The Unmanifest Self: Transcending the Limits of Ordinary Consciousness

I wonder how many of us have a book on our shelves that we discovered, upon the first reading, to be very important to us, very timely, a book that touched our hearts and somehow changed our lives? How often have we shared this experience with others, given them a copy to read? How many times have we re-read the same book again and again, with new eyes, so to speak-deeper insight-feeling ever closer to the heart of the book, to its author, and to our own inner knowing?The Unmanifest Self: Transcending the Limits of Ordinary Consciousness, by Ligia Dantes, has been such a book for me. I've read it at least seven or eight times over the past nine years, and each time I am surprised by the depth of the book, its timelessness and dedication to truth, its invitation to self-inquiry.Many times the reader is asked to pause and question for oneself the thoughts and ideas being put forth. In a way, this an entirely new kind of interactive communication: more like the Internet, less like the traditional printed page.The content itself-the issues of conditioning, consciousness of humanity, and transformation-is compelling and greatly needed in the world today.

Ligia Dantes says: "We need a totally new awareness, not based on traditional knowledge. We need a direct knowing based on wisdom, the wisdom of our hearts."This book is about that shift. It reminds me of the "Choose Your Own Adventure" paperbacks I read as a child - the ones that said "If you want to follow the space creature into the cave, turn to page 63. If you choose to return to your own spaceship, go to page 71." 'The Unmanifest Self' demands similar engagement, presenting me with questions such as: "How do you experience yourself as 'I'?" (pg. 83)and"I'd like to ask you not to accept this as an explanation; rather, challenge it! Inquire for yourself!"and then:"Even if this does not apply to you directly, please look at the general attitude in humanity. You are observing for all other human beings in the world."I started at the beginning and read all the way through the book, and found I'd been on a journey that challenged my conditioning, my belief-systems, my faith in my guiding influences. Whether I came at it from the angle of "I'm a basically good person, and so is everyone else and we're all doing our best" or "The world's in chaos, humanity's in crisis, how and where can I even start to make a difference?" the book asked me to reexamine my starting premises and directions. It made me work, but in the gentlest possible way. Page after page, it said, in effect: Put me down and think this out for yourself. Is this the case for you? True to your experience? Does it match your understanding and intuitive sense of how things are? It was the most respectful book I've come across in its field - referring me back, constantly, to my own intelligence and an awareness of my inner road map.But that didn't make it an easy trip. I was asked to strip away comforting blankets of emotion, fantasy, collective social beliefs, thought patterns, psychology and learned behavioural habits that obscured my ability to see a question clearly. I was presented with questions that have no evident answers, dilemmas we face as humanity, and invited to simply contemplate them. Much of Ligia Dantes' approach reminds me of Rilke's "Letters to A Young Poet", with its emphasis on holding things in the light of clear self-inquiry, on allowing time and space for ripening and unfolding, and on loving the questions for themselves without demanding instant answers.This is a book I keep coming back to as a manual for truthful examination of myself and the world. I open it at random, to a page on fear or conditioning or addiction or love. It plunges me straight into a deeply compassionate but intensely probing dialogue that gives me a sense of what it really means to be human on this planet: "open to all possibilities, being vulnerable to the unknown and free to experience that which is as yet unmanifested to our senses." (p.144)