Inquiry

hmmm... I couldn't get the "respond" button to work, so I had to post this here.

I have a meditation practice that I use on occasion that seems to deal with the unique self.  I go through a series of questions or statements.

1) "I need Love."  I try to remember a moment when I felt inadequate and completely contracted in the ego.

2) "Do I Love myself fully?"  I check and see if I am capable of loving myself 100%.  Of course not. Nobody can, not from the perpsective of the small self.  If you're awakened, you'll also have the perspective of the Big Self.

3) "Am I Loved fully?"  This is thrown out to Spirit, to the infinite expanse.  I'm then showered down with a most wonderful Yes.  All of me without exception.  This is a wonderful way to have a 2nd person perspective relationship with Spirit.

5)  "I am Loved fully."  I then bring this complete Love inside and embody it.  So I go from the 2nd person perspective to a 1st person perspective.

6)  "Equanimity."  After a while, it just becomes equanimity.

7) "Do I Love myself fully?"  I ask this question again, and notice that I am holding 2 spaces now.  One from the absolute, and another from the small, relative ego.  I feel into the newfound perspectives.

I then cycle back to 1), but with another word.  Instead of Love, I use Acceptance, Compassion, Confirmation, Understanding, etc...  Question 7 also immediately brings the small ego back into the picture, and then cycling back to question 1 brings the small ego into the forefront.  So by repeating this meditation form, I get to see the small ego go from the forefront and gradually take a back seat to my Unique Self, and then have the small ego come back to the forefront.  The more I do it, the more I notice the two in daily life.

   Claudia, That is an interesting point which is probably right (and I will intellectually process your idea in the next few days or weeks), but my first impression of what the term "unique self" might be is that it seems awfully close to what I would call (and have heard others call) "gifts". By gifts, I mean natural predisposed aptitudes which drive both behaviors/enactments and perceptions/perspectives.

   I recently called these gifts "default drivers" (see my most recent post), as they can be over-ridden, but at a cost of: ineffeciency, lack of proficiency, loss of potential/actualization, increase in existential ankst/dread, etc. Because of this sensed cost, the gift orientation remains the natural default setting for the construction of a self, the construction of the self's "bubble world" which interfaces with the outer world/culture, and for shaping the culture/world. Dreamers, do-ers, relaters, and thinkers may all go into various roles or professions, but their basic "gift" contributes in the way it best functions. A dreamer (or visionary, or "prophet", or "intuiter") would naturally contribute different things in different ways to a given system, situation, or profession, than would a do-er, a thinker, or a relater. However, the system, situation, or profession has its own specs, and may cull out many of the gifts' contributions, according to the needs of the system, situation, or profession. 

   In the book I recently finished writing (The Marketing of Virtue: Allsberg Rising), I refer to that gift-adaptation to a situation (such as to a profession, or to a given task force) as "gift shift", in which the natural gift is modified temporarily in a best fit sort of way, according to the needed functions of the group. But gift shift can turn into gift drift if the person's true gift gets put on hold for too long. The person ends up sacrificing too much of the real self for the needs of the group. This may even happen on a broad scale, in relation to the role of "citizen" or "civilization" agent. To some extent our adaptation to civilization may entail a level of mis-fit between the unique self (and its unique potentiality to shape the manifest realm) - a kind of strain similar to Freud's idea of superego suppressing the id, the price we all pay for participating in civilization. Is there a "spiritualization" world, once we evlove beyond "civilization? Would such a "state" be a sort of "unique (or authentic) State" which actualizes much more human potential than our current "civilization" does? 

   To me, it would appear that one of the tasks of the unique self is to help re-shape the world in a way that the world's "niches" better fit the natural gifts of the unique selves (RD Lang, in The Divided Self, said "Real Self", other authors refer to an "authentic self", etc.) - and to move "civilization" along Wilber's "conveyor belt" (or on a "collective elevator of vertical mind") toward "Spiritualization" (a higher social/collective order/format).   

