For such a self-centred species, humans have surprisingly little understand of Self. Now I hear you thinking; “Do you mean, that we don’t understand ourselves or we don’t understand the general concept of self?”. Both, I would argue, and in this article I explain what I mean. As always I am sharing my personal views and experiences, holding no claim to expertise or research.
The book from Eckhart Tolle starts with an awareness the self is possible not one but two concepts, and only one is real. Having understood this, Tolle’s concept of self, collapses into one, leading to profound insight.
Comparing that to my own way of looking at self, as I have come to look at it, there are similarities; I have come to realize that I have been thinking of my outward projected self as “me”, whereas this version of self is in stark contrast with my inner self.
The former is carefully curated, in response to the world. In my instance, I have always projected myself as strong; there is nothing I can’t do. Experience has proven me right (or so I thought). By sheer willpower and common sense I can run 80km in the mountains, I have been in movies and have turned my entire body into a work of art. My confidence in my ability to handle the new, the uncomfortable, the unknown is through the roof.
The latter however (my inner self) was largely unknown to me. What started my journey of discovering that part of me is the acute awareness that the gap between inner and outer self is huge and making me profoundly dissatisfied with the life that I have built up.
To understand that, let’s look at the inner self more. As a result of early childhood trauma, my inner self is deeply insecure. It does not have youth of building up little successes in socio-emotional development. I had never learned how to socialize as I lacked the basic emotional development for this. Absence of such success largely lead to avoidance; I didn’t have any normal friends my age.
The result is a strong reliance on that strong outer shell, without a strong self of an inner self, lead to a lack of empathy, moral compass and direction. Inevitably this made me conclude that – if this is all there is to life – its really not worth living it. So I just bided my time.
The change came with the awareness that this strong outer shell was no inspiration to anyone, least so my son. Sure, people asked my how do I do it, so many hobbies, so much work, running 100km per week? But my strength wasn’t drawing them close, wasn’t inspiring them. Rather, it was keeping them at bay, demotivating them, mostly so my son.
Embarking on a journey to discover your inner self, requires help. I found that in an amazing therapist, who made me realize that I was amongst others suffering from fragmentation. While in most people the various sub-persons that make up the self, all sit at the table, all join in on a fruitful discussion, for those with trauma history, there is often only one sub-person in the room at the same time. You are ALL anger, ALL sadness, ALL excitement. You can imagine that such fragmentation presents itself as a pinball machine of emotions.
I learned, through therapy and these days hypnotherapy, that I can call the various sub-persons to the table in the safe space in my head. An example of how that works is as follows: my injured child is scared to be alone. My protector sub-person, lets call him Jason, therefore chases into endless connections, surrounding myself with people. My wise sub-person, let’s call him Gandalf because that’s what he looks like, then shames the injured child for being needy. The subsequent negative self-image needs more surrounding with people to counter. Only when Jason and Gandalf communicate, does the injured child make progress.
Understanding the inner self’s needs, one can appreciate how the outer self, came into being in the first place; as a direct response to the vulnerabilities of the inner self. So to summarize, we spoke about being aware of the inner and outer self, the fact that the outer shell, isn’t real and that the inner self may be fragmented.
This is where I add one more notion from the Buddhist teachings, which is the concept on non-self. Because even the inner self in the end is not real. It is constantly changing. True, there are likely hereditary elements (nature) involved. But by and large the (inner) self is made up of a series of responses to external stimuli. It works something like this: when our sense come in contact with what they are meant to detect, they send a signal to the brain. The brain matches this with the knowledge base through a lens which we call perception. This lens colours the interpretation of the stimuli, based on past experiences. Now imagine a situation where you connect all the senses and wipe the memory bank of perception. This means we would respond to new stimuli objectively and – all things (intelligence, amount of information given) equal – we should all respond to the same situations in the same way. There would be no more self.
Now how does this – very abstract – concept help us in practice? By being vigorously aware of the concept of self often getting in the way of responding objectively and logically, we will avoid the emotional roller coaster that we often go through: for instance when someone gets our name wrong (Why is it really that important that someone addresses us correctly? Personally I really don’t care what name you call me by.) or when someone cut you off in traffic (Was that really an attack on the self, iow did that person really see you, know you and decide to cut YOU off because you are you?).
The directional effort of removing our “self” from daily life, will make for a much more constant happiness in life, something also called “equanimity”. Perhaps its time to leave our “self” at home?
