Separateness: the fundamentals of self-deception
This is a post I'm writing in support of the new sticky posts which I've added on the home page of my updated personal website. In particular it's additional and supportive of the post titled 'The lies you keep on telling yourself' which is of course referring to the Ego. Please keep in mind that I'm not being judgmental, nor am I pointing any fingers, because I'm doing the same as you and telling similar lies. But what I want to do here is dig deeper into what I feel is the fundamental issue affecting Mankind and that is this false belief in separateness between self and environment and also self and other. This is a kind of bridging post between the sticky posts and the other posts on my blog.
So who are you?
If I were to ask you who you are you would most probably give me an answer which centres around three of the five dimensions of life. If we were interacting in person, or via a social media platform which allows for profile photos you would not need to tell me much about your physical appearance because it would be obvious. But you would give me an answer across just three of the many planes of consciousness, relating to your social role, your personality, your life experience and perhaps your worldview and attitude to life.
In other words you will be describing yourself as a social, psychological, physical entity or being. Everything you tell me about yourself will be primarily focussed around your Ego or Ego structure. This is essentially your concept of 'self' and who you believe yourself to be whenever you use the words 'I', 'me' or 'myself' in a sentence. You would describe yourself in this way out of habit, because by and large this is the most relevant information the vast majority of people you deal with in society expect to hear from you. You will have documents, passport, driving licence, identity cards, etc which will back up this information.
If we were to get into a somewhat longer conversation you would probably tell me of your experiences of life and the things you've done, the social relationships you're in or have been in, family, spouse, friends, people you know, etc which back up the information you give to me (and give out to others) based on just these three physical dimensions of life.
It's only at this stage whether I would be able to work out whether or not you have a developed meta-physic or a more existential dimension to your life and we are able to get into the deeper, more meta-physical or existential aspects of our existence. It does happen. I'm not the only mystic connected to Qultura. Nor are my levels of conscious awareness or mystical insight that profoundly deep. In fact there are people who are more meta-physical and existential in their being even if they're not consciously aware of the fact. But my point here is that most people are not and they are unaware of the deception they are participating in both in terms of themselves and other people.
You see you can only be as consciously aware of your environment and others as you re able to put into words and express some way in language. You cannot be any more consciously aware than this. The lies you're telling are not done with any premeditation or a conscious attempt to deceive. You express yourself in terms of relative truth based on all the social and mental conditioning you've gone through in life. In other words you were taught to lie by other people and it was made clear that this was what was expected of you. To modify an old Timothy Leary quote you cannot use butterfly language if you are a caterpillar. Just to be clear on that point.
To make it even clearer let's shift the emphasis in our relationship between writer and reader.
How I perceive you
Having walked a shamanistic path through life my mystical tradition is a fusion between the eastern cosmology of Buddhism and samara and more Western occultist thinking rooted in the Kabbalah. My perception of you is weighted in favour of meta-physical dimensions, so I see you as an individual who is going through the same processes as me more or less but in different incarnations. I'm just seeing you primarily in this incarnation, but I'm conscious of the fact that some of your factors, karma and issues in life might arise from how you lived in previous incarnations.
If I were a psychologist (which I'm not) my focus would be perhaps on childhood to try and figure out how your Ego structures developed but as a mystic I'm well aware that the Ego is not created from a blank slate. This is because life is a whole series of paradoxes. The Ego is never ever written on a blank slate. There are no standards going through my mind as to determine how appropriate your behaviour is to or labels to define you by. I'm merely looking at an incarnation of a human being which manifest out of an egg and grew into a child and then into an adult relative to an environment. This is part of a process of unfolding the same way as life unfolds, and I understand that you evolve as things in your environment change.
I find it difficult to separate the individual from the environment because I'm aware that who you are is always relative to the other people who are in your life or who have passed through your life and influenced you. There's the obvious influences we all know about, such as your parents, your grandparents, your brothers and sisters, but there's less obvious, nuanced influences coming from friends, the people you work for and with, and your children (if you have them). Who you are is always relative to the relationships you've had with other people. Furthermore the labels you carry around with you and believe define you often don't define you at all. It's something else. Something much deeper.
