You are God
But don't put that on your Social Media
I received a marketing email the other day that began with “You are You. You are special. Unique. Important. You need to get out there in a big way. We are social media experts. Let us help you stand out and build your personal brand!”
I deleted it. But first, I had a good laugh. Not only was the irony of building a personal brand for a member of the clergy hysterical (read televangelist here), but it was a perfect example of the materialist distortion of the concept of “self” in the modern world.
Our culture is “self”-obsessed: social media is overflowing with representations of “self;” our psychology is all about our “self;” and even our politics put the “self” front and center. It’s me, me, me. Look at me! We trip over our “i”phones and “i”dentities. These days, the individual self has become sacrosanct: the Selfie is the modern “i”con.
Not only is the emphasis on self-promotion rampant in our material culture, it’s everywhere in modern spirituality, too. (Yeah, OK, I’m going to call out Spiritual Materialism. Be forewarned). Much of modern spirituality is “self-obsessed.” It’s about “my” practice, “my” feelings, “my” enlightenment. Spiritual “teachers” trademark their products in the spiritual celebrity marketplace, and practitioners try to outdo one another for how “spiritual” they are (complete with social media posts of them in their yoga poses to prove it). Worse, we have watered spirituality down into “self-care” therapy to make ourselves feel good or bypass the hard stuff. We are on a constant spiritual “self” improvement kick to strengthen our spiritual egos, and it’s the exact opposite of what “self,” self-realization and self-knowledge really mean on a spiritual path. (OK, I’m done ranting).
In all traditions, what our culture calls the “self” is considered the greatest obstacle to spirituality: our egoic selves - the ones we have to promote, improve, and protect - prevent us from experiencing the Divine, but our true selves are the gateway to it. That’s why one of the highest goals of spiritual inquiry is self-knowledge. It’s the first of the Big Three Questions that all faith and wisdom traditions ask: Who Am I?
That’s why one of the highest goals of spiritual inquiry is self-knowledge. It’s the first of the Big Three Questions that all faith and wisdom traditions ask: Who Am I?
There’s a wonderful Hasidic story that illustrates this. A young man travels a long distance to visit a famous village Rebbe (spiritual teacher), who asks him, “Why have you come here?”
"To find God," says the eager young man.
"Then you come for nothing,” the Rebbe scoffs. “You're wasting your time."
Confused, the young man asks, "But why?"
"Because God is everywhere," the Rebbe waves his arms dismissively.
"Then, tell me, Master,” pleads the young man. “Why should I have come?"
"To find yourself."
This is not an egoic or self-absorbed “self-knowing.” It’s not about creating your personal brand. It is knowing your true, innate nature, your “being-ness.”
Every tradition, including the Greek philosophers (check out JW Bertolotti’s Substack, Perennial Meditations), calls us to examine ourselves, to look inward, to take off our social masks, stop pretending, unveil ourselves, and discover who we truly are. On any spiritual path, especially a radical one, we must spend the time to know ourselves, not our social media image.
On a deeper spiritual level, the one to which all the mystics allude, true self-knowledge is also a form of self-transcendence. We go from “self” to “selfless,” or false self to True Self. To know our true, real selves is to know ourselves as indivisible from the Divine. As the great 13th Century Buddhist poet Dogen wrote:
To study the Way is to study the Self To Study the Self is to forget the Self To forget the Self is to be enlightened by all things To be enlightened by all things is to remove the barrier between self and other.
The truth is that most of us have no idea what our self actually is. Anthony De Mello, an Indian Jesuit priest and psychotherapist, wrote about the importance of self-knowledge in his book, Awareness: Conversations with the Masters: “The great masters tell us that the most important question in the world is: ‘Who am I?’ Or rather: ‘What is ‘I’?’ What is this thing I call ‘I’? What is this thing I call self? You mean you understood everything else in the world and you didn’t understand this?”
Many of us define our “self” as our external personality: “I am funny, warm, intense.” Some of us define our “self” by our thoughts, as in the famous saying by the philosopher, Descartes: “I think, therefore I am.” Others define the “self” as the body, the organs, bones, muscles, workings, and appearance of the physical form. Others yet define the self by the emotions: I am sad, or I am happy. We define our “self” as all of this, as well as our stories and social identities. Yet, all these things are impermanent: they come and go, and thus, while they are part of our experience of being human, they cannot be our “self.”
So, when we question what our “self” is, we come up against the realization that we don’t know. In our minds, we create a single narrative, the story of “I” in which we are the main character moving unchangingly through our life experiences. If we inquire, we might find that in fact, there is no “I” that is a single main character, let alone one that doesn’t change. After all, are you really the same “I” now that you were when you were six? Or even yesterday?
Neuroscience has also shown that the self is not consistent and not fixed in a specific part of the brain but is a process of consciousness itself. As Psychologist Carl Rogers explains: “A person is a fluid process, not a fixed and static entity: a flowing river of change, not a block of solid material: a continually changing constellation of potentialities, not a fixed quantity of traits.”
The truth is that we are not a consistent, unchanging “I” or self, and our obsession with our “self” is a fiction. There is no such thing, and holding on to our egoic sense of self is the problem, not the solution. Trappist Monk, Thomas Merton, once said: "This is the greatest stumbling block in our spiritual discipline, which, in actuality, consists not in getting rid of the self but in realizing the fact that there is no such existence from the first."
“A person is a fluid process, not a fixed and static entity: a flowing river of change, not a block of solid material: a continually changing constellation of potentialities, not a fixed quantity of traits.”
For some, that knowledge can be unsettling. If “I” am not “me,” then who or what am I? That, my friends, is the question! Christian, Muslim, and Jewish theology tells us our real “self” is our soul, the eternal part of us that is directly connected to the Divine. Hindus call it Atman, the personal soul that is no different from Brahman, the eternal. Buddhists call it Buddha-nature or Buddha Mind and claim that it is empty of form. Daoists refer to Ziran, our “Such-ness”, or Pu, the Uncarved Block, our simple, unconditioned being that is directly connected to the Dao as our innate nature. Indigenous traditions speak of spirit, and everything has one.
In other words, all the wisdom traditions tell us is that there is something besides or beyond our emotions, stories, and thoughts that is our “True Self,” inseparable from the Divine, the All That Is, God, Dao, or Mind.
This, of course, is the deeper spiritual purpose of self-knowledge and self-inquiry in which, through capital “S” Self-realization, we discover that the True Self is a manifestation of the Divine, or, as all the mystics will tell us, one and the same. You are God. (Don’t put that on your Facebook profile, though. People might misinterpret it).
This, of course, is the deeper spiritual purpose of self-knowledge and self-inquiry in which, through capital “S” Self-realization, we discover that the self is a manifestation of the Divine, or, as all the mystics will tell us, one and the same.
As we begin to get glimpses of our true selves on a spiritual level, we discover that the True Self and our popular understanding of “self” are polar opposites. The True Self has nothing to boast about, nothing to prove, and nothing to defend: That’s the ego. That’s the version of “self” the social media marketers want to sell you.
But when we let go of needing to stand out on Instagram or promote our ego-selves, we see that our True Self is much bigger than our Facebook profile. It’s connected to everyone and everything else: we are all One Self. That’s the ultimate brand.
No marketing team needed.
When you see all beings in the Self And the Self in all beings You fear no one. – Isha Upanishad 6
If only people take the time and have the courage to do what you wrote about so beautifully
This is a great article! Thank you, Lauryn! ❤️