The False-Self, Healing

"This was also the point in my life when I became a master at masking my true thoughts."    --an unknown blogger

Simple Mindedly browsing though some blogs, I came upon this curious and very honest statement, "this was also the point in my life when I became a master at masking my true thoughts..."
How many of us relate to this? One guesses very many; it seems that one of our many fears is that we will not be accepted as we are, that we apparently see ourselves fearfully as a certain type of monster. While there are those rare individuals in every society who rub against the grain, some who are evil, for most of us this is a fear we face each and every day.

Recalling the words of R.D. Lang, "every man is involved whether or to the extent to which he is being true to his nature." The false-self as Lang views it is the complement of an inner, spiritual self, if you will, which is occupied with maintaining its identity and freedom by being transcendent, unembodied, and thus never grasped, pinpointed, trapped or possessed.
Its aim, writes Lang in his book, The Divided Self, "is to be a pure subject, without any objective existence. Thus except in certain safe moments, the individual seeks to regard his existence as the expression of a false-self, not himself.

 In spiritual terms, this is devastating, and it is very common. How often do we encounter the "fake" smile and the yawn which quickly follows it? How often do we feel divided, yet proceed with the response that is expected, even when it feels untrue to our deeper self?
And how often must we force ourselves to comport an attitude which we don't feel yet believe for social reasons to be obliged? In some societies these behaviors are usual and expected; societies in which the group is more valued than individuals frequently demand this behavior; one learns, 'a smile often hides a frown.' And in these groups, this behavior is normative.

Yet here in the West, often there is the sense of a dis-connect with the self and others. We are afraid to say who we are, or what matters most in our short lives; maintaining this stance may lead to a sense of grief, depression or loss over time.
As Lang expresses the situation, having an identity for the self, a private identity and another identity developed for the consumption of others is at times functional, and also may be at times non-functional leading to a sense of dis-reality, a feeling of not being real, a fake.
While living one's truth is not always easy, healing the self, gaining a perspective beyond the solution of the "false-self" is very healing to a soul; the soul seeks its original wholeness.

The false, divided self is like a child, eternally small, anxious, weak and not responsible for what happens in any given interaction. This is because a feeling arises that it wasn't truly me who did those things--it was someone else. Alternatively, there is a sense that one may do things--but only to a point-- because the truer, inner self would not go that far, or allow those thoughts or behaviors--would they? So it's not me.

The end point of many spiritual traditions is to encourage the maturity of the individual, to acknowledge the rightness of all creation, individuals included, so as to bridge the gap, with the clear knowledge, the belief in the harmony and rightness of matters to each one.
This existential dawning of both 'false' and true, undivided, self is widespread across today's societies; writers as diverse as Henry Fielding, Kierkegaard, Sartre, D.H. Lawrence and Carl Jung have acknowledged its role in the modern world. It is becoming a constant theme as societies settle into an industrialized, group identity. This leaves little room for the self, so you then must carve a whole one.

Forgiveness, Sorting Through Your Secrets

"Some harm that people do to themselves or others may appear to 
outsiders to be less grave..." -- Forgiving Yourself by Beverly Flannigan

Many people find it difficult to forgive themselves for the simple, secret reason that they felt some benefit or pleasure from the now regretted experience. It may have been a sense of power, control, emotion, energy or mastery. It may have been a degree of delight in depriving another of a benefit such as needed material items, or the plain truth.

Keeping secrets for these reasons may make a later impulse to self-forgiveness more difficult; self forgiveness is self-confrontation and requires for many, a measure of courage. We don't like what we see in the mirror, yet we live with it day after day. Forgiving Yourself by Beverly Flannigan, discusses forgiveness and includes the issue of secrets.
 "Some harm that people do to themselves or others may appear to outsiders to be less grave than it is to the person unable to forgive himself. You may have been told that you 'did the best you could' or 'didn't know.' You may not have been able to listen to other peoples' condolences because you knew something no one else knew about the situation. For example, you may have felt momentarily good about hurting someone or physically aroused, assaulted, or angry at a person."

