Jung’s “Self” is only a symbol. What we call the “Real Self” is that Self that is not a symbol, but is Real, not imaginary, not a symbolic form, but that which cannot be expressed in language—it’s indescribable. At some point in our meditation, that understanding is going to open up as a yearning and as a readiness to receive…
Excerpt:
So, let me explain a little bit about how meditation works, what it is, from the perspective of Sat Yoga. We use an approach that is very similar to that of Sri Ramana Maharshi, who taught what he called atma vichara, which is often translated as “Self-inquiry” or “Self-investigation”, “Self-discovery”—and we have fleshed it out a bit and explained it more in the terms that the Western ego-mind and structure can digest, perhaps, and make use of, with more clarity than the more simple and direct explanation that Ramana was able to give to people of India, or people who were already on the path of nonduality, or the path of realization of the consciousness that transcends the ego.
So, to explain meditation we have to understand that in our childhoods we were taught, through the acquisition of language, to represent ourselves and to create an internal self-representation made up of words, based on the I-thought, the “I am”. But “I am … this or that”—the one that carries a certain name, a certain body type, a certain body style, attitude. And so, the basic representation of the self, encrusted itself gradually with more and more self-images, and self-concepts, and we learned to live in the plane of representation, and we lost touch with the Real, with the Self we were originally before birth, or before the acquisition of language. And we gradually hypnotized ourselves, through the continual flow of internal mental chatter that would support the internal representation of the self, and the self’s attitude toward the representations of others, because this internal representation of the self also contained, and contains, the representations of those who taught you who you are supposed to be, and what they desired from you, and demanded from you, and what they considered you to be, and the worth they considered you to have, to them, etc., etc. Freud called those the “superego figures”.
So, the self-representation (or ego) is an internal representation that has become extremely complex over time, because there have been a number of variations of self-image that we would create one for the mother, one for the father, one for the siblings, one for the people in the playground, and one for the teacher—etc. etc.—and so we would have a number of different ego fragments. I’ll use Jung’s terminology—he said that the outer layer of the ego—he called the “persona” or indeed there are several different ones, so “personae” in the plural. And this was the part of the self-representation that we would use to have interactions with others, to lubricate social situations, to accommodate, to act friendly even when we didn’t feel friendly—basically to put on a false front and to navigate our way through difficult situations, and we would gradually get a very, let’s say, nuanced set of personae—one for when we were at work, and one for when we were playing football, and one for being on a date, and one for doing whatever other kinds we’re doing, one for family reunions, etc. etc.—and they were all fake of course. And we learned that in certain situations we had to act tough, in other situations we had to act sweet, etc. etc. And so, we got a repertoire of masks.
And the problem is that, in some cases, the mask got glued onto the face. And then once we couldn’t take it off we assumed, “Well, that’s who I am.” Didn’t they make a movie of that? Wasn’t it a Jim Carrey movie, I think? The Mask? I didn’t see it, but somebody showed me clips, it was too horrible to show here, I think, but the idea is right.
So we have this problem of some of us being stuck in a persona that we can’t take off and don’t even know that it’s a persona anymore, and in other cases we just, we know it’s a persona but we feel like we can’t afford to reveal anything deeper than that. We don’t want to be invaded, we don’t want to be known, we don’t want to be too vulnerable. And partly the reason for that is, that in general we learn to use language as weapons. Words were for accusing somebody else of doing something bad, or to demand something from them.
So, because words were weapons, and people hurt people very badly with words, it was a good idea to have a thick skin, and a very thick persona that couldn’t be penetrated by somebody else’s attacking language. And so, the outer edges, just like the crust or the bark of a tree, is a defensive layer. And that’s, unfortunately, ended up being robotically used without great reflection, and habitually people tend to remain in a kind of defensive stance with the ego, and often will create social situations in which that’s justified…
