2 selves

Two Selves
By M. Catherine Thomas
We come to earth with one self and then create another on top of it, a more artificial one. So, we live with two selves that are essentially in conflict with each other. And thus, as we mature, even though “the child is father to the man,”1 we lose something which we will retrieve only later in higher stages of spiritual development.
Wordsworth describes the loss:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy
But He
Beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy; . . . .
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.2
In his book, The Snow Leopard3, Peter Matthiessen describes his son, still in the midst of heaven:
In his first summers, forsaking all his toys, my son would stand rapt for near an hour in his sandbox in the orchard, as doves and redwings came and went on the warm wind, the leaves dancing, the clouds flying, birdsong and sweet smell of privet and rose. The child was not observing; he was at rest in the very center of the universe, a part of things, unaware of endings and beginnings, still in unison with the primordial nature of creation, letting all light and phenomena pour through. Ecstasy is identity with all existence.
But the child, painter of cosmic-colored art, becomes a man whose work no longer has that aura:
Compare the wild, free paintings of the child with the stiff, pinched “pictures” these become as the painter notices the painting and tries to portray “reality” as others see it; self-conscious now, he steps out of his own painting and, finding himself apart from things, notices the silence all around and becomes alarmed by the vast significations of Creation. The armor of the “I” begins to form, the construction and desperate assertion of separate identity, the loneliness.
Ecstasy, this author says, describes the experience of “identity with all existence” but, as time goes on, the armor of the “I,” that second self, forms with its self-doubt, its separateness and loneliness.
I watched this second self begin to stir in a little boy, olive skin, black curly hair, round eyes, perhaps three, living on the island of Tenerife. He had come up to the front of the room with his teacher and some other children to perform a song. He didn’t know the words, but as the piano music started, he began to respond to the music, his hips marking the rhythm, unselfconscious, totally unaware of himself; his only experience was the music. But he was a thing of such charming beauty that we couldn’t keep our eyes off of him – the utterly engaging sight of pure experience happening before us. But soon he became aware that he was being watched. A new awareness began to interfere. His finger went to his mouth as his eyes dropped and the rhythm of shifting hips slowed and mostly stopped. He had lost awareness of pure experience and had become self-conscious; the second self had awakened.
On another occasion, several people were presented with awards for having offered unusual service, either in a moment of selflessness or for service rendered through an extended time. The spiritually experienced among them quietly acknowledged the award, deflecting the credit onto others. The less spiritually experienced visibly processed the tug of war with a new self-consciousness which had not been with them when they had performed the service, compelled as they had been by the task at the time.
In the less spiritually experienced, the first self may experience a pure motive and act before the second self has time to notice. But soon the second self is reviewing the experience to see what sort of credit he might take, or failing that, what sort of shame he might have to feel. Spiritual inexperience allows the second self to take over, always creating disquiet in the soul, even when successful in getting approval. This second self inhabits a noisy cell and is caught up in incessant self-evaluation which causes him to experience nearly constant degrees of pain --which he has not yet recognized as pain.
To live in a “selfless” way may mean to seek to live on unmixed impulses out of an unveiled soul, responding to his inner Truth. This purer self escapes incessant self-evaluation and any motive that provokes it, seeing such an impulse as a contaminant of his inner experience. Of course the wraith of the second self may keep trying for what it can get; but the first self, having caught on to it, seeks to preserve its awareness only of the “music” and those subtle, spiritual energies by which he feels continually nourished.
The second self must form, of course, because the first self needs that greater sophistication, but we must, at the same time, allow the child to father the man.
1 William Wordsworth, “The Rainbow.”
2 Wordsworth, Ode: Intimations of Immortality, V:67-672, 78-79.
3 The Snow Leopard, Peter Matthiessen, New York: Penguin Books, 2008, 39