Who is the you underneath the you? There is a self below the ego, and the ego is the part doing all the suffering.
Ask who Steven is and the false self answers first. Podcast host. Councillor. Meditator. Man in a wheelchair. All of that is memory doing the job it evolved for, remembering where the bear was. Underneath it is something with no desires and no story, and you can find the edge of it right now. Are you aware of your left toe? You were not, and then you were. Now widen that until it is not pointed at anything. Not warm, not cosy. Just there, and it does not come and go.
One thing to try: Be aware of your left toe. Then let the awareness spread until it is not aimed at anything at all.
In this episode
(2:48) The false self answers first, every time
(4:09) Memory evolved to remember the bear
(5:35) It does not feel warm or cosy, and that is the point
(6:18) Are you aware of your left toe
(7:56) I cannot see beyond me. But I can experience it
(9:16) Aware of everything and of nothing at once
(11:17) The ego is the part that suffers
(12:55) The only self that truly has your back
(17:00) The passage, read aloud
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Thank you for listening.
Steven
The question this answers
Who is the you underneath the you?
There is a self below the ego, and the ego is the part doing all the suffering. This is a hard one to talk about, because at this level words start failing. Hundreds of books have had a go and I failed to follow most of them, and here I am having a go anyway.
The heart of it
Ask who Steven is and the false self answers first. Podcast host, councillor, meditator, man in a wheelchair.
The ego is not a fault. It is memory doing the job it evolved for, which was remembering where the bear was.
None of that story is tangible. No surgeon could open my head and find Steven in there. Something goes wrong in the brain tomorrow and somebody asks who Steven is and I might have no idea.
Rupert Spira has a way of pointing at the other thing, and you can do it now. Are you aware of your left toe? Notice what you just did. You went to the toe, became aware of it, then answered.
Now the harder one. Are you aware? Slow down and notice the gap between the question and your answer.
That gap is not aware of anything in particular. Not my voice, not the room. Aware of everything and of nothing. Awareness with nothing pointed at.
I met it once without meaning to. When I dived in and broke my neck, I lay on the bottom of that pool, and after the oxygen went and the panic went, there was a moment where I did not fear anything and did not want anything. I did not think I was dying and I did not think I was alive. There was no me and the pool and the people and the earth. There was just awareness. It might have been four seconds or ten milliseconds. It felt like a minute.
I could not talk about that for about twenty five years, because it sounds like the sort of thing that gets your breath smelled.
It does not feel warm and it does not feel cosy, because it does not feel. It has no desires and no story, and it does not come and go.
Ask yourself what real love actually feels like. I think honestly it is: I am safe, I can be vulnerable, I will not be judged, and somebody has my back. That is what this is, without any of the giving of gifts.
One small thing to try
Be aware of your left toe. Then let the awareness spread until it is not aimed at anything at all.
Then just take a breath and let go of everything, and notice what is still there when the wanting stops. It is quiet and it is vast and it is equally small.
The ego comes and goes, and so do loneliness and excitement and joy. This does not.
Questions people ask
Is this the same as the soul?
I would not use that word for it, mostly because it drags a lot of other beliefs along with it. What I can say is that it is what remains when you stop adding.
Is the ego bad?
Not at all. It is why you function, why you remember, why you got through childhood. It is only a problem when you think it is all there is.
I tried the awareness question and got nothing.
Then you probably did it. There is nothing to find, which is what makes it so difficult to explain and so easy to walk past.
Read along
The transcript
It follows the audio. Press any line to jump there.
In this episode
ego · buddhism · spiritual-journey
Read the transcript
Hello, and how are you doing? I'm Steven Webb, and this is Stillness in the Storms. And on this episode,
I want to talk about the true self.
And it's not an easy thing to talk about, because I think at this level of
understanding who we are, words fail us. And there's been hundreds of books,
there's been Zen masters and Buddhist teachers and everybody that are way wiser and know way
more about this stuff than me explained it in so many different ways, and I failed
to understand most of them.
