One of the most basic facets of meditation practice is the conscious act of becoming an active witness to your own mental processes. In our every day lives, we tend to habitually identify ourselves as the thoughts circling through our head. In meditation we quiet down and take a few moments to look at ourselves constructed from these thoughts, as an object, rather than from ourselves as subject. As we see what we held to be ourselves as an object, we become disavowed of the idea that it is us since we must be the ones seeing it. Our identity becomes an object of our consideration, and we naturally broaden our perspective, and this allows us to recede into ever deeper, wider, higher realms of conscious consideration.

As Ken Wilber would put it, the subject of one level becomes the object of the subject of the next level. It’s a constant process of fading farther, and farther back to our true selves. Into the ever present, unchanging reality that the great sages of old have described to us painstakingly.

But, if it’s true that our true self is this ever present, unborn, changeless perfection then there can be no stages to its development. It must have no moving parts. So, the idea of moving farther into the unchanging self we are seems to be incorrect. For me, the effect this line of thinking has is a sudden skip of tracks. The whole process of infinite regression, “it’s turtles all the way down!”, of ever more profound subjects becoming the object of the next more evolved subject reveals itself to be purely a mental construct of that very object; the chain of increasing development of the experiencing mind is a product of that very mind. That mind is not changeless. It is not the true self.

The true self is aware of this whole process. It is present during the whole affair, the ground upon which it is all built, the source of its power, and the object of all the mind’s striving.

In that clear moment of seeing the whole process as play, one is catapulted onto the other side of the game, out of the game and into naked reality. At least until the laundry needs folding.