The Self Beyond the Self

“Let that quiet darkness be your whole mind and like a mirror to you. For I want your thought of self to be as naked and as simple as your thought of God, so that you may be spiritually united to him without any fragmentation and scattering of your mind. He is your being and in him, you are what you are, not only because he is the cause and being of all that exits, but because he is your cause and the deep center of your being. Therefore, in this contemplative work think of your self and of him in the same way: that is, with simple awareness that he is as he is, and that you are as you are. In this way your thought will not be fragmented or scattered, but unified in him who is all.”
—Privy Counsel, Ch. 1

The existence of the “self” is seen as a big problem in the contemplative traditions of world religions. There is no single way that the traditions have responded to this problem, but there is one common theme about what happens when the contemplative arrives at a state of deep inner awareness: the self ceases to be a problem, because the fragmentation and alienation that the normal sense of self creates in the mind is overcome and a deeper unity and wholeness emerges.

On retreat last spring with Vipassana meditation teacher Matthew Flickstein, we did a practice in which with every rising thought and sensation we shifted our locus of awareness toward the “self” that generated the thought. It was a difficult practice at first, and then a wide open space emerged within the mind, a kind of vast void. It was breathtaking and startling and extraordinarily peaceful.

But what was most amazing—and this experience continued for several hours after I rose from the cushion—all the elements of the “self” were still present. All my normal thoughts, feelings, memories and judgments—the “stuff” that we normally associate with “self”—still existed in the mind. They arose and disappeared as steadily as during “normal” states of awareness. The difference was that these phenomena existed in an infinite space inside the mind/heart/soul. I could see them appear and disappear, and looked upon them with the same consciousness that I noticed sounds and smells and the movement and activity of other people around me. Rather than being the center of my universe, the “self” appeared within the context of an enormous universe that I had never even noticed before.

This, I think, must be what Huston Smith is getting at in his book Why Religion Matters, when he discusses the “transpersonal” nature of God. For Smith, the old debate about whether the fundamental nature of reality is dual or non-dual (personal or impersonal) is irrelevant. For the Ultimate Reality, which is unified, contains within it all dualities, including all aspects of personhood. The problem only arises from a limited perspective that places so much emphasis on one thing that all other things are lost from view. From the Divine perspective, it is all seen, all embraced, all loved.