And I'm now going to try to explain it to you. And I totally get the irony in this
because it's something that you can you can feel it, but it doesn't actually feel it
like feel anything has no emotion. It's kind of there. It has our backs no matter what. It's that love
that we seek. It's that joy that we want to be in. It's that
safety and that that safety net that we have when we want to be vulnerable it's that
It's that person that we want when we're feeling lonely or down. It's that
person we want when things are not going our way. It's the love that we want from our partner is
a love that we want from a family remember it's the it's It's all of those things,
and it's always there. Yet why is it so elusive to so many? And why was it
so elusive to me most of my life? And now it's still elusive most of the time, yet it's always
present, always there. Always. It's not even waiting, it's it's just there anyway, whether or not we go there, it's
there anyway. So I'm talking about the true self. I'm talking about there's something below the ego. And why is
it so important to experience this and understand this? Well, if your spiritual journey wants you
to suffer less if if you're on the spiritual journey because you've suffered enough, then you're going
to want to experience, you're going to want to understand the true self. So what is the true self? Well
that's it's easier to explain. What's the false self? The false self is. Is your story, your egos, it's who
you think you are. If someone comes to me and goes, who's Steven The false self is. I'm Steven. I'm
a podcast. I'm a podcast host. I'm a city councillor I'm a meditator. I'm these things. I'm in a
wheelchair and all those things. My name is Steven and I was born so and so. Well, that's false, it's
true in the sense that it's a story, it's in my mind, it's tangible there.
No surgeon could ever open my brain and find Steven. It doesn't really exist in that way.
And if I have something go, malfunction in my brain tomorrow, some kind of neuro disorder like a
stroke or something, I might wake up and someone go, who's Steven I'm like, I don't know. No
idea um So it's not a tangible thing, but we think it's tangible. We think it's
incredibly real. And why is that? Because it serves a purpose. It serves a brilliant purpose of survival.
So if you go down to the woods and you got almost eaten by a bear and you come home
to your camp and you didn't have a story of remembering that you're going to get down to the woods
the next day and you're going to be eaten by a bear because the bear is going to remember you
come down every day. You better sure as hell remember that the bear is waiting. So that's why a
memory evolved. Nowadays that memory's evolved into a career and a person and all these
whims and what we like and what we prefer and what we want. All those things. A whole big story.
We write whole books, we write autobiographies. We do all these things. We tell our stories of who people are
and how they are and what they're like and then we guess We have star signs, for Christ's sake you
know we We do the enneagrams and we do all these things about personalities not It's all ego, it's all
how we interpret the world around us and then what we do with it. That's what I'm not talking about.
So what am I talking about? So
if you take a deep breath and just go, ah. Just let everything go.
And you just literally gazed in the thin air. You know that moment when you're just literally,
you're not thinking, you're not doing anything and you're literally just. It's somewhat between asleep and
um being present. You know, you're not asleep, but you just have no motivation to move or do anything.
You're just being. And there's no desires, there's no things they've got to move. We've got to do anything. It's
just, ah. There's
a moment when it doesn't feel warm, it doesn't feel cozy, it doesn't feel nice because it doesn't feel.
It
doesn't have no desires, it doesn't have a Desire to improve the world or a desire to run and hide.
It just is 100% present with what's now.
It's just awareness itself,
just aware.
And Rupert Spira has a wonderful way of pointing you towards it. And what he does,
he says, and you can do this now. So no
matter what you're doing, even if you're driving, you can do this. Just make sure you keep concentrating on your
driving as well. But if I said to you, are you aware of your left toe?
Now if you consider what you did, to become aware of your left toe,
you had to think about your left toe, you had to go to your left toe, you had to then
become aware of it. And then you had to answer the question, am I aware of my left toe? If
I said to you, are you aware of something that's behind you? So you've got a plant pot, like I
have, you have to go to what's behind you. You weren't aware of it before now, then of course you
knew it was there, but you weren't actively aware of it being there. Now, hopefully you're keeping up because
I'm struggling to keep up but That's okay. I've
struggled to keep up with the zed world for my whole life. Yet they all say it's so simple, really.
So why so many books roll on it? And people go, what? Anyway, come back to
my little ego trying to understand the world it It is when we take a step back and look at
it on the big picture. The big mind just, it's.
It's not. The small mind is so easy to see and understand. The big mind is impossible to see
and understand from the small mind perspective. And the small mind is the ego. That's me I can't see the
big mind. I cannot see there beyond me because my only frame of reference is me. But we can experience
it. And this is what I'm doing. So going back to the experiencing. So if I said to you, are
you aware?
