The Science ofSELF

Humans have spent millennia describing existence from fragments. Religion named one part, philosophy another, psychology another, medicine another, physics another, the mystical traditions another. The Science of SELF begins before those divisions, because its subject is the Self experiencing them all.

The first mistake we make when trying to understand a human being is beginning with the human being. We start with conception, genetics, the brain, childhood, family, culture and social conditioning, and assume that somewhere among those events we will eventually find the person. But those describe the conditions of a human incarnation. They don't answer the prior question: what is the consciousness experiencing them?

What religions have called God, Source, Brahman, Tao and countless other names, the Science of SELF calls simply Self — the higher, original, universal consciousness from which individual consciousness emerges and within which it remains contained.

The word matters, because the later distinctions between God and human, spiritual and material, creator and creation already belong to differentiated consciousness. Self precedes those divisions.

Individual existence is therefore a paradox from its beginning. The individual self is distinct, yet it is not separate from Self. A drop leaves the ocean and acquires an apparent identity of its own, while carrying within itself the nature of the ocean it came from.

This is why the oldest human question cannot be answered by describing personality. I am not my name, nationality, profession, thoughts, emotions, trauma, diagnosis or even my body. All of these belong to the particular vehicle and experience through which Self is presently expressed.

The question underneath them is: who is experiencing all of it?

The state in which we arrive here prevents that answer from being obvious. Human incarnation involves a narrowing of awareness. We become absorbed in sensory reality, bodily needs, immediate relationships and the culture into which we are born, and we forget the greater continuity from which this temporary identity emerged.

That amnesia is not a flaw in the design. Without sufficient narrowing, there would be little point entering the experience at all, because we would already know the ending, the meaning and the larger reality behind every event. A game in which every move is known before it happens is not an experience.

So we enter separated enough to experience ourselves as one, while remaining part of One. Human Self-awareness is the gradual recovery of the ability to hold both realities at once.

The oldest human yearning for home, and the recurring search across every civilisation for Origins, God, meaning, immortality and invisible reality, are not religious accidents. Why would humanity have spent its entire history searching for its origins if nothing within us retained any trace that there was something to remember?

The Science of SELF starts from that memory.

If Origins asks what am I and where am I coming from, Purpose asks: why this particular expression of Self?

Why this body, this mind, this combination of abilities, this sensitivity, this temperament, these experiences, this historical period, these people, these challenges, this life?

What or who am I here for?

If Origins and Destination pertain to higher dimensions of Self, Purpose is the land where individuated fragments of Self rediscover their belonging to the greater whole.

Purpose is inherent in the fabric of life. Every functioning living being has a purpose.

A neuron does not fulfil its purpose by performing the function of a liver cell, and the heart does not fulfil its purpose by performing the kidney's function. Each has its own purpose within the larger organism, and the health and functioning of the whole depend on each part fulfilling that purpose while enabling the other parts to fulfil theirs.

Human beings operate on the same principle.

We arrive with different perceptual abilities, temperaments, aptitudes, forms of intelligence and life experiences because these are the capacities through which we fulfil our particular purpose. Our unique abilities therefore matter because they are the means through which we perform our function within the whole.

The question is not what makes me different, but what am I equipped to do, why am I equipped to do it, and how does fulfilling my purpose help others fulfil theirs?

Purpose is not a me thing. Health is a we thing, the environment is a we thing, and so is purpose.

We fulfil our purpose by using our gifts and experience in ways that support the expression and development of the gifts and experience of those around us.

When each part fulfils its purpose, it enables the functioning and development of other parts. When individuals fulfil their purpose, their contribution helps other individuals fulfil theirs. Through that reciprocal process, the larger human system develops.

The individual evolves, contributes to the evolution of others, and through that collective development the societal Self moves to the next octave.

Purpose propagates.

That's why purpose and health cannot be separated.

Explore: Redefining Health — The CWS Model →

Origins without Destination leaves human existence suspended between two mysteries.

We ask where we came from but rarely follow the logic far enough: if Self and consciousness came into this experience, where does it go when the experience ends, and what was the development for?

The body has a biological beginning and end. Self does not begin with the body, so the end of the body is not the end of Self. Human incarnation is one stage within a longer continuity of Self-exploration.

The task is not to spend our life trying to escape the human condition and return prematurely to some imagined spiritual purity.

We came here to have a human experience.

Matter must therefore be lived. The body must be inhabited. The intellect must be developed. Relationships must be experienced. Choices must have consequences. Abilities must be exercised. The particular contribution must be made.

The lessons of one stage cannot be bypassed on the way to another. People who move abruptly into extraordinary states of perception without having developed the intellectual and psychological capacities of the stages beneath them must return and complete what was missed.

Evolution is integration and transcendence of the previous stage.

Destination is not a race away from matter. It is an expansion in the amount of reality human consciousness can recognise and hold without losing the truth of the levels already crossed.

Eventually the apparently independent individual recognises itself again within the greater Self from which it emerged.

But something has changed. Self has acquired experience. The point of leaving unity was never to return unchanged. The journey creates knowledge through lived differentiation.

This is why experience sits at the centre of the Science of SELF.

Existence does not only ask what you know. It asks what you became capable of knowing because you lived it, and what Self learned about itself through being you.

Destination is the movement from unconscious unity, through separation and individuation, towards conscious unity.

Home, but no longer innocent of the journey.