  Sorry for the excessive parentheses. Maybe I took Jean Houston too literally when she said we are a "people in the parentheses"! I wrote like a writer-person in the parentheses! Or is the parenthetical affront to language structure actually a part of the cosmo-cultural change process going on as we speak (and how we speak!). 

Darrell

Thanks Dutch, Your review of Genz's book - the interface of science and philosophy as regards concepts of nothingness and empty space - reminded me of a philosophical idea I shared with a high school friend many, many years ago while he and I were riding on the bus one morning. I put forth a notion which I later found out to be a Zen notion. I said "ever think that the word nothing might mean 'no-thing'? And that 'no-thing' is not nothing, just 'no-thing'?" I remember my friend arguing about the foolishness of trying to turn a nothing into a something called no-thing. The gist of my argument was the idea of a dynamic field of some sort, in which some reality other than descrete things might exists and be mistaken as nothing at all, when, in fact it is just something which we can't compute from our "thing" , matter-based, logic. To this day, I believe I had a valuable, if not valid, insight that day as a young high-school aged boy.

  And that fleeting window (although I have come back many times to it since) of a view or "sight", as in "in-sight", seems to match the philosophical/scientific thrust of Genz's book, as you describe it.  In particular, the following excerpt from your comment/review: "He states on page 207 that "there is no such thing as absolutely empty space. All space contains fluctuating fields and particles. Even in the emptiest space that the laws of nature permit, there are energy levels about which the energies of the fields and particles fluctuate; and these energy levels are never sharply defined." Essentially, as space is created it is given some properties of 'non-emptiness'. ". 

"Dynamic fields" where the "things" are unfamiliar - not acting as "things", acting like no-things, as things acting unpredictably more like energy or waves, or smudges, in a subatomic realm. The nothing of empty space in the subatamic level is just a more dynmic form of things which yields to the energy-sensitive, pattern-sensitive, right brain hemisphere type of logic  that I was probably using when I argued with my high-school friend that nothing meant "no-thing". By this, I meant, I think, that some sort of field dominant state or logic in which thinking like static things does not make sense, rather sense can only be made when a person thinks more like energy or energy fields. By "no-thing",  I meant "no definite or static thing", and my philosophical insight/argument was that, perhaps that is what "nothing" really is - a something else, rather than an absolute void-type nothing. Perhaps a different aspect or dimension of reality that doesn't "stand out" (exist) in the manner we are accustomed to seeing things stand out, or "exist". But exist (stand out) in a different way.

Looking back, I think I was toying with the idea that I would now call "thinking like energy" (as opposed to thinking like matter). What happens to our reality frames when we think like energy, vs. when we think like matter (our more familiar, habitual, way of thinking)? The mind seems to function/act differently when "on" energy, than it does on matter. Ingest a "hit" of energy, and see how the mind acts and reasons. It is a different type of consciousness. One that I feel is more in line with the theological concept of "Grace", and the scientific concepts of "quantum mechanics"(?) or "quantum soup"(?) or other such no-(static)thing "realities".  

   The tie-in to my earlier comments about sleep= nothing= unique-self-state (from which the emergence of a unique self can be detected), and about the role of integrating wakeful consciousness with a base of brain wave activities normally associated with sleep, is that those sleep zones may have a thinner viel or a more open reducing valve (Huxley) and are more sensitive to subtle energy characteristics than are the higher-resistence (lower "frequencey" - Dyer) of the waking state and beta brain wave activity. 

An interesting question along the lines of the idea that "you are what you eat", would be that practicing "thinking like energy" might actually activate, and/or help integrate, the slower, more synchronized brain wave states of "sleep" with the spike-ier waves of beta activity (wake state). "Thinking like energy" might actually activate alpha, delta, or theta waves in the person who is engaging in the sport of "thinking like energy". The mind might be transformed by the exercise itself. Much like using a cognition to cue up a different mood and behavioral sequence or state. 

   Darrell