Mystery XIV: Self-awareness, the Ego, & the Way Back

Don: In our discussion so far the message seems to be emerging that the way back to god through a true and faithful understanding of the god of our various religions may be a red herring; that the best way is in fact through a true and faithful understanding of our individual selves and of our need for god’s grace.

We discussed the story of the Samaritan woman whom Jesus met at a well and of whom he requested a drink of water. In those days, the cultural and religious divide between Jews and Samaritans was about what it is between today’s Israelis and Palestinians—pretty wide and contentious. There were also taboos about men interacting with women, as there still are in some religions today. One other unusual aspect of this story is that the woman was collecting water at about 2 pm—the hottest part of the day—which is not the norm even in today’s desert communities, which perform the laborious task of fetching water in the cool of the morning and/or of the evening. It suggests that the woman was not welcome at the well with her fellow villagers so had to use it when no-one else would be there—that she was some sort of outcast; perhaps because (as the story recounts) she was living with a man who was not her husband.

In short, Jesus was reaching across multiple barriers—racial, religious, gender, and moral—in talking to this woman. He did so in order to awaken her self-awareness, to give her a new spiritual understanding. In talking about thirst, they were talking about life and death in that place at that time. Today, we are so accustomed to water gushing out of nearby faucets on demand that we tend not to appreciate its critical vitality in the way that Jesus and his contemporaries, who had to dig deep wells just to find it, then haul it by hand up the well shaft and across the desert back to the village, would have appreciated it. In the story, therefore, it is important to recognize the great strength of the metaphor of water as a spiritual life-giving substance. Jesus was telling her (and through her, us) that he had something that was as essential for her spirit as water was essential for her body. And what he had was not just a bucket of spiritual water to bring temporary relief from drought and thirst, but rather a bottomless, inexhaustible well bringing permanent relief from spiritual drought and thirst.

But while we are aware of the state of our bodies, we often fail to be aware of the state of our souls. We know when we are thirsty for water, but we may not recognize when our spirit is dying for lack of its metaphorical counterpart.

David Foster Wallace, a writer, novelist, and philosopher who was not particularly religious, made an extraordinary and now quite famous commencement speech at Kenyon College in 2005.

The full speech is well worth reading, but the ending of his speech is especially relevant to our present discussion:

… in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness. [In other words: Self-awareness — DW]

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.

They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving…. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

I know that this stuff probably doesn’t sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don’t just dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.

It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

“This is water.”

“This is water.”

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.

I wish you way more than luck.

It has been suggested that confession of our sins is a key component of self-awareness.

Robin: There is a danger that self-awareness can degenerate into self-absorption, which brings no benefit to others.

Michael: Self-awareness is not taught in college. Where does it come from?

David: I don’t get Jesus’ contention that he delivers a bottomless well of spiritual water:

Everyone who drinks of this water [from the physical well] will thirst again; but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him shall never thirst; but the water that I will give him will become in him a well of water springing up to eternal life.”

It seems to me our spiritual thirst needs just as much overt quenching as our physical thirst. The well won’t do that for us on its own. We still have to drop the bucket in and haul it up, and even before that, we have to feel thirsty.

Robin: That’s why we need daily communion with Jesus, otherwise we might fail to notice our thirst.

Charles: As I understand it, Jesus went to Samaria, and probably to the well and to the woman in question, by choice. There was a more direct route that would have avoided the desert, but he chose not to take it. We can assume he did so to present us with the lessons we are now discussing, but there is another possible reason: God is thirsty. After the Fall and until the End of the Age there is a mutual need and desire to reconcile God and Man, to become One again. We humans sometimes forget it, but god never does, and seems to go out of his way to maintain a relationship with us. In the Catholic church, the act of confession and penance (significantly, its formal name is the Sacrament of Reconciliation) is our way to reciprocate, to seek spiritual reconciliation, to repair our broken souls, to assuage our guilt, to confess that we are not what we could be. Jesus instituted this sacrament. He passed on this power of reconciliation—this power to forgive sins—to his apostles, who passed it on to the church. But the sacrament—the act of confession—is all about the sinner, not about the priest. It is about self-awareness, a self-examination of conscience, a self-admission of guilt and contrition and a plea for forgiveness. This seems to me to be the only way to a quieting of the troubled soul, a healing of the broken person, a quenching of the thirst, a fulfilling of a need. The Catholic confession is just a mechanism—but it works. At some point in life, I believe we are all the Woman at the Well. We are broken, and reach out for god—but even as we do so, god is reaching out to us, as if in a mirror. And at the interface, where the fingers touch, there is pure truth. The woman confesses her sin, recognizes her brokenness, becomes self-aware.

