In Buddhism, permanence—as a general phenomenon—is at least problematic, at most heretical. It would be a strain to commit christianity to the same zealously held impermanence. But evidence suggests that "thinking things are permanent" might be more a feature of western culture than it is a biblical teaching. This is the question to which I hope to hazard an answer: in light of scripture and tradition, just how permanent must a christian profess his “self” to be?
The content of Under the Influence might show my hand before I even begin. Let’s look at some of that content, as preface.
As far back as the post “I think, therefore I am who I am not” it’s been no secret: I have beef with Descartes. The famous caricature of his words goes: “I think, therefore I am." Since then I’ve been railing against thought as the foundation of being. A buddhist, quite properly, might ask Descartes, in return, “Now I’m not thinking. Therefore what?” The Implication: beyond pure perception, the forms we associate with it and the theories we build with them are optional.
The Post “Removing the Self from knowing", asked “When the self stands between the beholder and the beheld, can we know anything?” The suggestion, in the end, was that a self, at most, allows us to examine things—but examination falls short of “knowing” because a dualism endures, still between the beholder and the beheld.
So in short: We don’t need to think in order to be, and we don’t need a separate self consciousness in order to know. In fact: thinking, and self-consciousness, actually impede being and knowing.
“Removing the Self from Knowing” also spoke of the 3 “selves” a Catholic can speak of having. The desert fathers said the eight evil thoughts culminated in a prideful false self, called “the ego” from the days of Freud onwards. St. Paul spoke of a “true self” which was hidden with Christ in God, to be revealed after the end-times. The Christian east spoke of “Divinization” as a process by which, through deep humility, a person actually becomes God.
“Selves” seem a bit tricky. They’re certainly not universally bad. To hear Christians talk about them, though, it’s evident that we talk about selves the way we talk about Church: it’s easiest to point out the problems, the false self. Benedict’s “ladder of humility” would say awareness of our faults indicates spiritual growth, and anyone who’s not treating Godliness like a credential would agree. We make great effort to “be our better selves” when life gets rough, but honest self-appraisal bars us from claiming we’ve ever fully and permanently mastered that task. And then there are times when we forget about selves altogether because we’re so in the moment. These foreshadow a conclusion: If being doesn’t require thinking, if knowing requires self-diminishment, then separate self-consciousness isn’t a requirement of personhood.
The post “On Suspension: Holding Non-Duality Together” spoke about the three effects that “being crucified with Christ” has on a person. It dissolves opposites, it calls cosmologies into question and it relativizes personal identity. Further back, we talked about the “Dark Night of the Self” coming soon after Suspension, officially rendering self and desire the same as any other attachment of which we can easily let go.
A theology professor of mine, answering the question “Does God suffer” had to answer in the negative. Godliness is a nature, a type of being that the Father and the Son shared. He concluded “natures don’t suffer, people do.” So the person of Christ suffered, but he had that in common neither with the person of God, nor with the Nature they shared. In a similar move, I’d like to suggest that “Selves don’t progress spiritually, people do.” In the spiritual journey, “selves” are optional, and shedding self is a pivotal part of full, humanized personhood.
The post "On Suspension: Holding Non-Duality Together" talked about selves being relativized as the people who have them move closer and closer to union. It spoke of Suspension as the dressing room in which one takes off the old self, and puts on the new one. Selves may do a limited amount of good work. Perhaps we could properly speak of them as magnifying glasses that make conflicts in desire and attachment apparent. But tool and task are not synonymous, here. Both the healthiest ego, and the truest of selves, confine a person to dualism. The distance between observer and observed always wiggles its way between God and his faithful.
On the other hand: peace, when all desires are united and at rest, is only found when selves are discarded. I don’t know if either God or his people have “selves," in the immediacy of being who they are. I’d stake my next meager paycheck on the claim that people, when they’ve given up separate self-consciousness, no longer need selves in the least. God’s name, “I AM,” rather than being an indication of divine “selfhood," may merely have been a divine spilling of the beans: God may have been saying that, when we see our original face, we will both recognize Christ, and face God’s absence. After all, what devotee can see a God who looks on the world from his own eyes? And yet, if our whole bodies are full of light, that must mean something, and something significant indeed.
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