Christian Newman Unsplash
My self is my opinions, my indoctrination, my learnt behaviour. My self is no different from all other selves in essence. I might be an American self and you might be an Indian self. I grow up with the ideas and ignorance of my parents and the people I am surrounded by. As the beautiful little tabula rasa, I am one with life, one with the Mystery. Inside the womb I needed nothing. All was provided by the Mystery. Out I popped through the first trauma into existence.
We teach the child our ignorance. Ignorance is the ignorance of love, life, death, the Mystery. We fill it with our second-hand information, our limited, partial understanding of what life is about. This understanding is based on hearsay mostly, what our parents, friends, society deems to be true and good. With the true and good comes it’s opposite. The untrue and the not so good.
The child grows up in confusion and fear. No one seems to know anything that is real. The world is full of pain and suffering and there is little love. To survive one has to perform. If I cry, fawn, smile, I elicit certain results. The love that I came from, the Mystery that is my origin is fast fading. I begin to know pain. The pain of existence, of hunger, of the lack of warmth of my mother’s love.
I am no longer one with the Mystery. I am separate. I depend on others. I start to become cunning, learning how to manipulate, use others. From wanting my mother’s milk and warmth, her soothing words and love I gradually learn to want more and more. I’m never satisfied for long. I want love but have not yet learnt that I can’t demand it.
Is there nothing else? What is this wanting, this yearning in me? Who am I?
I am ignorance. A desire to exist that I know nothing about. I am hunger and psychological fear. I cling to those around me in ignorance and soak up their ignorance. This existence is painful. I am helpless, dependent on others.
Gradually I learn to play the game. I begin to think and be self-serving. What else is there? I am my self. That’s all I know. I am a separate entity. I am connected by blood and tradition, by ignorance, my personal tribal ignorance to this tribe. I start to learn to have opinions and grow as a conglomeration of many aspects which coalesce into what I call me.I’m a little copy of my mummy and daddy and those around me. This is all there is and it’s great. I laugh and play and fall over and cry and know lack, unhappiness but that’s normal. In this existence, it’s okay to be unhappy one day and happy the next.
My self is my ignorance of life that is free. It is an imposition on the blessed state, the natural state of love that I am, that is underneath all my opinions about love, life and existence.
To be free, to return to my love, I must give up my self. Not the practical aspects. I need a bit of self to exist in this ghastly dimension. I need to know how to tie my shoelaces, boil an egg.
All of my negative emotions which I ignorantly think are natural have to go, die. All the self-improvement, my pathetic ideas of what life and love are about has to go. I must be as nothing. I must go through the hell of my own creation and die to all that is not real. There is no community in this. No fairytale group hug to get me through. No leaning on another or telling my sad story again and again. I must die to come to life. Who said that?
The world will destroy me if it can. It will call me mad. I will feel that I am going mad as I lose my self. It will fight me tooth and nail. It lives through me. A living entity in my body that is not me and yet I have allowed it to take me over. I am possessed by my self.
Self-improvement is one of it’s many cunning, sweet-sounding, weapons of self-preservation. Nothing changes. I am as empty within as ever. I carry on. I’m the Queen or King of the castle. The idiot I own has not a clue.
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