Contemplative Exercises for Enhancing Experiential Self-Understanding

Abstract

Submit Manuscript | http://medcraveonline.com psychotherapist, analyst, or Guru (i.e., spiritual advisor and guide of whatever religion or philosophy) can ever know the truth of you as well as you can know it. The experiential truth of you has no predetermined, controlled, route to it. It is abiding within you from moment to moment, and no one else’s mind but yours has direct, unmediated access to that moment to moment experiential truth of yourself. To discovery the real truth of yourself, you must not rely on guidance form others, that is, you must not be taught to hold any predetermined, exclusive, viewpoint, although other individuals who are in empathic communion with you can sometimes alert you to aspects of yourself that you have not previously noticed. The process of direct self-observation or looking at the experiential truth of yourself is your own inner “guru.” The experiential insight that leads to appropriate action is not something that can be coaxed out of you as you sit across from some kind of counselor whose only claim to wisdom hangs framed as a diploma or license of certification on his/her office wall. Likewise, it does not come from sensitivity training sessions in which some individuals engage in evasive, insincere psychological “games,” camouflaging the experiential truth of themselves by superimposing predetermined psychosocial “masks,” seeking to be viewed by others and by oneself in particular ways. Instead, genuine experiential self-understanding comes only when the mind is totally alone with itself, without any predetermined goals or preselected self-interpretations. Genuine self-understanding arises only when the mind is open and receptive, not going anywhere, without distractions of any kind, so that it can clearly and directly observe and understand the experiential truth of self. This process, in essence, is what contemplation or meditation is all about. It is an attempt to help you to get to contact and understand yourself better, to be in better (unmediated, undistorted) contact with the reality of the experiential truth of yourself. Being sensitively or keenly open to the experiential truth of yourself, so that you can be real, or genuine, is the essential basis of psychological health and wellbeing. When one is psychologically healthy and capable of being aware of all aspects of oneself, as well as being sensitively aware of what is actually arising in one’s encounters with other individuals and phenomena around oneself, then one is in a position of appreciating life most creatively and to its fullest.