The spiritual challenge of our era is the urgent need for humans to free themselves from our collective ego tunnel. War, violence, greed, environmental damage, and inequality stem from the spiritual poverty and alienation caused by our ego’s dominance over us. Lessening the influence of our ego will allow us to strengthen our capacity for compassion towards ourselves and others.

Moreover, the ego’s natural feeling of separation only increases personal struggles like loneliness, despair, self-hatred, guilt, and shame. In turn, these struggles reinforce the illusion that we are separate from the world instead of connected to it. However, when we go beyond our limited egoic self, we can free ourselves from such suffering and move toward a more spiritually meaningful life. The path to this freedom is through cultivating awareness.

Awareness is not simply knowing that we know, as some may describe it. Pure awareness forms the ground of being beneath thoughts, feelings, sensing, and actions; a ground that extends beyond the limited self to encompass a larger reality beyond our individual identity. Such awareness has no object or subject — only what is, one that is both spacious and beyond words. Mystics refer to this ground of being as the true reference point of self, where utter emptiness and complete fullness coexist, along with a profound sense of belonging and love.

When we access pure awareness, even for a brief moment, we enter what mystics call the flow of immaculacy. Zen and mystical practices help us transcend our limited sense of self, ego, and personality, guiding us toward a broader reality where the feeling of separation and the illusion of the ego fade away.

All too often, awareness practices focus only on improving who we are—creating better versions of ourselves. While this is a noble and helpful goal, Zen and mystical traditions encourage us to go further, towards experiencing something greater than ourselves — call it what you will: the Unborn, the Tao. In Zen, we also practice manifesting this broader awareness into our daily lives. In Taoism, the sage Zhuangzi described this as the practice of self-forgetting—moving beyond our limited selves into a new way of being. And centuries later, Zen Master Dōgen reiterated this view, saying, “To study the Buddha’s Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things.”

The following poem by David Whyte, an American poet and Zen Buddhist practitioner, encourages us to take this step, just beyond ourselves!

David Whyte, Just Beyond Yourself, from The Bell and the Blackbird.

Copyright © 2018 David Whyte. Reprinted with permission from

Many Rivers Press, Langley, WA. http://www.davidwhyte.com

Watch David Whyte read his poem in this video link:

https://davidwhyte.substack.com/p/just-beyond-yourself-c1b