Undoing the Self

I think for the most part, developmental theories have it all wrong. Most believe that the tasks of growing, developing and maturing are learning what it is that we can accomplish and do with our lives. And while to an extent that is true, we make a critical error in assuming that is who we really are. As infants we make this discovery that we can grab and manipulate the things of our world. So as we grow we layer on that basic belief that the more we can do and control the more a unique individual we become. This, the theorists claim, goes on throughout our stages of establishment and generativity to a point when we can no longer sustain that level of output identified with our self concept. Thus in later years we are told we enter a period of decline and begin preparing to die! Erikson even says that we either get that as a level of acceptance or we fall into despair.

But what if our task as mature adults is not simplification and decline but one of recognition of the essence of who we really are? The complexity of the veil, the disguise we have concocted and used as the projected (false) self through all of those years, begins to unravel and be exposed for what it really is. Wisdom begins to recognize all of the actions and accomplishments as delusions and begins to detach from them in an effort to rediscover the true self that is already, and has always been, there. Simultaneously we begin to uncover the in-dwelling god that as well has been there all this time, from whom we have succeeded in distancing ourselves through all or our doing.

However, because we have such an investment in the idol we have constructed out of our accomplishments, this transition often does not happen without some significant disruption of the self, or more accurately, of the ego. Thus many only come to this realization after a near death experience, after a debilitating injury, after the body begins to fail. In the sadness that may fall into despairing over the lost trappings of our youth, we turn inward to contemplate (some for the first time) who we really are if we are not our doing-ness and our accomplishments. The great sages have been preaching this message for eons – that we are not what we do but how we are that matters. (part II to follow)