The Real Self
The nature of the real self is the subject of Raja Yoga, as well as The Arcane Formulas, and is mentioned and talked about in many other books such as The Inner Secret.
The real self put quite simply is spirit; spirit has two properties which are AWARENESS and WILL. The spirit is what you really are, it stands apart from all the things of the mind and body, and you must consciously become aware of yourself as spirit.
The first step to be taken concerning the real self is to become intellectually aware of its existence such as you have just now in reading this and in reading the books on the subject. The next step requires you begin a series of meditations in which you strip away from your awareness all the things of the not-self, in parts, or completely until your consciousness attains a state of pure awareness and pure will.
There are a series of meditations I use for this purpose. The order you do them in does not matter. If you fail OR complete one, go to the next, and the next until you've been through them all and then begin again at the start and cycle through them again, perhaps in a new order the next time around if you like. There are also meditations I won't be listing here specifically but which will be covered later on that also happen to give insight into and empower the real self.
1. The stripping away of parts of the body: become aware of parts of your body, and then remove each part from your awareness, and think about each part you could do without and if you would still be you with that part missing. Think about how every cell in your body can be replaced, how you can lose a limb, etc. and you are still you after all that.
2. Plane of personality: Desire strongly to resonate with the plane of personality (a subplane of the astral) and to experience for awhile having the body and mind of another person. You may do this while "falling asleep" and "dreaming" and you will experience this in a "dream". Once you have this experience of being someone else completely, with a different set of memories, a different mind, a different body; and you take this experience back to you then it will have a profound effect on you and help you realize that you are a spirit and not your mind and body.
Now let me tell you this knowledge of and realization of the spirit is very important. The degree to which you know your Real Self is also the degree to which you are able to manifest POWER. The more you are like ordinary men (only aware of yourself as a body or as a mind in a body) or in the case of person's of very low consciousness who are more like animals (which can't even turn their thoughts inward at all) the less power there is behind your thoughts.
This low-power state is at once a blessing and a torment. As you gain experience through incarnation after incarnation, your desires are purified and turn towards higher things more and more, and you eventually become less satisfied with material things and you yearn for spiritual knowledge. Those who awaken to an awareness of the real self, the spirit, too fast and without the proper purification plunge into disaster. The reason for this is that as you resonate more and more with the plane of spirit, each thought you have becomes more and more powerful, the emotions behind each thought manifesting as actual conditions and life circumstances. The attractive power of your thought is stronger in ALL DIRECTIONS, a fear will manifest to a certain degree, just as will an ideal you direct thoughts of love to.
When you are operative on a higher plane of consciousness you must be much more pure. Here is where books like The Universal Master Key and Character Power come in and the importance of ethics and of character development becomes great. Faith as well becomes very important and is needed to help you break past various barriers that would otherwise limit you.
Some things that can go wrong are:
• You may become operative on multiple planes all at once and be unable to tell for yourself what belongs to what plane; be something physical or mental in its manifestation you may get these things confused and you then end up with quite a problem.
• You may while your awareness is active upon the mental planes attract to yourself things which will torment or upset you.
• Negative thoughts you have about your body or mind may fuck up both. This will create a lot of suffering for you as the instinctive mind, the body intelligence, etc. acts upon negative thoughts and suggestions from yourself or from others that you are receptive to screws up.
• You may hurt others and then come to regret it because of your ignorance and low-development.
The degree to which you resonate with the plane of spirit is the degree to which you have power over the things of the mental and physical planes which are below it. This is a prerequisite to being able to do any magick; nothing you do will work very well if you have barely yet to awaken into the consciousness of the I AM I