If the self remains at the center of meditation, it can be argued that the meditator begins with an immediate problem: he has separated himself from the meditation.

Because science has given modern society the things of comfort, solutions to important issues (sanitation, electricity, transportation, food production, entertainment, etc.), we have become conditioned to depend upon it for answers to everything. And because of this conditioning, we have come to rely upon science to also provide answers for that which is beyond its capacity to provide.

Here we are, centuries down the pike in our cultural and scientific evolution, and we are still trying to figure out where the nothingness meets the something-ness. The problem is that, though science can now look into the subatomic world, it still cannot see deeply enough to uncover the depths of the human experience.

Consciousness says 'I am,' but it is the self that says 'I am this or that.

The enlightened sages speak of surrender to the guru. This is not to be taken literally as surrender to some personage embodied in a teacher. Instead it means to surrender the belief that you are an individual so that you may embrace what you are as consciousness

A wave on top of the ocean is still the ocean; it is still made of the same substance. Although it seems to be differentiated, it is still the ocean. It cannot move or change course from the entirety of the ocean, nor can it reorder the ocean so that it can do something that the rest of the water is not doing.

The subjective experience is an incalculable, immeasurable personal experience of what it is like to be alive, to exist. It is the feeling of knowing that one exists, no matter how unexplainable or unprovable. This continues to be a thorn in the side of scientists, because science demands proof for everything, yet even the most skeptical scientist knows that he has the subjective experience of knowing what it is like to say, 'I am.

...there is nothing that is truly objective, because all is consciousness, which is an undivided whole. As such, what is termed subjective and objective — the seer and the seen — are fictitious fragments of the whole. Both the seer and the seen are actually perceived aspects of a single consciousness.

The self is a story of who you are. The biological body has no ability to make up any stories, and consciousness has no need to do so. The practical mind merely goes about its business of making practical decisions and thinking without unnecessary emotions. But the self has been forged by millions of years of ideas, experiences, culture, history, biology, evolution, teachers, nature, education, religion, and all manner of influences.