Got home last night from a party and started to chat to Noel about metaphysics. It's been awhile since I've thought and talked so near to the boundaries of reason. I love moving conversation to the point where it is almost invisible, meaning that the ideas you're talking about are near impossible to describe so the terms used are very soft and non-binding, and both parties in the conversation acknowledge that the words themselves are simply stairs to a destination rather than concrete debatable items. It's a testament to our relationship that Noel and I have a conversation like this and not have it end with passive "in one ear out the other" listening on one side, or debate over terminology, or a big "you don't get it" denouement.
We were talking about the ability to fully engage the ego self while at the same time remaining attached solely to the transcendent self. The ego self is necessary to create motion and engagement however if you get attached to this self and the "fruits of the labor" of this self you push yourself into the painful spiral of want/need/happy/sad whereas if the perspective remains only on the side of the transcendent self you watch the fully engaged ego self move through the same fields, but due to the fact you're not personally invested in what the crop yields, the wheel of pain and joy can be avoided. It's not that you no longer feel pain or joy it is simply that you are no longer attached to the pain or the joy nor concerned with the labeling of pain or joy so they become raw and pure experience.
This may seem like a lot of conceptual masturbation or gibberish from the outside but when I've lived inside of the "full identification with the transcendent self while keeping the ego self fully engaged" concept, life has been very fine. Putting the words down here are in no way meant as a way to tell anyone else how to live, it is more a personal exercise and experiment in playing with the ability to communicate invisible ideas successfully. Please post a comment if you have a chance and let me know if this makes sense or not. I have the feeling that I may be going through various permutations of the same ideas a number of times here because, like robots last week, this is what excites me.
DND
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2 comments:
As your wife, and original recipiant of these thoughts, it may seem strange for me to comment, but sometimes it helps to write responses down in addition to saying them out loud.
I'm not giving a pat interpretation. Just borrowing your antenae for a bit and aiming it in a different direction.
I believe the "self" changes very slowly. Even when it appears that a person has taken a large leap in perspective, there will always be a part of the psyche that's still residing in the infancy stages of the change. There will always be parts of the mind that feel the need to crawl around a bit and take in the new surroundings before standing up and adapting to the change completly.
I've known you for over half your life and I see you as a person who puts personal development as a top priority. When you combine this trait with such an (interestingly) dynamic personality, you get a lot of experimenting.
Your current perspective seems especially pragmatic for you. You're being realistic regarding who you are at the present, and you're accepting and embracing your current values. "How do I integrate the ego with transcedence?" "How do I best express who I am right now with that person that I transcend to be?"
Noel
Interesting response, thanks Noel! The one delineation I'd make is that the ego self and the transcendent self that I write about are not so much the "current form" and the "destination form" as much as they are already fully realized forms that already exist. Maybe sometime I'd reach a point where I am firmly rooted in the Transcendent Self all of the time but I suspect that if I did, I'd then realize that I'd always been there and simply didn't realize it before.
Transcendent Self would be described in Hindu terms as the Atman, the universal soul, what Thelemites see this as "True Will" and I'm sure many other folks have their own terms and definitions for the same idea. I use transcendent self in the article because I like the term and it doesn't have too many outside associations for me so it tastes fresh.
The idea as I see it is that everyone has a best self, a self that exists outside the needs and wants of the ego. This self is realized to varying degrees over the course of life. I suspect that the purest form of this self is the same for every person. This self, the Transcendent Self is indeed yourself; it is the purest form of yourself.
I feel that the use of the phrase transcendent self roots the spiritual and religious experience purely in terms of your own self as that can then lay the linguistic groundwork for self-deification without any degree of self-aggrandizement. The concept of self-deification is a very gripping idea indeed for the ego and one that it can get a good grip on but if you bleed the actualization of self-deification of its ego expansion you get a system that encourages the ego to be a full participant in its own diminishment.
These are lofty goals and they are, I’ll admit, rather convoluted in their expression but the process of trying to actualize these goals is a lot of fun, if nothing else.
DND
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