From Self-Obsession to Self-Realization

In this episode I show how we can move from the Western cult of the self to Jesus’ teaching of Self-Realization.

Transcript

Westerners, and Americans in particular, are infatuated with the individual self. That might be true of many cultures to various degrees, I imagine. Especially with the influence of Western culture on other traditional cultures. But it is certainly true of my culture. The symbol of this obsession with the self is the selfie. I am amazed at how many selfies some people post on Facebook, for example. I guess you would expect this of adolescents and teens, but when people in their forties post a new selfie every other day, you know something is going on in our culture.  It is clear that for many people it is all about themselves. In other words we are infatuated with the self. It is self-absorption.

We live in a society that focuses on the individual self. The myth of the rugged individualist is central to American culture. Earlier in my life I read a lot of Louis L’Amour novels set during the early years of our country, colonial times and the Old West.  The protagonist is always a solitary man who braves the elements and makes his own way. Westerns on TV had the same image. I grew up watching the Lone Ranger. What a name! And Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone. In American capitalism we have the myth of the self-made man.

Social media encourages the cult of the self, producing psychological and social problems surrounding self-image, self-identity and self-esteem. Most psychological problems can be traced back to a maladjusted self. We feel the need to protect our image of ourselves emotionally and psychologically and physically. So we develop all sorts of social, physical and psychological mechanisms to protect ourselves. 

Self-centeredness, self-absorption, and plain old selfishness are all expressions of the self. Religion often advocates unselfishness as an antidote, but seldom does it directly address the fundamental problem of the self. It ends up being simply self-improvement or self-management, which is still all about self.  Unfortunately religion sometimes makes it worse rather than better with religious self-righteousness. The self itself is the problem. It is a distortion of Reality. 

True spiritual life is the realization that there is no self and the process of discovering and being who and what we really are. In this way we move from self-obsession to self-denial. Jesus said, “Anyone who would be my disciple must deny himself (deny his self), take up his cross and follow me.” The Way of Jesus is the way of self-denial. 

This has been badly misunderstood historically in Christianity. It developed into an anti-body, anti-flesh asceticism and sometimes even masochism and self-mutilation. All that does is fabricate a self-righteous religious self that opposes the natural tendencies of the body. This so-called solution is worse than the problem. Such a person is more deluded by the self than they were before.

True self-denial is not asceticism or masochism. It is healthy, joyful living. Jesus quickly got a reputation for not being an ascetic, unlike John the Baptist for example. Jesus was known for not fasting and for hanging out with winebibbers and people who did not follow the religious rules. Lots of his parables were about parties. His first miracle was turning water into wine at a wedding feast, because they had run out of wine. 

Self-denial is not an ascetic physical or psychological discipline. Self-denial is denying that there is a self. It is literally selflessness. Jesus said, “Whoever seeks to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life with save it.” The word translated life here in the gospel is psuche or psyche, which means psychological self. This is losing one’s self. It is as simple as that, and yet as difficult as that. Because this is not a doctrine to be believed but a truth to be realized. People did not understand what he was saying. 

After a couple of years of teaching Jesus realized that something more was necessary to get across his message. That is why he decided to die on the Cross. It was his teaching on self-sacrifice. The Cross is not a sacrifice for sin, the way it has been historically interpreted in Christianity. Jesus did not have a transactional understanding of the spiritual life. The Cross was a symbolic prophetic action meant to communicate the spiritual necessity to give up the self. Self-sacrifice. So far in this episode I have gone from self- obsession to self-denial to self-sacrifice.

The Cross of Jesus Christ was not an atonement for sin. It is not penal substitutionary atonement. It was not a way to way to propitiate a blood-thirsty angry God. It was not God’s way of punishing Jesus for our sins to satisfy a cosmic moral code. 

These ideas arose very early in Christianity. So early that you can find them in the writings of the New Testament. Some of the early Christians believed that stuff. Some didn’t. The ones that believed these things prevailed, and they censored all the books that didn’t agree with this proto-orthodox position. So now we have a New Testament that teaches a transactional understanding of the Cross that Jesus never taught. 

Jesus taught self-denial and self-sacrifice. One lets go of the self – offers it up as a sacrifice, so to speak. His death was meant as the supreme symbolic teaching of self-surrender. It was a prophetic action. Prophets were known to perform symbolic actions that communicated truth. Jesus performed the greatest prophetic action in history by dying on the Cross to communicate giving up the self: self-sacrifice. He was willingly giving his life as a demonstration how to be free from bondage to the illusion of the self. We are to die to self.

Jesus dying on the cross was Jesus saying that we are not the body or the psychological self that is a creation of the brain, which is simply part of the body. The apostle Paul talked of offering our bodies as a living sacrifice. The separate self is a creation of the mind, which is a function of the human brain, which is simply an organ of the human body. Jesus dying on the Cross was his way of showing that he did not identify with the body and mind. Jesus was saying that body and mind can die and we still will live.

That is the meaning of resurrection. That is why the Cross was not the end of Jesus’s teaching. The Cross is not the greatest of Jesus’ symbolic actions. The resurrection is the greatest. The Cross is only understood properly along with the empty tomb and the resurrection. The empty tomb teaches that the body is not what we really are. The resurrection teaches us that the psyche is not what we really are.

Read carefully the resurrection accounts and you see that the repeated theme is that his disciples did not recognize the risen Christ. They did not recognize him physically or psychologically. That is because the risen Christ was not the old physical Jesus or the psychological Jesus. The risen Christ was and is the cosmic Christ that transcends any separate individual identity. 

This is the teaching of Self-Realization. We realize what we really are. In this episode I have gone from self- obsession to self-denial to self-sacrifice to self-realization. In my vocabulary self-realization is the same as the realization of No-self. There is no individual self. The separate self is simply a temporary and temporal manifestation expression of the Divine connected with a body and mind. When the body and mind are no more, the self is no more. Yet what we really are – whether you call it Self with a capital S or whether you call it No-self – remains. 

This Eternal Spirit is all we ever are and ever have been. The spiritual life is waking up to this reality. Jesus taught this reality. When he realized that his words could not communicate this reality, he demonstrated it in the symbolic prophetic actions of his death and resurrection. We follow his way of the Cross by moving from obsession with the self to realizing the True Self, which is No-self. From self-obsession to Self-realization.