There are moments when my eyes meet a mirror in passing, and I don’t immediately recognize myself.  With a delayed jolt I realize that the stranger in the mirror is me. It doesn’t seem possible that the woman staring back so blankly could be the same emotional swirl of a person I feel myself to be. At such times, I have the disquieting feeling that I am two people -– the noisy me, running about with too much to do, and the more silent me, who gazes startled from the mirror.

There is an uneasy, sometimes even hostile, relationship between these two halves of myself. The woman in the mirror is just not what I want her to be. She’s not thin enough, not kind enough, not secure enough, not disciplined enough.  I long ago decided that she is the one holding me back, preventing me from being happy, and so I criticize her and nag her to improve.

There is some small comfort in knowing that most of us feel something similar, this split in the self, with one side at war with the other.  Many of us have spent a great deal of our lives, and great deal of our money, in the effort to get the contrary person in the mirror under control. 

Yet, at some point, we grow sick and tired of the battle.  At some point, even more than we long for improvement, we long for peace.  We long to heal the rift between our two selves and become one whole person.  We long to find this person, discover who we really are.

Searching for myself

The desire to “find” oneself is apparently a modern phenomenon.  Before the rise of science, most people accepted what local religions and myths declared them to be. 

In the Christian West, that meant each man, woman and child was a sinner, and any interest in the self other than the matter of one’s salvation was unseemly vanity.  Meanwhile, any feelings of inner conflict were laid at the devil’s door, and one could only hope that God on his throne would hear one’s prayers and be moved to grant one peace.

Then along came Galileo and Newton and unsentimental science and suddenly, who we are became a question mark.  As science sucked away at our souls on one side, religion held unhelpfully to its archaic pronouncements on the other, and many of us were left floundering the middle. 

By the turn of the 20th century, being a human self had become something of a “problem.”  In an effort to help solve the problem, science developed a new branch, called psychology.  Yet, despite its many successes in treating the various glitches produced by the meeting of mind and life, it has been unable to satisfy the question mark of who we are. 

Indeed, increasing numbers of people, even after growing up on a church pew or spending years on a psychiatrist’s couch, are still searching for themselves.

Know thyself

Today, the search for ourselves is often ridiculed as a self-absorbed and narcissistic endeavor, the by-product of an affluent society made of citizens with too much time on their hands. But the effort to find oneself is a legitimate philosophical endeavor.

Indeed, to “know thyself” has long been considered the foundation for wisdom, for the self is the door through which all experience of reality flows.  To understand who we are is the key to understanding all else. 

That is why the New Age actively encourages us in this vital task, and offers up a variety of self-discovery tools to assist us.  I can head off to the bookstore and find any number of metaphysically-based self-help books by any number of gurus and shamans that will help me identify what I’m looking for. 

Meanwhile, in my local Whole Life directory, I can find help in integrating myself into one whole person from hypnotherapists, transpersonal psychologists, spiritual counselors, bodyworkers, intuitive advisors, holographic repatterners and meditation masters, among others.

Many of these teachers and healers begin by turning us back toward the mirror.  They ask us to examine the voice that scolds me so relentlessly.  Where does that voice come from?  Why do I feel it somehow separate from me?  Just who, the New Age asks, do I think I am?

I think, therefore I am

When I try to put my finger on who I am exactly, I find myself sorting through a list of words I use to describe myself.  I am a woman, I am a writer, I am a mother, an American, a Democrat, a blonde, a book lover. 

But as I read my list I realize that most of these things are easily changeable.  I can change my career, my political party, my place of residence, the color of my hair, or most any other thing about me, and I would still be myself.

Science, of course, could map out my DNA and give me a printout of my body’s genetic code, which is not changeable, but that would be mere identification, like the name or social security number that are mine alone.  It would tell me nothing about who I really am. 

To find out the “who,” I must go deeper than adjectives and other classifications and ask, who is this person that writes?  Who is it that mothers my children?  Who is it that asks these questions, and thinks these thoughts?

And so we arrive at thoughts.  My thoughts seem intimately connected with who I am.  And yet, my thoughts come and go so quickly.  Some common themes are repeated, of course, but my thoughts can change entirely, head off in new directions, and I would still be myself.  Obviously, I cannot really rest my sense of self on the content of my thought. 