If what you know about your situation, you keep 'secret,' it likely is at the center of your inability to forgive yourself. Flannigan recommends to such transgressors that they write down as much as they can remember about the situation, include all the details without fearing the memory; express those parts of yourself in writing that you think or thought then, were unacceptable.
She advises the writing be kept in a safe place; refer to it as often as needed, adding details or feelings which you may have not recalled at first writing. This may take weeks as things surface in your mind.

Concluding this discussion Flannigan notes that, "With each phase of forgiving yourself, you come closer and closer to truth. Eventually you will expose more of your truth to another person."
  For now, the hard work of confronting what you most dislike in yourself takes you closer to the time you feel genuine relief and can say to yourself, "I feel whole, I forgive myself."

True Love From the False

"Love gives itself; it isn't bought." Henry W. Longfellow

As we move through our lives, one hears and learns by experience a simple truth as the poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote. Love is free, it cannot be bought or coerced. Nor can it be captured or restrained, like a pet canary, adored in a golden cage.
Loving persons come together by desire, by free will, in giving. Lovers cannot be used, one blind to the motives of another. 'Love,' as the Bible tells us, 'sees all, knows all, tolerates, is patient and forgives'. In the book of Corinthians it is written:

"If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal."

The conclusion of this passage is also simple enough:

"For now we see in a mirror dimly, then face to face; now I know in part, but then I will know fully just as I also have been fully known. But now-- faith, hope, love, abide these three; but the greatest of these is love." --1Corinthians-NSB translation

For those whose life experience has been without the experience of love's purity, innocence, freedom, or patience, the foundation of relationship as adults may easily turn to an experience in which there is a transaction of "confusion between winners and losers in a game of competing needs," writes Deepak Chopra in his book, The Path to Love.
 Instead of weaving together in friendship, in desire, in love, individuals concentrate on what will benefit me. "How many couples bond by forming a "we" that is just a stronger, tougher version of "me"? muses Chopra.

"Undoubtedly," he continues,  "mutual ego needs have a place in every relationship... however when they obliterate the tender growth and life of love in the Spirit," love is replaced with something that is false. He notes that "acquiring an ally to fulfill them [needs] isn't the same as getting free from them. 
Only love can free us."
"The reason that ego and love are not compatible comes down to this: you cannot take your ego into the unknown, where love wants to lead. Ego craves control, certainty, and power alone. As practitioners on the Way, looking carefully, we see this is false notion. By life experience, we have found that the world is not static, it is not every man an island. Rather the world is as the Buddha preached: a world of change, impermanence; a world that survives because of the inter-being of all. One depends upon another.

Think about your morning habits, for example. The dwelling you awoke in was quite possibly built by another, the electricity you used was wired and made safe for you by others. The food you eat was grown and delivered by others; the water you drink, and the road you travel-- all made safe by others. A truth of love versus ego, then, is that "Uncertainty is the basis of life," writes Chopra.
And inter-being is the way.
Allow yourself what you deeply desire.  In love, in spirit, there are no ulterior motives. While acknowledging another's needs or wants, "Spirit neither takes responsibility for that need nor opposes it." In this way, the person and their love is seen as real, because whatever your true need is, is your reality.

Merton and the Reality of the Body

"And what God has joined, no man can separate without danger to his sanity"

" If I never become what I am meant to be, but always remain what I am not, I shall spend eternity contradicting myself by being at once something and nothing... --Thomas Merton



While Gnosis is chiefly concerned with the mind, the idea of the body as a perceived reality is discussed by the Catholic Christian monk, Thomas Merton.

In his book, New Seeds of Contemplation, a compilation of his short musings on a variety of subjects he writes, "Detachment from things does not mean setting up a contradiction between things and God, as if God were another thing and his creatures were his rivals. We do not detach ourselves from things in order to attach ourselves to God; rather we become detached from ourselves in order to see...This is an entirely new perspective which many sincerely moral and ascetic minds fail utterly to see..."

There is no evil in the created world, nor can anything created become an obstacle to oneness.

However the obstacle often becomes our self, "that is to say our tenacious need to maintain our separate, external, egotistical will... It is then that we alienate ourselves from reality and from God..."

