The Undiscovered Self

“If you look around, you can find a face of God in each thing, because He is not hidden in a church, in a mosque, Temple or a synagogue, but everywhere. As there is no one who lives after seeing him, there is also no one dying after seeing him. Who finds Him, stays forever with him.” …………..Shams Tabriz

In explaining the title of his book “The undiscovered Self”, Carl Jung states:

"Why has the ‘Self’ gone undiscovered?" I must tell you that my American publisher had the grace to invent this title. I would never have thought of it, as the Self is not really undiscovered, it is merely ignored or misunderstood. For about 1900 years we have been admonished & taught to project the Self into Christ, and in this very simple way it was removed from empirical man, much to the relief of the latter, since he was thus spared the experience of the Self, namely the “unio oppositorum”. He blissfully does not know the meaning of the term."

The above two references are from a Sufi mystic, whom Rumi considered as his teacher, and a great depth psychologist. These two contain a great truth which results from a question as to why the “Self has not been discovered.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein, the great rationalist philosopher, in articulating his take of how it is that we can think and speak at all writes in his book “Tractatus” by giving an expression, probably very close to high validity, to a conception of ourselves that was arguably already embedded in our intellectual culture. A conception of ourselves through a composite of our individual representation – mind, which can represent, in a purely subjective mode, the outside world to ourselves, through this mental disposition. we think and say things that are true or false. This mental existence is assumed to be infallible and is used as a tool for acquiring truths about the world – which we call science. This picture of the nature of mind, and hence of ourselves, continues to be the default conception in the cognitive sciences. Minds are representational engines. This reasoning from Wittgenstein could be used as the nature of the only artefact of the “Individual self”.

As Jung says, the higher Self, which is very much within oneself, was assigned to an external metaphysical objective concept such as Christ or any other Divine object of adulation and worship through which various religions taught us the path to realization of Divinity. This is a misleading path orchestrated for humans to have an innate satisfaction that the process to seek the “True Self” was this sole path.

When Shams Tabriz says “there is no one who lives after seeing him” he means one who is a purely materialistic existence because in this mode we assign an external attribute to the Self. This is is a futile exercise. As long as we have a rational mind rooted in this bodily manifestation, the subjective experiences which do not conform to apriori objective concepts are pushed back and invalidated. This is the evolutionary burden we carry. A consciousness which has increasingly become divorced from unitive perception, through nearly 40,000 years of increasing dominance of the rational mind. This is the main block in reaching back into the very depth of our inner self.

In this article I am limiting myself to the early Christian father’s understanding of “unio oppositorum”, an androgyny of opposites.

One of the emergent concepts in the writings of the Fathers of the early Greek church is that of theosis, or the deification of humankind. This idea—that humankind is to find communion with God through assimilation to him, that humankind is to be glorified and become divine itself—finds its locus classicus in Athanasius's statement that God became human so that we might become God. “For he [the Word of God… was made man,” Athanasius declares, “that we might be made God.” [1]

Gregory of Nyssa holds that the very purpose of the Incarnation, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus is to deify humankind and render it immortal through its union with and participation in the divine nature. “In the suffering of His human nature,” Gregory writes, “the Godhead fulfilled the dispensation for our benefit, that all the corruptible may put on incorruption, and all the mortal may put on immortality, our first-fruits having been transformed to the Divine nature by its union with God. [2]

We have lost track of this line of thinking through an extreme control agenda in all religious traditions and it is time with the emergence of integral consciousness in Homo Sapiens we transcend in the evolutionary ladder to Homo Deus seeking and finding the “undiscovered Self”. This is what Christ says in the Gospel of Thomas:

“Jesus said, "Those who seek should not stop seeking until they find. When they find, they will be disturbed. When they are disturbed, they will marvel, and will reign over all. [And after they have reigned they will rest.]" …………Saying 2

This is the unrelenting process of seeking the higher truth and in its discovery a radical disturbance or transformation and then Joy unbounded then a final culmination in Nirvana,

Love to you all

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[1] Athanasius, On the Incarnation, sec. 54, in Christology of the Later Fathers, ed. Edward R. Hardy (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1954), 107. Literally, Athanasius's statement reads, “He was humanized that we might be deified.”

[2] Gregory of Nyssa, Contra Eunomium, bk. 2, sec. 13, in A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2d ser., vol. 5, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1890–1900), 127; see also 101, 179.