Yet if I look deeper, look through the noisy ripple of thought -– yes, there.  There beneath the ever-shifting river of my thoughts, I find a steady sense of consciousness of those thoughts.  If nothing else, I am a being that is conscious of its thought. Or, in the words of the great philosopher Rene Descartes, cogito ergo sum, I think, therefore I am.

But am I special?

As soon as we locate the seat of self in our consciousness, we may be dismayed to realize that the consciousness that is me is also what everyone else is.  Each and every one of us is a being who is conscious of its thought, and if I cannot use a list of adjectives to describe myself, then in what way am I unique? 

Despite my earnest efforts, I can think of nothing that makes me essentially different from anyone else, at least not in this particular moment.  But wait -- if I collect all my moments together, I can identify a pattern that is unique.

"According to convention," writes Alan Watts, "I am not simply what I am doing now.  I am also what I have done, and my conventionally edited version of my past is made to seem almost more the real 'me' than what I am at this moment.  For what I am seems so fleeting and intangible, but what I was is fixed and final."

Memory provides us with an image of ourselves based on our remembered strengths and weaknesses, remembered likes and dislikes, remembered skills and talents.  Memory gives our successive moments of consciousness the image of unity, and it is this image that forms the ego of a human being.

Self, meet ego

It would seem we have arrived at the source of self in the ego, a memory-based image that represents who we are.  But if we look closely, we discover that this image is not real.  A memory of the past is nothing but a thought that we have now.  Whenever we remember something that happened in the past, we are remembering it in the present. 

Ultimately, even memory leads us back to this particular moment.  The ego we think to be firmly based in the past is actually an illusion of the present.     

Alan Watts again describes it best when he says, "The image you have of yourself is a social institution in the same way it is a social institution to divide the day into twenty-four hours, or to draw lines of latitude and longitude which are purely imaginary over the surface of the earth. It's very useful, but there are no actual lines.  They are imaginary. Ego is an imaginary concept that is not the organism."

This is not to say that the ego is an accidental by-product, or somehow unnecessary.  The ego serves a vital function by making the physical world accessible to us. As Campbell observed, each of us requires “a deeply imprinted persona through which he is made known no less to himself than to others.”  The ego is a necessary construct, not only as escort into the world, but as mirror for the self.

I sometimes think the ego must work like our atmosphere, which presses us close to the earth.  Without atmosphere, we would go tumbling out into space and find ourselves dissolving into the void.  

In the same way, the ego makes it possible for us to step outside the Absolute from which our existence flows.  Without the sense of separation provided by the ego, the world and all its divisions would have no meaning for us, and we would be unable to learn from it.

Seeing through the illusion

The ego is usually blamed for all our troubles. Eastern religions have long taught that a man's ego is part of him that keeps him unnecessarily separate from God.  The part of us that hates and judges is pure ego.  The part of us that clings and fears is ego.  The part of us that is threatened by the opinions of others is ego.    

But our problems do not arise from having an ego; rather, they arise from our identification with the ego.  Instead of recognizing it as our persona, or what Jung calls a mask or “false face,” we take it as our true face.  We jump into the shoes of this false, solid-seeming self and in the process separate ourselves from who we are in this moment. We literally split ourselves in two. 

This is naturally a painful condition, and so we begin to wrestle with ourselves, try to fix ourselves.  But it is a hopeless task.  As Watts phrased the problem:

How on earth are you going to get at yourself, to do something about yourself…?  In other words, if you feel that you need to make some sort of psychological or spiritual improvement, obviously you are the character who is going to have to bring this about.  But if you are the one who needs to be improved, how are you going to accomplish the improvement?  You are in the predicament of trying to lift yourself up off the floor by pulling at your own bootstraps, and you are likely to land with a bang on your fanny and end up lower down than you were in the first place.

The only way out of our “predicament” is to stop identifying with the ego, learn to understand its basic unreality.  Yes, the ego will continue to tag along with us, noisy as ever.  It will continue to rant at us in the mirror. 

But if we refuse to identify with it, refuse to take it seriously, then the ego’s voice can become exactly what it is:  the background noise of being human.

When we begin to understand that the self is not found in the ego, but in the soul, we step through the mirror into a magical looking glass world where everything is exactly the same but completely different. 

The ego-identity that once seemed so solid becomes a wavering illusion, and the past on which we based that identity becomes as insubstantial as a dream.  Meanwhile, the present moment that was once so fleeting opens into an eternity, and brings us into the presence of our true self – the soul.   