This concept of self-awareness is mightily powerful.

Incidentally, the Catholic sacrament of reconciliation is only offered after baptism. It started only after Jesus had risen and passed on his spirit to the apostles. I don’t mean to say that this Catholic sacrament is the only way to reconcile with god. I am sure it could occur spiritually within the individual, without any religious intervention: The essential elements are self-awareness, confession, and a plea for grace.

Robin: We become thirsty when something gets out of balance. Jesus says we will never lack balance—will never need an IV—if we drink sufficiently. We have to drink constantly.

Jay: The ego is a stumbling block to self-awareness. Jesus is saying that our physical wellbeing is not the issue; it is our spiritual wellbeing is the issue. Therefore our self-awareness has to focus on spiritual, not material, things. Confession and reconciliation allude to immaterial—they allude to lack of integrity, and so on.

Ben: I feel that I was more self-aware as a child than I am as an adult. Do we regress with age, but then start to recover it as we approach death?

Michael: Our default state is fear, which creates a need for worldly things such as money, power, and so on. Our default state is thus to be NOT self-aware. Jesus wants to get us out of our default state, and that is not easy.

Ben: That makes sense. A state of being not self-aware has no subject and therefore no object—no “other” to love. It takes a conscious act to leap from the non-self-aware state to the self-aware state.

Robin: Yes, the question is how to make our self-awareness generous and relate to others rather than purely self-centered.

Ben: Lying back and gazing at the night sky can bring an awareness of being a part of—one with—the universe. At those moments, there is no “other” because all are One. This Oneness—god, if you like—is not an object; it is a subject without an object. It is a Being.

Pat: I would say that we do not exactly regress in adulthood so much as we start to accumulate material junk and make compromising concessions that smother and divert our spirituality. Eventually, as Ben says, we start to recognize the junk and concessions for what they really and discard them. We start to recognize the essence and the value of just Being—of “Be Still, and Know that I Am God” (Psalms 46:10). That’s where we can still hear the still, small voice; after we have abandoned our own ego.

Michael: Can we reach a sustained sense of Being, of self-awareness?

David: The idea of the Catholic confession as I understand it is that you need to confess regularly, and that both confessor and confessant understand that the former’s instruction to go away and sin no more is not likely to be obeyed. And I agree, intuitively, that constant recourse to the well of self-awareness is necessary—that one bucket of spiritual water is not going to cut it. The “Inner Light” seems to me to be the same as the spiritual well Jesus promises, but the problem is that the light tends to go (almost) out if not tended—and we often fail or forget to tend it.

Ben: The notion of oscillation between self-awareness and god-awareness seems to me to be an essential element of life itself. Without it, there would be nothing to distinguish. Ego must have helped drive the woman to the well in the first place, but once she arrived, the ego was no longer needed. It had done its job.

Pat: Over the course of human history, the people regarded as most spiritual are the hermits who abjure social responsibility and contact to seek their own spirituality! Yet our faith calls us to leave the hermitage and find and succor others in need. I could not and would not want to live the life of a monk, but they are the ones who try hardest to abandon their ego and reach ultimate self-awareness.

Chris: The spiritual and worldly senses of self-awareness are separated by the ego. The former does not need it; the latter does. Love, caring, and grace are foreign to the ego. The shift to spiritual self-awareness, the oscillation between them, is a battle between the ego and… what?

Charles: Just as an aside: There is no requirement in the Catholic church to confess regularly, though we are expected to realize that we need it all the time, and it is therefore available all the time.

I regard the child as being the least self-aware state. The younger the child, the more its dependence on and trust in the parent. I think this is what Jesus meant when he called on us to become child-like again.

Self-awareness began in the Garden, physically when Adam and Eve became aware of their nakedness, and spiritually when they became aware of their separateness from the whole, from the Oneness. I hope we will explore this further. It seems to me a crucial aspect of the human spiritual journey, of the way back to god.

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