We use all things "for the worship of this idol, which is our imaginary self; in doing so we pervert and corrupt things, or rather we turn our relationship to them into a corrupt and sinful relationship. We do not thereby make them evil, but we use them to increase our attachments..." To take for an idol is the worst kind of self deception. "It turns a man into a fanatic, no longer capable of genuine love...'

"Whereby a "saint knows that the world and everything made by God is good... while those who are not saints either think that created things are unholy [not unified], or else they don't bother about the question one way or the other, because they are only interested in themselves."

In the eyes of the Oneness, the unified, the holy, the saints, all beauty is holy and glorious; it is without judgement because he knows that his mission on this earth as saint is to bring mercy to all men.

Merton continues. He says, "The only true joy on earth is to escape from the prison of our own false self, and enter by love into union with the Life Who Dwells and sings with in the essence of every creature, and in the core of our souls.
In his love we possess all things... Until we love God perfectly [without fear], everything in this world will be able to hurt us. And the greatest misfortune is to be dead to the pain, and not realize what it is... The anguish that we [feel] belongs to the disorder of our desire which looks for a greater reality than is there... "

"But to worship our false self is to worship nothing... The false self must not be identified with the body. The body is neither evil nor unreal. It has a reality that is given it by God, and this reality is therefore holy. Hence we say rightly, though symbolically, that the body is the Temple of God, meaning that his truth, his perfect reality, is enshrined there in the mystery of our own being.'
'Let no one therefore despise or hate the body... Let no one dare to mis-use this body. Let him not desecrate his own natural unity by dividing himself, soul against body, as if soul were good and body evil. Soul and body together subsist in the reality of the hidden inner person. If they are separated, there is no longer a person... And what God has joined, no man can separate without danger to his sanity."

It is equally false to treat the soul as if it were a "whole" and the body as if it were a "whole."
Those who make this mis-perception fall firstly into the practice of "angel-ism," the study and love of angels, or spirit beings; those who fall for the second mistake, fall into the trap of life lived as below the level given by God to his human creation.
It would not be an acceptable cliche, however, to say that "such men live like beasts; there are many respectable and conventionally moral people for whom there is no other reality in life than their body and its relationship with things.'

'They have reduced themselves to a life lived within the limits of their five senses. Their self is consequently an illusion based on sense experience and nothing else. For these, the body becomes a source of falsity and deception. But it is not the body's fault. It is the fault of the person himself, who consents to the illusion, who finds security in self-deception and will not answer the secret voice of God calling him to take a risk and venture by faith outside the reassuring and protective limits of his five senses."

"You are the secret of God's heart." --unknown

Commentary 2-- Just This

In the study of the self, we find that wherever we go, there we are. Gaining this sort of awareness of the self is central to practice. Applying just this, we acquire the power and creativity to break out of our habitual defenses and thought habits so to experience reality as it is. When you do, you find that your anxiety level is reduced, your stress goes down, and in its place arises a new sense of the possible; that you are just this moment. Every moment is new and possible. That moment becomes a good thing; you open yourself to be curious, to learn more about the world around you, yourself. Take rest in what is real.

As we come to better understand the precepts, an awareness grows that points our attention to doing what is necessary. We ask and see more clearly what is required of us, and we do just that.

Being a scientist and examining our self, we come to see that we have expectations and requirements, first of ourselves and then of others. When these ideas or assumptions fail to correspond with reality, we suffer. Cutting through deception, we live more in this moment and find that it is a good. We may even begin to acquire the realization that often when we think it is the other, in reality it is ourselves who think, act or feel a particular way. Avoid spinning into the past or the fearful future. This moment is the only moment there really can be.

An old saying I learned as a child goes, "He who accuses, accuses himself." Being aware of a situation or an event does not make us bound to engage or respond. We may choose to do so, if it seems necessary, or we may stand back and let it play out on its own, in its own time.

Know that feelings are just feelings. They may guide or hinder us equally. Feelings arise and recede; when they're urgent at that moment things may seem clear. Later, we may, in a calmer mind see they were not, and then there's the damage we cause to ourselves and others. So there is a great deal of power in awareness. It may be increased and cultivated. Take the journey of the head to the heart through the precepts. They are a reliable guide.