The Lexicon
Who you really are
Self
The Self is the deep, unchanging awareness that you have always been beneath every passing thought, feeling, and role. It is not the small self of personality and biography, but the silent witnessing presence in which the whole of experience appears and disappears. In the nondual traditions it is identical with the ground of being itself, so that to know the Self is to know reality at its source. It was never born, cannot be improved, and needs nothing added to it.
Carried by 8 teachers · across 4 traditions · 4 quotes
The great pointers all turn the seeker inward to this one discovery. Ramana Maharshi reduces all practice to the single question 'Who am I?', tracing the sense of 'I' back to its source; Nisargadatta insists you are the awareness in which body and mind merely appear; Shankara strips away every false identification with his neti neti, 'not this, not this.' Jung gave the word a complementary sense as the organizing centre of the whole psyche. To realize the Self is to come home to what was always already here.
In their words
You are not the body, you are not the mind — you are the awareness in which both appear.Nisargadatta Maharaj
The fact is, this "I" is yourself, your Real Self.Joseph S. Benner
I am large, I contain multitudes.Walt Whitman
Your own Self-Realization is the greatest service you can render the world.Ramana Maharshi