The "Real" Self

Self is the sense we all have of being separate and unique among all other human beings, and is what causes us to see all of the rest of the universe as background.

You are you and I am me, and we experience everything around us as simply the backdrop that helps us stand out. 

One of the really interesting things about the self is that we experience it as real; but, where is it? There is nothing solid to point to or hold on to, and yet we have as much certainty about its existence as we do about anything material in this world.

To add to the confusion, there is a tradition in Eastern philosophy that talks about the self as an illusion; a point of view that says that the self does not exist and that it is useless to spend any time attending to it.

However, in the West, we pay lots of attention to the self, talking in terms of self-esteem, self-worth, self-image, self-love, healing the self, the higher self, and finally, personal growth, which implies the forward movement of the self.

One of the more caring things we can say when parting is, “take care of yourself.”

The self exists. It is not just a concept or an idea; it is an actual structure. Only it is a mental rather than a physical structure. But we sense it to be substantial in the same way that we think of anything physical as substantial. 

What makes perceiving this non-material self the same as any physical structure is that the self has all of physical evolution behind it. All physical developments are the platform of mental evolution.

The self followed billions of years of the universe generating matter and then coalescing matter into form, and all of the time it took the earth to become capable of sustaining life. 

The human brain took many millions of years after that to become what resides in our head today and gives us our ability to experience separateness and existence.

(Nothing else has our ability to see our separateness from everything else, which is the requirement for perceiving existence.) 

After evolution generated the material world, which culminated in the development of the human brain, a second creation occurred to generate the new mental world.

With the development of this world of abstract thought and imagination, a fundamental shift occurred in the relative importance of the physical and mental realms in determining what was “real.”

While the physical manifestations of consciousness remained intact as a base, the mental expressions of consciousness began to dominate awareness.

An easy way to see this, for example, is in the fact that the brain and central nervous system have evolved to react in just the same ways to threats that are imagined as to real physical danger. We are capable of being traumatized from fear and worry without actually having to have an experience to set off.

The mental world trumps the physical world in terms of our perception of what is real. And, in evolutionary terms, that is entirely appropriate.

Remember, the end point of evolution is our ability to be aware. In order to be aware and to be able to trust what we are aware of as real, we have to have the same sense of “substance” about our awareness as we do everything material that came before it.

And we do.