an interesting remote viewing experience which I described in my book, The Christian’s Dilemma: When my son Mark was a teenager he used to go for long cycles on his racing bike. One day when he had not come back by the expected time, my wife and I started to get worried. I had been reading a book about remote viewing and decided to give it a try. Remote viewing is a technique by which ordinary people are able to see things which are distant from them. I sat down and closed my eyes. After I had spent some time clearing my mind and relaxing, I expressed to myself a desire to know where Mark was. I then saw a picture of him walking up a hill pushing his bicycle. The place looked like South Avenue, a road about a quarter of a mile from our house. This was puzzling because I would have expected him to come home by a different route. He arrived about five minutes later saying that his tyre had punctured and he had walked for miles. I asked him what route he had taken and he explained that he had come by South Avenue because it was safer to walk that way than on the main road.3 Some of the results of the US research were highly significant statistically and were published in the Proceedings of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineering. One test attempted to see if long distances affected the results. One exceptionally gifted subject, Ingo Swann, agreed to view the planet Jupiter just before the Pioneer 10 space probe flew past. Swann said he saw a ring around Jupiter and thought that he had got confused with Saturn. But later NASA reported that Jupiter had a ring around it at that time This is reason. This is properly carried out academic research. It should appeal to scientists but most scientists do not want to know. Why? Because they are too closely identified with the ego, with their status, with academic respectability. But Eckhart Tolle saw clearly that there was something beyond the ego, that there was an inner “me” that is unchanging and unaffected by the trials and tribulations of life – and there is a “myself” that was causing all the trouble. He identified the “myself” as his ego, the part of him that was caught up in the world, worried about success and failure about other people’s opinions. He resolved to overcome his ego and become the “me” that is unchanging and unaffected by life’s ups and downs. Eckhart Tolle’s book, The Power of Now has been a bestseller since 2001. In it he points out that all that exists is the present. If we look at our thoughts we find that they concern either the past or the future. We worry about things that went wrong in the past or about how things are going to work out in the future. But he points out that everything happens in the Now. We cannot do anything about the past or the future. We can only do something about the Now. Does that make sense? Is it helpful? You see, I am only telling you things that you know already. If it resonates with you at some level it is because somewhere in the past some part of your awareness has already absorbed it and understood it. Your awareness is much greater than you acknowledge. You could even have picked this knowledge up in a previous life! When I gave my last talk here on reincarnation we did a meditation together where I asked you to ask yourself who you were and if you identify yourself solely with this life, this reality, this incarnation. The exact exercise was as follows: I asked you to ask yourself what it would be like if you were a divine being say an angel. Then I asked you to imagine that his divine being has agreed to be confined to a human body for a period which we call a life. Then I asked you to ask yourself who are you? Are you the person named (Your name) or are you much more than this?. By seeing yourself as more than just this body, this mind and this life you can make a start in experiencing your true magnificence, your divinity. As I said in a previous talk here, its hard to really feel that you are divine and I am certainly having trouble with my divinity. My wife is in complete denial about it! I once did a course with Paddy McMahon, better known as Patrick Francis, the author of the Grand Design books. At the end of each session we directed our energy to each participant saying the words “Kieran, we love you and respect you exactly as you are in all your magnificence.” So now I say to you all, “ I love you and respect you exactly as you are in all your magnificence”.

Kieran Comerford Dublin Unitarian Church
Sunday 10th December 2006

Kieran Comerford book “The Christian’s Dilemma” is available in the church, Kieran donates half of the sales to the Restoration Project.

Cover