If you can’t claim exclusivity over the objects of your experience, your body, or even your thoughts and feelings, then what can you call your own? And here the knowledge of Vedanta saves us. If we replace the word exclusive with the word inclusive then you are not just these objects, you are not just this body, you are not just these thoughts and feelings. You are all things, you are all bodies, you are all thoughts and feelings. You are a field of all possibilities.

The essential you, your real essence, is a field of awareness that interacts with its own self and then becomes both mind and body. In other words, you are consciousness or spirit, which then conceives, constructs, governs, and becomes the mind and the body. The real you is inseparable from the patterns of intelligence that permeate every fiber of creation.

At the deepest level of existence, you are Being, and you are nowhere and everywhere at the same time. There is no other “you” than the entire cosmos. The cosmic mind creates the physical universe, and the personal mind experiences the physical universe. But in truth, the cosmic mind and the personal mind are both permeated by infinite consciousness. Infinite consciousness is our source, and all manifestation is inherent within it.

Infinite consciousness observing itself creates the notion of observer, or the soul; the process of observation, or the mind; and that which is observed, or the body and the world. The observer and the observed create relationships between themselves; this is space. The movement of these relationships creates events; this is time. But all these are none other than the infinite consciousness itself.

In other words, we are infinite consciousness with a localized point of view. And yet our whole system of thought divides the observer from the observed; it divides the infinite consciousness into a world of objects separated by space and time. The intellect imprisons us in a cage of fictitious images, a suffocating web of space, time, and causation. As a result, we lose touch with the true nature of our reality, which is powerful, boundless, immortal, and free.

We are all prisoners of the intellect. And the intellect’s mistake in one simple sentence is this: It mistakes the image of reality for reality itself. It squeezes the soul into the volume of a body, in the span of a lifetime, and now the spell of mortality is cast. The image of the self overshadows the unbounded Self, and we feel cut off or disconnected from infinite consciousness, our source.

This is the beginning of fear, the onset of suffering, and all the problems of humanity from our minor insecurities to our major catastrophes like war, terrorism, and all other acts of human degradation. To one who is trapped in the prison of the intellect, all indeed is suffering. But the cause of the suffering can and should be averted. Ignorance of our real nature causes the inner self to be obscured. But when ignorance is destroyed, the powerful, unbounded, free nature of the self is revealed.

At first this may sound strange and abstract, but as you bear with this notion and understand it, you realize the most dramatic discovery: The real you is nonmaterial and therefore not subject to the limitations of space, time, matter, and causation. The soul, the spirit, the essential you, is beyond all that. In this very moment, you are surrounded by a pure consciousness. Pure consciousness illuminates and animates your mind and body, and it is powerful, nourishing, invincible, unbounded, and free. Pure consciousness, the eternal spirit, animates everything in existence, which means it is omniscient (all knowing), omnipresent (present in all locations simultaneously), and omnipotent (all powerful).

Now, if you don’t fully comprehend that, don’t worry about it. In the following articles, we will take a closer look at the different expressions of the spirit, the inner self, the source of all that is. As you read these pages, you will get a better understanding of who you really are.

Once you have fully grasped this understanding, your life will be established in joy. Not only will you have the power to accomplish all that you want, but you will have true freedom and grace. This means you will never experience fear, not even the fear of death.

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