What self am I?

Day 4

The Art and Science of Enlightened Communication

On Retreat with Andrew Cohen

The deep snow is melting and it's a positively balmy day, with the temperature soaring to 6 or 7 degrees C - well OK, not quite Spring - though I did just glimpse the first Robin, but it's relatively much milder.

Today Andrew takes several individuals through the process of exploring their deepest value spheres that make up part of our sense of self: the collective ego, to illustrate how it works for everyone, since we only partly understood it yesterday.

And today there is a clear sense of everyone really getting what he is pointing to, as he uses people's experience to illustrate the process, such as the moving story of an Indian man describing his personal evolution through traditional values, to modern values and now to postmodern values. Andrew draws out how the world appears to you at each of those stages and it's not an individual issue. The purpose is to see how one may still be quite emotionally invested in values that one hasn't chosen, that were absorbed from family and culture. If you haven't brought these values to the light of awareness, they may well still be having a big inhibiting effect on one's availability to be able to evolve.

The Discussion: where the rubber hits the road

So in our discussion group today, we continue with this investigation and there is immediately a unitary shared sense of the thrill and liberating potential of this endeavour.  

An example will hopefully make practical sense of what I'm saying:

A Danish man describes how the values that he absorbed from the Scandinavian very post modern milieu that formed his sense of self, is felt as ‘the need to have my own space'. He says that it's not so that he can do anything particular with this sense of space, but it's almost like a sacred right.

 ‘I must have my own space and time for myself'.

This is a classic postmodern expression of the value sphere that life is for me and revolves around me - there is no higher value, purpose or authority than me, the individual.

He could see the emotional investment in this value; that it is still important to him and affects how he organizes his time, even though for someone like himself, who is committed to evolutionary development, it's an irrational motive that is contradictory to his conscious desire for transformation and obviously has an inhibitory effect.

The felt need is to carve out the time for himself but there's nothing he wants to do with it, once he's got it - it's actually boring!  It's eye opening to see how we still can have strong feelings about these values even though they are not at all how we now want to live.

 He says that ‘Life is a hobby' - you try something out for a while, and then drop it and try something else - and because of the cradle to grave social welfare system in Northern Europe, you are always looked after, whatever happens. So life is not real - it's a hobby.

My reflections on all this

It occurs to me that Andrew is leading us through some kind of evolutionary post post modern deconstruction of the self, in order to free us up from outmoded cultural structures to be able to chose our own values.

 As a former Buddhist and fan of the Buddha's scientific method of investigation, I fantasize that this might be an approach the Buddha would take if he were here in 2008 and applying his famously rigorous deconstructionary analysis of the self sense! Of course there was no knowledge available of the evolutionary view or of collective self structures in the Buddha's day, 2500 years ago.

It strikes me that what we are doing is looking at the value spheres of the collectively formed self sense from an overarching evolutionary perspective that sees us in a continual process of development. But what is remarkable, to me at least, is that we are not just getting a cognitive understanding; we are focusing very personally on the emotionally felt values we each hold, and bringing them into expression, but it is being done from a very impersonal viewpoint. So we are not getting fascinated with the personal dimension or with anyone's personal story, or psychology; these are not individual issues, they are collectively formed layers of our identity.

The point of the exercise is to enable us to be fully available for a higher purpose, to be able to create our own self structures and to free to evolve.

          The sense of liberation that each of us feel from seeing firsthand the evolution of the self structure, is very palpable.

Of course, now the challenge is to change because I've had enough experience to know that the idea that ‘seeing is freeing' is usually not true per se. We need to apply conscious intention to actually make it so