letting go of the self

In discussing his experience at the Department of Justice in Washington, DC, Michael Singer says the following:

"All this exposure to intensely powerful people and situations was having a profound effect on the psyche I watched so diligently.  I had never been exposed to this powerful lifestyle.  Nothing in me got off on it or wanted anything from it, but it did make me deal with parts of my being that I would not have faced otherwise.  If I saw any weakness, fear or anxiety come up, I just deeply relaxed back into where I was watching from. I simply kept letting go of whatever came up.  This is where life had taken me, and I used all these situations as a way of letting go of myself.  It was definitely working.  I kept being pushed into strongly positive and negative situations, and I increasingly found myself in a very clear and undisturbed state.  It seemed that the more challenges life put me through, the less my inner energy flow was affected by outer conditions.What years of meditation had not gotten rid of, life's situations and challenges were rooting out of me.  As long as I made getting rid of myself my only goal, every situation was a fruitful experience."  (The Surrender Experiment, pp.213-214)

I notice that Michael does not rely primarily on his thinking mind to evaluate the situations that he finds himself in and to guide his decisions.  Instead, he lets go of attachment to thought and emotion and moves into a state of higher awareness.  

We can learn to access this state of awareness by practicing meditation and other spiritual techniques. For those who are interested, there is an excellent book called "Shift Into Freedom" by Loch Kelly which provides very clear and simple techniques for shifting out of identification with egoic self into a state which he calls "awake awareness."