How do you know if you don’t have a Self? And if you don’t… what is missing?
As with everything in life, things are never completely this way or that way. All physical laws are only 100% true in your imagination: in reality there are too many factors to consider.
It is a matter of spiritual and emotional maturity whether a person can be with controversy and ambivalence… or in this case degrees of anything.
What I am trying to say: there is no one who has no Self at all, and there is no one who is 100% in possession of their Self.
There is a huge variety, and a huge variety of ways one isn’t willing to have a Self.
Why do I say “willing”? Isn’t it the goal to have a Self?
It is and it isn’t. We all have a personality of some sort… and most of us are satisfied with that.
Personality or identity is a Tree of Knowledge phenomenon.
We create our personality in response to threats or perceived threats to our survival. Your personality and your Self has maximum 20% in common… your personality are the masks you wear.
When you have a Self, the Self takes on being responsible for its actions. Responsibility is not all good news. Even though responsibility is your access to your personal power, it does start with bad news.
When you are a Self, you need to do the work of seeing what is missing, what you did, what was your attitude, or you can’t be responsible.
When you are a Self, you need all the tools that make it possible to BE a Self… knowledge, information, and structured thinking.
When you are a Self, you need to consider other people, their welfare, their opinions, their needs.
You can see, that with all those pre-conditions to be a Self, mighty few people are even willing to consider it.
Even to consider…
What way people are going to slink out of having to be responsible is quite predictable from their soul correction.
Why? I don’t know. But it is.
Soul correction could be called your archetype of struggle between your bad ego and your good ego. Between your higher self and your lower self.
Here is a list of some of the lower self/bad ego attitudes I encounter with some regularity in my work:
Drama Queen
It’s all about me
I can’t
I don’t know how
You’ll do it for me
I am too busy
You are wrong
I am worthless
I am so creative
Don’t tell me what to do
I don’t want to change
I know better
I want what I want when I want it
I want to do as little as I can
I am afraid
You are supposed to be nice to me
Here is some money, now let me get away with murder
Here is some money, now do my work for me
Give me all you got for my 10 bucks…
You don’t matter
what do I care?
etc.
You see that what is a lower self/bad ego attitude will also block a lot of actions that would make one able to be responsible.
The more insistent a person is on who they are, the stronger the soul correction is dominating them.
These are not character traits, the attitudes sit under of character traits.
The character train (Tree of Knowledge) is a judgment, or an assessment
The attitude is Tree of Life… can be, often, translated to an inner speaking.
Having character traits gives people an good excuse to think that they cannot control themselves… i.e. they cannot be responsible.
But, of course, you can, you just won’t.
Yesterday I caught myself being testy: every email struck me as a disruption of what I wanted to do. So my responses were testy…
Once I caught myself, I put in correction. It wasn’t easy. I had physical justification: it was suddenly 81 degrees here, and I am weather sensitive… Yeah, but…
I am either a person causing myself or I am a person who is an effect.
Also, one of my clients was having one of her moods… it started on Friday, I think.
By the evening I was, at least in my responses, someone who was causing myself. I still have this inner tension. It is not even all mine… as an empath it is even harder for me to know what is mine and what is not.
This horrible resistance I have in my chest and arms is not mine. It belongs to someone else. It’s a client’s who is having a temper tantrum, most likely. This is their drama, and I need to separate myself from it.
But I got pulled into it. Burned and destroyed my favorite frying pan, and had the worst sleep in a year or so.
- How you behave when things don’t go well for you is where you see most of your attitudes.
- How you behave when things go really well for you is another extreme where you see many of your attitudes.
I am not an exception… I have a soul correction too.
Now, we could say that you won’t have a Self, most of the time, as long as your capacity to be responsible, i.e. ownership of your attitudes, of your actions, or the words that pop out of your mouth.
The work I attempt to do with my students is hard. Hard because the “opponent” the lower self, the bad ego don’t like it.
Can you innovate yourself out of these messes? Can you innovate yourself into a Self?
Yes. Innovation always comes from looking at things from an angle that is not usual for you.
If you are normally looking at things in a stingy way, you need to become willing to scratch it all and start over. Throw away what you have done… It is, for a stingy person, the hardest thing to do.
Whether it’s a project that you have invested a lot of emotions and a lot of time, or a pipe-dream, or a goal… or a relationship, or a belief…
Chucking it is the hardest thing for a stingy person. Throwing good money/time/effort after bad money/time/effort is what you normally do.
Innovating yourself out of that means: fully saying NO to it. Fully.
By the same token, no matter what is your main attitude to life, to yourself, or to others, in the work we do, we need to uproot it.
Mighty few people are willing to do that. No matter what they can’t have with the attitudes they have, human nature is to want to hang onto what you have, value it higher than what you could have.
What you could have is dignity, freedom, the freedom to be yourself, results, peace, love, happiness, fulfillment, and if you want, more money.
Animals, and I think, the Tree of Life isn’t, aren’t behaving the same way.
Living on the Tree of Life it’s easier to change, because you see further.
You are not limited by the words, the concepts, or by other people’s opinion.
When Bannister managed to ignore the truth of his time, that a human cannot run fast enough to break the 4-minute mile, he could run faster.
And once he could, many people who were stuck, could as well.
The Tree of Knowledge is limiting you, and keeping you hostage.
It’s time to break through…
Of course, if you are nowhere near running a mile in four minutes, you won’t break that tabu.
Of course, if you are nowhere near to taking charge, taking ownership of your Self… you won’t break this tabu.
Are you in the running?
I wonder what “that” is that is great news. Please elaborate. thank you
That is great news!
OK, I had the good idea to check myself for attachments… right after I published this article. Lo and behold, there was a nasty attachment (an energy “cord”) in my right ear…
I pulled it. I am feeling better, although I am still in high alert… which will subside in a few hours.
This is for those of you who have been worried about me.
It came from someone I connected to…not a client, not a student, a commenter.