Various Selves

 Thomas Merton has much to say about what some zennists have termed the "recondite host" that is to be realised/known beneath all our conditionings of time and place, conditionings we can end up killing and dying for. Zen seeks our "original face before we were born."

This not really to displace or erode our day to day self, but more to redeem it, to allow such self its proper place. All religion speaks of the unity of the transitory with the eternal. It can be a life adventure to discover that unity.

Merton explores such themes by contrasting the "modern" Cartesian self with other ways of seeing. Descartes famous "I think therefore I am" which has become much of a bedrock of modern thought, perhaps presumed or assumed too much. Perhaps it should just be "Thought"? Presuming an "I" that has the thoughts, therefore creating a dualism, could well be a step too far, at least as a beginning to constructing a worldview.

Whatever, this cartesian self has led in part to the rampant individualism so prevalent in the West, where self enclosed units of selfhood each seeks to create a persona, a self, as a suitable case for dealing with the world, to display, to sport with.........to judge all others from. Or pass some sort of presumed "test" set by the Almighty!

Merton suggests an alternative form of "Being", but first he speaks of the consequences of cartesian thought for the concept of God:-

Cartesian thought began with an attempt to reach God as object by starting from the thinking self. But when God becomes object, he sooner or later “dies,” because God as object is ultimately unthinkable. God as object is not only a mere abstract concept, but one which contains so many internal contradictions that it becomes entirely nonnegotiable except when it is hardened into an idol that is maintained in existence by a sheer act of will.

Then Merton suggests an alternative:-

Meanwhile, let us remind ourselves that another, metaphysical, consciousness is still available to modern man. It starts not from the thinking and self-aware subject but from Being, ontologically seen to be beyond and prior to the subject-object division. Underlying the subjective experience of the individual self there is an immediate experience of Being. This is totally different from an experience of self-consciousness. It is completely nonobjective. It has in it none of the split and alienation that occurs when the subject becomes aware of itself as a quasi-object. The consciousness of Being (whether considered positively or negatively and apophatically as in Buddhism) is an immediate experience that goes beyond reflexive awareness. It is not “consciousness of” but pure consciousness, in which the subject as such “disappears.”

Posterior to this immediate experience of a ground which transcends experience, emerges the subject with its self-awareness. But, as the Oriental religions and Christian mysticism have stressed, this self-aware subject is not final or absolute; it is a provisional self-construction which exists, for practical purposes, only in a sphere of relativity. Its existence has meaning in so far as it does not become fixated or centered upon itself as ultimate, learns to function not as its own center but “from God” and “for others.” The Christian term “from God” implies what the nontheistic religious philosophies conceive as a hypothetical Single Center of all beings, what T. S. Eliot called “the still point of the turning world,” but which Buddhism for example visualizes not as “point” but as “Void.” (And of course the Void is not visualized at all.)

In brief, this form of consciousness assumes a totally different kind of self-awareness from that of the Cartesian thinking-self which is its own justification and its own center. Here the individual is aware of himself as a self-to-be-dissolved in self-giving, in love, in “letting-go,” in ecstasy, in God—there are many ways of phrasing it.

The self is not its own center and does not orbit around itself; it is centered on God, the one center of all, which is “everywhere and nowhere,” in whom all are encountered, from whom all proceed. Thus from the very start this consciousness is disposed to encounter “the other” with whom it is already united anyway “in God.”

(From an essay contained in "Zen and the Birds of Appetite")

From my Buddhist perspective the "self" that has come to be, more often than not, in our modern world, is inevitably prone to suffering (dukkha)

Our modern world seems to value "individualism", but as Merton points out, individualism should never be confused to "personalism". True, life giving personality is to be found in the “true Self”, in the unity of subject and object.

Merton again:-

 Hence the highest good is the self’s fusion with the highest reality. Human personality is regarded as the force which effects this fusion. The hopes and desires of the external, individual self are all, in fact, opposed to this higher unity. They are centered on the affirmation of the individual. It is only at the point where the hopes and fears of the individual self are done away with and forgotten that the true human personality appears. In a word, realization of the human personality in this highest spiritual sense is for us the good toward which all life is to be oriented. It is even the absolute good, in so far as the human personality intimately and probably even essentially related to the personality of God.

Well, maybe enough. I waffle to find my own clarity. My time here in McDonalds with a white coffee is precious to me, helping me deal with my own problems and mental health issues. I'm "on call" for others in many ways, times which I also treasure, yet I value a certain solitude.