But the labels all come out of separateness so I feel we need to dig down deeper to actually understand what separateness is.
The concept of original sin
Let's look at the meaning of the word 'sin'. Sin basically means 'insufficient'. Sin has got nothing whatsoever to do with morality or moral reasoning, and it's got nothing whatsoever to do with being good or being bad. Back in the Garden of Eden in the Book of Genesis Eve took of the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, and through disobeying the law that God laid down - do not touch the Tree of Knowledge - Eve separated herself from the whole, and in taking fruit from Eve and following her insight rather than God's insight, Adam also chose separateness and for this they were tossed out of the Garden of Eden.
This of course is a story or parable to introduce followers of Christianity to the concept of original sin, and original sin means more than anything insufficiency. This is what sin really means. It means being separate from the totality of existence.
It's the act of separation. The taking of the fruit by Eve was a metaphor for becoming separate from God, separate from the Dao, separate from the universe, separate from the world. Separate from the flow of life. Whatever you want to call it. You see the issue here is that you're identifying with the part, or the individual, and not the totality. There's a kind of false equivalence in all this in that you still think that you're connected to all that which sustains you, supports you and gives you life, but you are not and this is where we start to get into the deception which is inherent to the separateness.
The predicament you're caught up in
You see you develop a whole persona or character and psychological model to protect yourself from 'other' and reinforce your separateness, most often through justification.
So the first thing which lies at the core or root of this false illusion of separateness is a sense of separateness from the whole. This is what original sin refers to, which is the conscious choice and act to go against the totality and the whole, or the flow of life.
You see this is something you're born into and something you've descended from. You're a descendant not only of your mother and father in this life. You're also the descendant of yourself through numerous previous incarnations and life cycles. You are the descendant of those who committed the original sin. This is how you came to be. If you didn't have this separateness, you wouldn't have manifest as a separate entity from the totality. Your birth into a physical form is just the outcome of all that. You're just seeing and experiencing the symptoms of this now.
This is what you're dealing with here.
The process of liberation from separateness
This sense of separateness is what drives this sense of isolation and alienation from your environment and others. In some ways it is just like telling a lie, and having that lie believed. Can you remember telling someone a lie? Can you also recall the sense of unease or fear of being found out. Well this is what separateness gives you but on a completely different dimension. The Ego, in fact your whole Ego structure, architecture and identity has been developed by you, from childhood, as a way to mitigate or deal with this false sense of separateness that you, me, and everyone else is caught up in. The Ego is the persona you've developed, over the years, to reinforce your separateness and deal with the fears, the anxieties, the insecurities, the loneliness, the isolation and alienation that separateness causes.
So how do you overcome this?
There are many different ways of going about this. Similar to the travel industry there's an entire industry devoted to the whole spiritual journey and mindfulness need in human beings on this planet, hundreds of different religions and philosophies to choose from and various techniques and methods you can follow. Some are good, some are swirly and freaky, some are outdated and not suited to living in modern society, and some fail at the first hurdle by reinforcing the separateness.
The bottom line goes something like this.. What do you do to undo a lie or a deception? What do you do if you feel that you are living a lie? Well surely you make an admission to yourself and accept the deception and the lie. Then you either make a confession, admit the truth, or come out as your real self (anyone LGBT or queer will know what I'm writing about here).
The process of liberation from Ego and separateness involves both development of conscious awareness and a spiritual journey - to offset the emphasis on the physical and psychological. What you need to do is strip away all that has built up from the social and mental conditioning which has reinforced separateness and built up your Ego throughout the years. The process of becoming free and liberated, enlightened, whatever you want to call it means becoming from from all structures, models, stereotypes, ideologies and belief systems, role attachments, and so on.
In order to do this you need to get into the practice of creating individual truth and being subversive whenever and wherever possible. But to understand subversion we need to get into relative truth. So I've decided to conclude this post with this point and pick up again from 'Relative truth'.