The modern and postmodern world is the first period of history where a large number of people have been allowed to take their private lives and identities seriously. This marks a wonderful movement into individuation, but there is also a diminishment and fragility if that is all we have. It is a paradox! This first dome contains my private life, those issues that make me special, inferior or superior, right or wrong, depending on how “I” see it. “I” and my feelings and opinions are the reference point for everything now. This is the small self we must let go of through contemplative prayer; and yet most people, including Christians, take this very tiny and even false self as normative and sufficient. (View the three domes of The Cosmic Egg on our website here).
The dome of My Story is often all the postmodern person has left: my power, my prestige, and my possessions. It’s the little stage where I do my dance and where the questions are usually “Who is watching me? How do I feel? What do I believe? What makes me unique?” It’s a passing arena, to be certain. It will be over in a few years and is frankly not very interesting if it is all we have to talk about. My Story is not big enough or true enough to create large or meaningful patterns by itself. It is all just personal anecdotes, and some people live their whole lives there with no need for broader connections.
Perhaps we can see how fragile, unprotected, and constantly striving this self will almost certainly be. Self-focused people are very easily offended, fearful, and therefore often posturing and pretentious. My opinion is that if we stay in this smallest dome of meaning, we often move toward a neurotic self-image. Psychologist Jean Houston puts it this way: “When mythic material remains latent, unused and unexplored, it can lead to pathological behavior.” [1] This small and fragile self needs to be a part of something more significant—and so it creates dramas, tragedies, and victimhood to put itself on a larger stage.
The small self is intrinsically unhappy because it has no ontological foundation. It is not real. It does not exist. It will always be insecure, afraid, and scrambling for significance. In Jesus’ language, “the branch cut off from the vine is useless” (John 15:5).
However, when we are able to move beyond the small or “false self”—at the right time and in the right way—it will feel precisely as if we have lost nothing. In fact, it will feel like freedom and liberation. When we are connected to Our Story and The Story and not just My Story, we no longer need to protect or defend the mere part. We are now connected to something expansive and inexhaustible; and we can become a useful and contributing citizen in both this world and the reign of God.
The Three Domes
Just as the body needs food, so the soul needs meaning, and the spirit needs ultimate meaning. Often that meaning is communicated through story. The function of all mythologies, religion, and even family lore is to help us situate ourselves inside of a safe and meaningful universe. This week’s meditations focus on a “Cosmic Egg of Meaning” inside of which people can find their rest and happiness. The image I’ve used in numerous books, and first learned from Joseph Chilton Pearce (1926‒2016), to describe this “Cosmic Egg” is that of three overlapping domes. (View this image on our website here).
The smallest dome of meaning is my private world of interests. We can call it “My Story,” where we proudly proclaim, “This is me!” No people in history, up until the last forty years or so (particularly in the United States), have had the language or the freedom for this level of personal meaning. My Story is full of subjective, interpersonal, psychological, and self-help language. It’s the vernacular of talk shows, blogs, and social media. I’m not criticizing it; in fact, it has its origins in Christian history with Augustine’s sophisticated Confessions (4th century). This language does answer a lot of questions, so it’s understandable that we revel in it. It is very good, as far as it goes. The trouble is that it is so rich it can become a substitute for true transcendence. My Story is not yet totally The Story.
There is a second and larger dome of meaning that encloses the first. I call this “Our Story,” where we declare, “This is us!” This is where most people in all of human history have lived their lives: identifying completely with their ethnicity, their gender, their group, their religion, and their occupations. The biblical tradition honors both of these domes of meaning and takes each of them seriously. Though it doesn’t name them as such, My Story and Our Story are both part of the narrative. The life of the individual and the life of the nation of Israel are both arenas for God’s action, but religious traditions affirm that they are connected to something Infinite, too.
The third dome of meaning that encloses the two smaller ones is “The Story.” By this, we are referring to the patterns that are always true—beyond anecdote and my cultural history. The biblical tradition takes all three levels seriously: My Story, Our Story, and The Story. Biblical revelation says that the only way we can move to The Story and understand it with any depth is to walk through and take responsibility for both our personal story and our group story. Anything less we now call “spiritual bypassing.” This is quite common among many fundamentalist groups—jumping to spiritual answers or theology without any honest self-knowledge or knowledge of history. We’ve got to listen to our own experience, to our own failures, to our own sin, to our own gifts and calls. Plus, we have to recognize that we’re a part of history, a part of a culture, a religious group, a nationality, a gender, for good and for bad. When all three domes of meaning are deemed worthy of love and attention, we probably have a rather mature spiritual person.
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