Beyond the Psychological to the Cosmic Self
Our true Self is not the psychological self,
which is the ego that is to be discarded for it to shine forth.
Our true Self is not the personal identity of this particular incarnation.
It is not the self-formations of emotion
or our personal likes and dislikes.
Nor is it our mental or intellectual identity
through the opinions, beliefs and predilections
of our thought processes.
It is not even our human self but our soul
that unites us to all beings and all worlds.
To put it simply: our true Self or Atman is a Divine principle.
The Self is a principle of subjectivity, awareness
and self-being inherent in all existence.
It is the ultimate principle behind all the laws,
principles and righteousness in this magical universe of mind and matter.
Our true Self is a divinity, a God or Goddess as it were,
the very Divine power behind the manifestation of time,
space and causation.
We are God. God is our true nature.
Yet this Divinity is not a theological principle
but the very nature of existence that is self-aware,
self-determining and self-responsible.
This Self or the Absolute Being-Consciousness -Bliss.
An important approach to our true Self as a Divinity.
This is to honor the Divine presence within us,
to respect our own being and consciousness
as sacred, immortal and untainted.
From the standpoint of psychology
and the spiritual systems that use it as a cornerstone,
such worship of the Self within can appear to be an
adulation of the ego, an ignoring of our personal faults,
and our responsibility to other people,
a fantasy to cover over facing the hard realities of our emotional nature.
Yet such psychological reductionism
can also be rigid and can cut of the
roots of aspiration and idealism within us.
An important law of the mind is that
whatever we focus our attention on that we become.
It is, as it were, the Divinity we aspire to become.
The danger in fixating on the neurotic psychological self
is that we end up becoming it, we can get lost in
an endless obsession with its peculiarities, traumas and idiosyncrasies.
We can reinforce the psychological self rather than releasing it.
We should learn to worship the true Self within us
as the Self of all beings and the Being behind all existence,
as the light of all the worlds.
This can take us in an instant beyond
our human problems and attachments.
Our problems are inherent in our psychology
which focuses on our personal identity as our true reality.
We cannot go beyond them without opening up
to that which in us that transcends them.
This is the universal Self within.
To do so we must set the psychological self aside,
which is also to learn to see it as a formulation of
universal forces, elements and qualities,
not as something unique to ourselves.
All of nature works within us and moves externally
according to the glory and the beauty of the Self within.
Our psychological self is just another formation
of nature's energy and expression, but blocked to our deeper reality.
Of course, we all have a psychological self just
as we all have human bodies. But focusing on
the psychological self will no more take us to
truth than will focusing on our physical bodies
take us to pure awareness.
We should give the psychological self
its appropriate place in our lives as
a mechanism of personal existence
but not confuse it with our true reality.
