2.
The separate self is very interested in the spiritual. It
wants to know all about it. It has the sense that it is incomplete
somehow. It has the sense that it needs to add something to itself. It
has yet to realize something very important: there is always something
missing. It is quite capable of suddenly having a “conversion
experience”, becoming a reborn-Christian, or a Buddhist or Muslim,
perhaps, or a Communist Spiritualist, or a Native-practicing
existentialist Kabalist, or a post-Jungian Transpersonalist and so on.
It perceives itself to be capable of all these different choices. It
believes it is capable of combining all of these beliefs and more.
The separate self is looking for a certain kind of spiritual certainty.
It wants to be sure about the spiritual and its special place in it. The
separate, subjective self wants to be able to say, “Finally, I’ve found
the truth. This is the real thing. My spiritual views give me security,
personal value and authority.”
Now, it would seem perfectly obvious that the separate self is the lower
self using Theosophical language. It is very watchful. It is always
observant and calculating. It is not intelligent, but it is very
cunning. There is an underlying paranoia. When we become aware of the
underpinnings of separate self, we see that it is actually a fairly
recent event in history: it is a cultural product, and has, in recent
times, been developed in this form so we can say that “we are
psychological entities”.
This kind of self-identity began in this phase in the late 1600s and
passed over into what is called “the Enlightenment” (die Aufeinklarung).
At a certain point, the identity within subjectivity was defined by
Descartes as the “ego cogito sum”, “I think; therefore, I am”. This
thinking subject is continuously involved in an internal dialogue which
is grounded in doubt about everything other than its own existence as
the thinking doubter. And this “talking-to itself” subject is taken to
be the “I”. But this “I” is a cultural creation. It actually did not
exist in this form prior to the period leading up to Descartes. The
“I-think” subject just wasn’t there. A different kind of personal
identity was there, whose theological underpinnings were in some
respects similar.
There was a self made in the image of God, the Imago-Dei, who looked out
beyond itself into the space of a “here-after” world, “heaven”, and saw
itself as living briefly in this “fallen world” of time. It was to die
out of this fallen world of time and go into the eternal heaven of
Western religious faith. So it is very easy for us to accept the idea of
an exteriorized, transcendental higher self. Our traditional cultural
underpinnings already tend towards that view of spiritual nature.
WHY DO WE LIVE OUTSIDE OURSELVES WATCHING OURSELVES?
How did the Seeker get out of the body and “off the Earth” in the first
place? Why does it stand outside and un-dead, watching over itself? This
condition is true of every form of multicultural spirituality in the
world. In the West, its history is the history of Platonic
Judeo-Christian culture, and the morphogenetic resonance field behind it
in time is immense. Even though this morphogenetic resonance field has
taken on the character of a “creation myth” for millions of secular
people, it is also dying into violent fundamentalism for millions of
true believers. Those who regard this history as a creation myth are
just as subject to it as those who claim to believe in it.
Christianity, like all dominant religions in their day, not only
fostered and demanded a specific type of man, but also had the power to
enforce its demand over long centuries of totalitarian power.
The essential shaping idea of the Christian type of man was that he had
to reject what he already was and focus upon what he should be.
Everything about what he already was was fated at death to descend into
eternal damnation and suffering in the fires of Hell. As the descendent
of Adam and Eve and their sin of disobedience to God, he was a fallen
man still guilty of that original sin. His only hope amid the
predestined calamity of his existence was that his God had sent his only
son, Jesus, into the world to save him from death and damnation. And the
Son of God had undergone a hideous, traumatized death in the process of
atoning for the original sin of Adam and Eve. The Son of God, Jesus, had
miraculously risen from the dead and held forth the promise that all
men, by being like him, could be forgiven by Him and do likewise.
For the Christian type of man, his whole life was the attempt to cease
altogether to be himself and become as much like Jesus as possible. Of
course, being a “mere sinner”, he could never accomplish this in this
world, though he might, if his plea for forgiveness was sincere,
actually be forgiven for his fallen nature, be absolved of who he was
and be given a new life in the hereafter. Indeed, he might even sit at
the right hand of Jesus in Heaven and live a blessed life forever.
As part of this “covenant”, he had to consider all of his senses and
bodily nature to be portals through which evil and Satan were sure to
enter his sinful, fallen nature in the form of temptation. He had to
continuously call upon a higher world for assistance in his struggle
with “the sins of the flesh”. In this way he was made to constantly
project an idealized image of himself away from this world towards Jesus
in another world, namely, Heaven.
This idealized self-image was saturated in psycho magnetically-charged
theological images which pointed his imagination, thoughts, feelings and
will away from this world. This image became what he thought of as his
'real self'. In time, Christian man became incapable of thinking of
himself in any other way. He became a personal, mystical projection
towards a personal, mystical, savior God. He became a conditioned,
fragmented mystical entity, ill at ease within himself, afraid of his
own body, a stranger in a strange land.
When he died, throwing himself, guilty and pleading for forgiveness upon
the mercy of his God, if he was pious and holy enough, he would die out
of this world and enter another world. His whole psycho-spiritual makeup
was an orientation towards death, but with the hope and faith of
immortality. With what ease does a humanity conditioned by this
traumatized theology take up the idea of the “higher self” as an
imagined exteriorization of the self in the world!
When spiritual seekers discuss the “higher self”, they talk about it as
if it were an other-worldly presence occupying a greater inner space
than the mind or self as normally conceived. They have the idea that the
higher self, as an other-worldly presence, goes on forever, that it is
immortal. There is an expanded image of the separate self, the “I-think”
subject, projected upwards into an imagined inner space, a higher
spiritual world.
The higher self in its higher world also has an inventory, but one of
psychic, mystical experiences. It has internalized various mythic,
religious and spiritual beliefs; it has an agenda which is often
described as the “spiritual path”. This higher self is also composed of
many visuals and visualizations, often including fragmentary pictures or
whole scenes of significant dreams and previous incarnations, which are
saturated in the emotions, real or imagined, of another world or another
time.
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