ELSA JOY BAILEY: Pretty good analogy; the important part being that, in addition to being our wonderful Umberto, you are also the Infinite holding up the frame on your tiny quadrant.

UMBERTO: That said, I'm mildly uncomfortable when I hear some of my spiritual-minded brethren -- whether they subscribe to Eastern or Western mystical philosophies -- say that the individual self is nothing but an illusion that we have been brainwashed to accept as reality. One must wake up from this dream illusion in order to achieve enlightenment.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what they say, filtering it through my own experiences and prejudices. Such things have been known to happen.

ELSA: I'm laughing.

UMBERTO: I get the impression that -- intentionally or not -- they discount the personal self as an artifice that needs to be discarded -- or at best, some old overcoat to be hung in the closet if one is to enter the Kingdom, join the party and become One with the Universal Punch (provided it's not Kool Aide).

ELSA: Actually, that's not my understanding about what mystics and non-dualists are teaching me: rather, I hear them saying that our 'tiny quadrant', or 'egoself' -however mandatory in this material body- is -if that's as far as we go- a very imprisoning identity, and not our True Self. Also, as we have all discovered, fixed identification with the egoself is the source of great suffering.

So, in order to speed us toward greater freedom, they urge us to reach deeper, to search beyond the ego identity to the sacred Self that underlies our sense of being only a separate & vulnerable body. Once in touch with that Self, our bodylife, egolife can proceed as ever, but now it is informed by a far greater authenticity and access to the Divine.

And by the way, what's wrong with an old overcoat? They're comfy, they're warm, they're useful. Eventually they wear out, but in the meantime: overcoats rock!

UMBERTO: Then I'm confused because, at the same time, they quote various texts and teachers urging self-reflection, self-awareness, self-knowledge to discover the path to enlightenment.

ELSA: Anything and everything we do is automatically a path to Awakening, even if we aren't consciously aware of it. Where else is there to go?

UMBERTO: As Lao Tzu, is oft quoted as saying in the Tao Te Ching, "Knowing others is wisdom. Knowing the self is enlightenment." I get that too. But do my fellow passengers on this Magical Mystery Tour mean to imply that "knowing the self" -- as nothing but figment pie equals enlightenment?

ELSA: Knowing the self, in my experience, simply means looking within deeply enough and silently enough and repeatedly enough to experience the "I Am That I Am" that is hidden under our temporal body mind. A temporal body mind that is hooked up with our Original Divine Self has won the lottery.

Enlightenment has nothing to do with what individual human tasks we are assigned here. Those, in fact, go smoother when we realize there's More to us than just our mind & body.

As to why this "I Am That I Am" is so devilishly and cleverly hidden and hard to find? That is one of the Mysteries. Some suggest it is because our small selves don't want to find it.

UMBERTO: And what is enlightenment anyway. I thought Buddha said if one can define and acquire it, then it's not enlightenment. If one meets the Buddha on the road then he ain't one, and all that.

ELSA: Right. Awakening is simply the remembering of Who we are, and Who we are is not describable in linear terms. Thus, our ego will never, ever, be able to categorize or label it.

UMBERTO: I suspect that we Westerners -- especially Americans -- who chose the less traveled roads of Eastern Thought -- or the home-grown Transcendentalist pathways -- tend to overcompensate on the ego thing because we suffer the slings and arrows of our popular culture's commercially motivated overemphasis on an isolated individualism and self-gratification that seems rife with venality and bereft of soul.

ELSA: The ego (with its infinitely long list of demands) has been #1 on the Human Pop Charts since the dawn of man.

UMBERTO: But, I wonder if my mystical friends don't throw the baby out with the bath water by stressing the phrase "nothing but," when calling the self a dream.

ELSA: Do you really have any mystical friends who call the self "nothing but"? My sense is that we are all divine chips off the Old Block, and that while we are each expressing out our unique selves we are simultaneously traveling -each in our own way- towards reconnecting with Home Base. It's called the journey.

