To Which Own Self be True?

“There are people,” he said, “who are past being hurt, beyond being hurt. You should know this is true. You should try to become one of those people, to make an understanding with yourself that you are not your body, that you are something bigger.” - From Breakfast with Buddha, by Roland Merullo

Occasionally I get the sense that the universe wants to tell me something. As I am a bit dense and more than a bit preoccupied, the universe often has to try really hard to get its point across. The most recent lesson came through as a variation on the same theme in four different books I read. Each book was recommended to me by a different person, in a different circle of my life, for a different reason. All centered around finding your true self, your best life (none were Oprah). The gist of all my readings is that I am not my ego, I am not my body, I am a nebulous, hard-to-define ‘true self’ – and that is the most powerful, joy-filled and wondrous part of me. The trouble is finding this true self; it’s difficult to locate under the layers of desires, demands and discontents of the ego and the hungers, fatigue, and pains of the body.

“It is important to remember, at all times, that the ego is not our true self. Our self-centered self is a false image of who we are. It is based upon the illusion that we are separate, independent, and autonomous.” – From Jesus Today: A Spirituality of Radical Freedom by Albert Nolan

Jesus Today was assigned as part of a class I am taking on spirituality. It is a challenging and rewarding book and one of its defining points is that our ego, while part of us and undoubtedly evolved for some good reason, has been overly encouraged by our culture and by Western thought for the past few centuries. Nolan defines the ego as our “selfish self” and I see this selfish ego in my actions every day (every hour). When impatience strikes (things are not going on MY time), when pride ejects words from my mouth before I have time to process how self-centered they are, when I resent the needs and demands of my children because I don’t have enough time for myself – my ego speaks loudly and carries a big stick.

I also identify strongly with myself as a body, one which loves to exercise, to drink, to eat and to fit into certain jeans. I follow the rhythm of its physical demands for meals or for sleep and succumb to frustration and short-temperedness every night as fatigue knocks on the door. I have identified myself as an athlete (competitive or not) for many decades now, and since I know what I look like, and have looked more or less the same for 25 years, it’s easy to see myself, to identify myself, in the physical sense. If you take away my ego, my body (including my face), the voices of my family, friends and culture that I have internalized over the years, who am I?

Nolan says that we can find our true self only in periods of silence and stillness. Periods of silence are used in many faith traditions as ways to get close to the guiding spirit of the universe, called God, or Buddha, or Mohammed, or Jesus, or another name. We have all heard of meditation, or centering prayer, and I have been resisting the call to practice this for three or more years now. But the confluence of readings, in conjunction with the class I am taking, inspire me to try to sit in stillness in order to get to know who I might really be. After reading Roland Merullo’s great book, and Nolan, and the first part of Ernest Becker’s Denial of Death, it appears that each of us has a true self that is our grateful self, the one which sees wonder and experiences moments of awe, the self that loves and the self that feels regret and sorrow for mistakes we have made or for the pain of others. It appears that this self also feels its connections to other people, and to the world, far more potently than any other part of us, leading us to a feeling of belonging and union that we all want.

Rumi’s poetry eloquently sums up what I have been attempting to say, so I’ll finish with the poem I just read – a little sledgehammer from the universe in case I had not picked up on the first five – or ten – messages:

Birds Nesting Near the Coast

Soul, if you want to learn secrets,
Your heart must forget about shame
And dignity.

You are God’s lover,
Yet you worry what people are saying.

The rope belt the early Christians wore
To show who they were, throw it away.

Inside you are sweet beyond telling,
And the cathedral there,
So deeply tall.

Evening now, more your desire
Than a woman’s hair.

And not knowledge.
Walk with those innocent of that,

Faces inside fire, birds nesting
Near the coast, earning their beauty,

Servants to the ocean. There is a sun
Within every person, the you
We call companion.
- Rumi