Inquiry · “You Are Not Your Thoughts”
Contacting the Essential Self
To dis-identify from the anxious ‘local self’/ego and turn within to a calmer, wiser ‘Essential Self’ (the inner mentor) for guidance.
Contacting the Essential Self in 5 lines: Catch the anxious “local self” in action and notice you are the one watching it. Relax into your inner Sanctuary of stillness and place attention on the calm Essential Self until it becomes where you’re looking out from. Ask your wiser inner mentor a real question, then listen receptively for the quieter, kinder answer. Don’t force it, don’t obey it blindly—weigh it. Return daily so essence, not ego, becomes home.
What it is
This is Barbara Marx Hubbard’s foundational practice of shifting identity from the “local self” to the “Essential Self.” The local self is the everyday ego—what she called the “irritated, pressured, and compulsive” personality that runs on anxiety and self-doubt.
The Essential Self is a deeper, quieter, already-present self: calm, creative, and connected to what Hubbard saw as the larger impulse of evolution moving through her. The practice is to stop, turn within to an “Inner Sanctuary” of stillness, and place attention on the Essential Self until it becomes the felt centre of consciousness, then to listen to it as an “inner mentor”—a wiser inner voice you can consult for guidance.
It is an inquiry-and-disidentification practice (All Is One, The Inner Creates the Outer): you notice the local self, decline to be it, and re-locate yourself in the deeper self that was always there (All Is One).
The Method
A faithful rendering of Hubbard’s practice from Emergence:
- Stop and notice the local self. Catch the egoic state in action—the pressure, irritation, comparison, or fear. Name it: that is my local self talking. You are the one who notices it, so you are not it.
- Enter the Inner Sanctuary. Relax the body, slow the breath, and turn attention inward to a felt place of peace and quiet—Hubbard’s “Inner Sanctuary,” an inner room you return to deliberately. The “discipline of relaxation” is the doorway; stillness lets the deeper self come forward.
- Place attention on the Essential Self. Shift your sense of identity from the anxious self to the calm, “Beloved” presence within. Hubbard’s claim was experiential: when you keep attention on the Essential Self, it “becomes omnipresent in consciousness”—it stops being a concept and becomes who you are looking out from.
- Address the inner mentor. From this settled place, ask your wiser self a real question—about a decision, a fear, a next step. Then listen receptively. Hubbard taught cultivating “inner receptivity” and listening for the “signals of the Essential Self”—intuitions, images, a felt sense of rightness—as the way the deeper self informs and guides you.
- Receive without forcing. Don’t manufacture an answer with the local mind. Let the response arise; it is often quiet, simple, and kind. You may write it down.
- Return. Bring the Essential Self’s steadiness and one piece of guidance back into ordinary activity—and re-enter the Sanctuary regularly, so the shift from ego to essence becomes a stable, repeatable home base rather than a rare experience. (Sourcing note: terms—local self, Essential Self, Inner Sanctuary, inner mentor, “signals of the Essential Self”—are Hubbard’s own, from Emergence and the related Emergence Process.)
Source & Lineage
The practice comes from Hubbard’s Emergence: The Shift from Ego to Essence (2001) and the Emergence Process she later taught with Patricia Ellsberg. Its lineage is twofold: the contemplative move of dis-identifying from the egoic self to rest in a deeper Self is ancient and pan-traditional (Vedanta’s witness, Assagioli’s disidentification, the “deeper Self” of All Is One); the evolutionary framing—that the Essential Self is the local expression of the creative impulse of evolution—comes from Teilhard de Chardin and Sri Aurobindo via Hubbard.
Common refinements
Fighting the local self. The aim is to dis-identify, not to attack or suppress the ego. Notice it kindly, then shift attention—don’t wrestle.
- Manufacturing the answer. If the “inner mentor” sounds exactly like your anxious local mind (urgent, harsh, fearful), that’s the ego talking. The Essential Self’s voice is characteristically calmer and kinder; wait for that tone.
- Treating it as infallible. Inner guidance is your own deeper knowing, not an oracle. Weigh it against reality and good judgement.
- One peak experience. The value is in repetition—returning to the Sanctuary until essence, not ego, is your default. Make it a daily stop.