UMBERTO: When my son, Zachary, was born, for example, my duties as his mother's Bradley Method "coach" didn't include brainwashing him to be an individual. When the midwife passed this tiny, 6-pound newborn over to me while she tended to his exhausted mom. I looked into my eyes and I into his, realizing that my mug was the first he'd see. I recognized someone instantly, in the say you recognize the distinct, spark, the uniqueness of the "I" in the instant of encountering anyone --- loved one, family, friend or stranger.

I had similar experiences with my three daughters, although they being born earlier, it took a little longer to connect because father's weren't allowed in delivery rooms back then.

I could see powerful and very distinct identities each of my daughters and in my son -- a living proof to me that we all are unique and the likes of each of us will not pass this way again.

My son didn't know "who" or "what" or have any words for himself or me or anything, but he was both divine, and absolutely unique. This was no act. No matter how much he learns --- and today he's 19 and a learned, funny, curious, scientifically bent college junior -- I can see that exact same essence in his look, continually emerging, always consistent.

ELSA: Makes perfect sense to me.

I found as a parent, it was always best to facilitate the incredible life force of this tiny growing person as it emerged rather than trying to shape it to some preconceived notions.

ELSA: Ideal approach! to take with a child. It's obvious you were a great parent. Were there also some unconscious judgments and fears and aversions you passed along to him? Sure. So what? That's what happened to us, and that's what happens to every child. Later on, we have the chance to taste the world for ourselves and to ask our own questions.

UMBERTO: I heard Deepak Chopra say in an interview once that he's done the same with his kids, encouraging and helping each of them uniquely in doing what comes naturally. I didn't hear him saying, "Kid, wake up. You're just dreaming who you are and don't exist ..." (Yet the good Indian doctor does talk about the dream part as well in a larger sense.)

ELSA: Yikes! No teacher I ever heard of tells anybody they don't exist. They tell them (when they are older) to start examining any beliefs that are limiting their happiness and peace.

Yes, Deepak taught his kids to love themselves as is, (lucky them) and along the way, he also encouraged them to look within for the I AM. What else could he have done? He's Deepak. I'm jealous: I wish Deepak had been my Dad.

UMBERTO: That life force -- if I may indulge myself a sentimental term -- seems to emerge from everything alive and perhaps even immobile -- plants, bugs, birds, reptiles and us mammals.

No one teaches a tree to be a tree. Best just to water and feed it and, okay, maybe prune here and there, but let it "be," realize it's just a particular arrangement of subatomic particles on the one hand, but something more than the sum of its parts that it keeps growing into as long as it lives.

ELSA: Exactly. As we all remember, Jung believed divinity indwelled everything. So firm was his belief that, ensconced in his gorgeous Swiss villa, he actually talked to his pots and pans. And claimed they responded. And, as Mother Teresa famously said when asked how she could bear to sit with the dying in Calcutta: "When I look into their eyes, I see the face of Jesus." >

UMBERTO: Like all religion, I don't think any of this can be taken straight, no chaser, but has to be blended with an healthy skepticism and appreciation of paradox as a defining principle of the universe in which we live -- and are perhaps dreaming.

ELSA: Rumi agrees with you. He puts it thus: "Sell your certainty and buy bewilderment."

UMBERTO: So, when I hear what sounds like overkill of the despised but over-indulged self, I have to quote the Great Spinach Master and say, "I yam what I yam."

ELSA: Or, as Ezra Bayda says, "Dropping your facades, what remains? Just being."

Talk me down. Straighten me out. Get me a can of spinach or a can of whup-ass or both, please. Come on, you can do it. What is the meaning of life?

ELSA: I Am That I Am.

UMBERTO: Okay, I can don my Vedanta Goggles and see -- sometimes directly experience -- my personal reality -- myself, as best I can define it -- as a frame superimposed on a tiny quadrant of the infinite. Take away the frame and my personal self-portrait melts into the whole, no longer operative as a picture, but still there if you hold up the frame in the same place.

ELSA: Pretty good analogy; the important part being that, in addition to being our wonderful Umberto, you are also the Infinite holding up the frame on your tiny quadrant.