Your Sacred Self: Making the Decision to Be Free
About This Book
Your Sacred Self: Making the Decision to Be Free is one of Wayne Dyer's most concentrated and psychologically precise explorations of the fundamental distinction between the egoic self (the complex, defended, needing, comparing, evaluating personality that most people take themselves to be) and the sacred self (the witnessing awareness that is present to all experience, that is not itself any of the experiences it witnesses, and that is the actual ground of the human being's consciousness). The book's specific contribution to the Dyer corpus is its emphasis on the decision that makes access to the sacred self available: not a practice, not a gradual development, not the accumulated result of many hours of meditation, but a specific choice — the choice to identify with the witnessing awareness rather than with the content of experience it witnesses.
The 'freedom' of the subtitle refers to the specific quality of liberation that this identification makes available: freedom from the tyranny of the ego's compulsive need for approval, for achievement, for the validation of its identity through external success — and freedom for the quality of genuine love, genuine presence, and genuine creative expression that is the natural activity of a consciousness that is no longer entirely consumed by the ego's projects. Dyer draws on his wide reading in the traditions of non-dual wisdom (the Advaita Vedanta understanding of the witness, the Course in Miracles teaching on the ego and the higher self, the Taoist teaching on the natural way) to illuminate different facets of the same fundamental understanding: that what one actually is is not what one has been taking oneself to be.
What You'll Learn
• Understand the ego-sacred self distinction: Dyer's specific account of the relationship between the ego (the defended, comparing, needing personality) and the sacred self (the witnessing awareness that is present to all experience without being defined by any of it) — and why the distinction is not between a bad self to be eliminated and a good self to be achieved but between two levels of identification that are both genuinely present in the human being
• Grasp the decision framework: how Your Sacred Self specifically emphasises that access to the sacred self dimension is available through a decision — the choice to shift one's primary identification from the ego's content to the witnessing awareness — and how this framing (as decision rather than development) changes the relationship to the possibility of experiencing the sacred self dimension
• Recognise the witness practice: the specific approach Dyer provides for developing the capacity to access the witnessing awareness — the practice of observing the ego's activities (its comparing, judging, wanting, fearing) from the perspective of the witness rather than from within those activities, and how this practice progressively loosens the exclusive identification with the ego's perspective
• Learn the freedom dimension: how Your Sacred Self describes the specific quality of freedom that the sacred self identification makes available — not the political freedom to do what one wants but the inner freedom from the ego's compulsive needs, from the dependency on external approval, and from the pervasive anxiety of a consciousness that believes its security depends on the maintenance of its image and the satisfaction of its needs
• Appreciate the cross-tradition grounding: how Dyer's understanding of the sacred self relates to the cognate concepts in the various traditions he draws on — the Atman of Vedanta, the inner observer of the Course in Miracles, the natural self of Taoism — and how reading these traditions together through the lens of his synthesis illuminates aspects of each that might not be immediately apparent from within any single tradition's framework
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