True Self/Separate Self

Trusting in the “True You” 
Wednesday,  September 2, 2020

Our separate self is who we think we are, but our thinking does not make it true. It is a social and mental construct that gets us started on life’s journey. It is a set of agreements between us as individuals and our parents, families, school friends, partner or spouse, culture, and religion. It is our “container.” It is largely defined in distinction from others, precisely as our separate and unique self. It is probably necessary to get started, but it becomes problematic when we stop there and spend the rest of our lives promoting and protecting it. This small and separate self is merely our launching pad: our appearance, education, job, money, success, and so on. These are the trappings of ego that help us get through an ordinary day.

Please understand that the separate self is not bad or inherently deceitful. It is actually quite good and necessary as far as it goes; it just does not go far enough. Too often, it poses and substitutes for the real thing and pretends to be more than it is. The separate self is bogus more than bad. We need the temporary costumes of our egoic selves to get started, but they show their limitations when they stay around too long.

When we are able to move beyond our separate self, it will feel as if we lost nothing important at all. Of course, if we don’t know that there is anything “beyond” the separate self, the transition will probably feel like dying. Only after we have fallen into the True Self, will we be able to say with the mystic Rumi (1207‒1273), “What have I ever lost by dying?” [1] We have discovered true freedom and liberation. When we are connected to the Whole, we no longer need to protect or defend the smaller parts. We are connected to something inexhaustible and unhurtable. The True Self cannot be hurt. I said that at the National AIDS Conference one time, and it was one of the most healing lines for that crowd. I got letters for months afterward; they realized the “True You” is indestructible. All our hurts and feelings of being offended come from our separate selves.

If we do not let go of our separate self/false self at the right time and in the right way, we remain stuck, trapped, and addicted. (The traditional word for that was sin.) Unfortunately, many people reach old age still entrenched in their egoic operating system. Only our True Self lives forever and is truly free in this world.

The Illusion of the Separate Self
Tuesday,  September 1, 2020

CAC faculty member James Finley studied under Thomas Merton as a young monk in formation. While many have been influenced by Merton’s writings, few have had the opportunity to learn from the mystic himself. Today, Jim reflects on the insights on the True Self and false self that he gleaned from Thomas Merton.

In the following text Merton makes clear that the self-proclaimed autonomy of the false self is but an illusion. . . .

Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self.

This is the man I want myself to be but who cannot exist, because God does not know anything about him. And to be unknown of God is altogether too much privacy.

My false and private self is the one who wants to exist outside the reach of God’s will and God’s love—outside of reality and outside of life. And such a self cannot help but be an illusion.

We are not very good at recognizing illusions, least of all the ones we cherish about ourselves—the ones we are born with and which feed the roots of sin. For most of the people in the world, there is no greater subjective reality than this false self of theirs, which cannot exist. A life devoted to the cult of this shadow is what is called a life of sin. [1] . . .

The false self, sensing its fundamental unreality, begins to clothe itself in myths and symbols of power. Since it intuits that it is but a shadow, that it is nothing, it begins to convince itself that it is what it does. Hence, the more it does, achieves and experiences, the more real it becomes. Merton writes,

All sin starts from the assumption that my false self, the self that exists only in my own egocentric desires, is the fundamental reality of life to which everything else in the universe is ordered. Thus I use up my life in the desire for pleasures and the thirst for experiences, for power, honor, knowledge and love, to clothe this false self and construct its nothingness into something objectively real. And I wind experiences around myself and cover myself with pleasures and glory like bandages in order to make myself perceptible to myself and to the world, as if I were an invisible body that could only become visible when something visible covered its surface. [2]

Richard again: Our false self is how we define ourselves outside of love, relationship, or divine union. After we have spent many years laboriously building this separate self, with all its labels and preoccupations, we are very attached to it. And why wouldn’t we be? It’s what we know and all we know. To move beyond it will always feel like losing or dying.