And you'll probably come back with, some of you might say yes, Some of you might say no. I should
imagine, knowing my listeners, knowing you, I should imagine you come back, yeah, I'm aware. Now I want you to
slow down, I want you to pause because I want you to see a little moment. I want you to
feel the experience of between the question and
your answer.
So I'm going to ask you again,
are you aware?
So
what did that feel like? What was there? What was in that moment between the question and
just before you answer the question now then, the More you practice this the more you do this, you'll probably
find that there's just awareness itself. But what is awareness itself? Suddenly the whole
world opens up, the whole field. Suddenly you're not aware of anything in particular. You're not aware of my voice,
you're not aware of whatever you're doing in front of you. But you're aware of everything at the same time,
yet aware of nothing. So it's a non-focused awareness And I think that's what
is in normal circumstances without having some kind of dramatic effect, some
dramatic craziness going on. Like when I dived into the swimming pool and I broke my neck. And when I
landed on the bottom of the pool, after a while, I I couldn't explain this for nearly 25 years.
And I after a while, I run out of oxygen, I run out of panic. I thought I was going
to die. And then suddenly, ah, okay. And
then suddenly I I didn't fear anything, I didn't desire anything. I didn't think I'm going to die. I didn't
think I was alive. I become the water and the pool. I become the people around me and But it
wasn't the fact that I become water in the pool. It was the fact there was no me and them
and there was no me story and the pool and the earth and the universe. It
was just
awareness. And it may have lasted, I don't know, four seconds or it might have been 10 milliseconds, I have
no idea. But it felt like about a minute or so.
And I never really thought much of it because I thought if I explained this to people they're going you're
crazy, you know, you become the water. And they'd probably smell my breath as I'm like, yeah, what's going on?
And I know I certainly would for many years, but it wasn't until I started to really read books and
study and I was suffering so badly 10-15 years ago that I wanted to reduce
my suffering. And in doing that, I discovered
through meditation and different practices that there's a self below all this ego. And it's the
ego that does all the suffering. It's the ego that's in pain. It's the ego that has the desires. It's
the ego that wants love. It's the ego that wants to love. It's the ego that puts all the importance
on all these stories and purpose and everything below that. There is no ego. There is no, you know, when
you're one month old, there's no ego it's just survival. Ego comes In
um a few months later, and then suddenly becomes more solidified in the one two year three years old, and
then suddenly you're now 30, 40, 50 years old and. Yeah, here we go. The ego's alive and well and
a tangible thing that has to live and survive and has to get what it wants. Yeah,
the ego doesn't even like to think it's fluid. It doesn't even like to think that it can change and
morph and grow and all those things. It's no, I'm fixed, I'm solid, I'm here and I'm real. Of
course it thinks that, because it has to do that to survive. It has to do that to function in
the real world. But why do I talk about this lower self? And I've got a poem I'm going to
read in a minute, but just before I read that, I want you to relax into a little bit of
a state of just here, now and present. So why is it so important to understand
this that the true self? Well, the true self is the only real self that has our back.
It's the only one that does truly know how to love. But
not love in the way of an ego love. It doesn't give us gifts, it doesn't make us excited doesn't
do all those other things.
It's not exciting love. It's not all those kind of things. It's not desires. It's just if
I was to ask you, what does real love feel like? And I think if we're really honest,
real love feels like I feel safe. I feel like I can be vulnerable, I can be
myself and I'm not going to be judged. I feel like I can
do something brave and you got my back. I feel like I can
be in someone else's company if they truly love me. And I don't have to think or worry or I
don't have to. And it's complete, total acceptance. So on that basis of
love and complete, total acceptance of who you are entirely,
no matter what you're going through in life, no matter how vulnerable you are in a changing circumstances and in
circumstances that are certainly uncertain at the moment, even in a relationship and everything in the world of economics and
politics and everything like the moment, I can't think of a more uncertain world than we have right now, especially
for fragile egos. So
if you take a deep breath and you get done and you just relax, what are you left with you're
You're truly left with this place of, ah,
okay, Breathing in, calm, breathing out, relax. And you're Just truly left with a place of