Locating the soul

Below the ego’s noisy river of thought, there is always consciousness.  This consciousness, which we also know by the name of “soul,” is the elemental energy at the core of each individual.  The soul does not belong to us, we belong to it.  It is not a part of us, we are a part of it.  Which is why it is so notoriously difficult to locate.

As James Carse writes, “When I look for the unnameable within myself, I don’t know what to look for.  But then, I couldn’t see it anyway, it is not to be seen, for it is indistinguishable from the act of seeing.”  Or as St. Francis of Assisi said, “Who you are looking for is who is looking.”

The soul is like the eye that cannot see itself, or the hand that cannot grasp itself.  It is not a describable object, not a thing that acts.  The soul is not a thing at all, it is a moment, a simple moment of conscious being. 

This may seem too small a substance on which to base an entire self, especially when compared to the dense layers of ego.  How can this one moment of consciousness be all there is?

Because consciousness is a medium of great energy and power, Campbell likened soul energy to electric energy, and the body to the bulb that turns the energy into visible light.  The bulb may burn out, we may change it many times, but the energy current still exists, and is always connected to its source.

Soul frequency

Comparing the energy of soul to the energy of electricity can be helpful, but again we find that electric current is pretty much all the same, no matter how many different kinds of bulbs it lights.  And beings that are conscious in this moment are essentially the same as all other beings, no matter how different the egos that come with them. 

This is the basis for the Buddhist concept of anatta, or no-soul, which says the soul is not individual or separate from the One life-force, and so does not endure after death. 

Ultimately, say the Buddhists, there is no see-er, there is only seeing.  There is no knower, there is only knowing.  There is no particular being at all, only being itself, consciousness of being that pools within an individual for the duration of his or her lifetime.  The separation between subject and object, or between one soul and another, is an illusion.    

We Westerners cannot conceive of a self that is indistinct from all others.  Our very definition of self is based on the self as an individual.  The idea of no-soul strikes us as either appalling or ridiculous, and is quickly discarded. Indeed, I believe one of the main attractions of Christianity is its devotion to the individual ego. Christianity insists that each person keeps the same identity forever, and criticizes any philosophy that appears to threaten individuality.    

Yet just because the soul is not individual and separate doesn’t mean it is not unique.  If we understand the soul as a current of energy, we can easily see that in an electromagnetic field, energy is expressed in waves and can be measured in the frequency of those waves.  An infinite number of frequencies can carry the exact same energy; there is no separation in energy, and yet each frequency is unique. 

That is why, in the New Age, one often hears the term “vibrational frequency” to describe a particular soul.  Although we are each made up of the same universal energy, each soul is understood to generate its own unique and constant frequency, giving our particular consciousness continuity, and allowing us to maintain the illusion that we are separate individuals.  Yet, as the Buddhists understand, there is no individual soul.  We are different expressions, or vibrations, of one divine soul.  We are all God in disguise.

Does this mean that after death and the loss of ego that we are absorbed back into God, destined for oblivion?  No, says Alan Watts.  Because we were never really separate from God in the first place, we cannot somehow disappear back into God. 

Campbell elaborates further when he says, “If the self participates in the power of being-itself, it receives itself back.”  The soul is not absorbed away -– we simply remember what we are and have always been, an eternal aspect of God.

New self, new world

The New Age considers this new understanding of ourselves to be vital to our future, for when our conception of ourselves changes, then everything changes. If we see ourselves, and each other, not as ego-based sinners who must be controlled, but as divine souls worthy of trust and respect, then we will act accordingly.  Our relationships, our values, our politics, our philosophy of education, our system of law and justice -- all these will reflect a profound and positive change.

Personally, the changes would be immediate.  A self understood as soul is no longer divided within, and no longer under control of the ego and its whims.  At any moment, we are given a choice between identifying with the ego’s drama or identifying with the much simpler present moment, and inner pain is no longer a burden we must bear.

But certainly the most dramatic and far-reaching changes allowed by this understanding of self would be in the social arena.  If we could learn to discern the divine frequency vibrating in the other, we would no longer feel so easily threatened by others.  Those who used to inspire our fear might instead inspire our compassion.  And rather than feel a need to punish others, we would feel the need to help them, care for them, educate them.  Rather than spending all our resources protecting ourselves, we would feel compelled to invest some of our resources in others.  We will be empowered to help our fellow man become all that they and deeply need to become.

Go to Karma & Destiny.