Defining the Unique Self: A Trans-Lineage Exploration

Lama Surya Das

Lama Surya Das is one of the foremost Western Buddhist meditation teachers and scholars. Surya Das teaches and lectures around the world, conducting dozens of meditation retreats and workshops each year. Based on his relationship with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Surya Das founded the Western Buddhist Teachers Network and has organized three week-long conferences of Western Buddhist Meditation Teachers with the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, India.

Marc Gafni

Dr. Marc Gafni is a cutting edge evolutionary visionary, a provocative spiritual artist and teacher, academic, public intellectual, author, social activist, and lover of people. He holds a doctorate, written on Nondual Humanism in Kabbalah taken at Oxford University under the co-supervision of Prof. Moshe Idel. He serves as the founding co-director of Integral Life Spiritual Center, the founding co-director and teacher in residence of iEvolve Global Practice Community. He is also the founding co-publisher of Incorrect Inc, scholar in residence at Pacific Coast Church, and lead teacher at Shalom Mountain Retreat Center Wisdom School.

Sally Kempton

Sally Kempton, formerly known as Swami Durgananda, is recognized as a powerful meditation guide and as a spiritual teacher who integrates yogic philosophy with daily life. She is the author of The Heart of Meditation, and writes the popular Wisdom column for Yoga Journal. A teacher in the tantric tradition of Kashmir Shaivism Sally conducts conducts workshops and retreats on applied philosophy and meditation. She is co-director of Integral Life Spiritual Center and a core founder and faculty of iEvolve: Global Practice Community.

 

Do you want to realize the unique purpose of your life? Do you want to share your unique gifts with the world? If you do, then please join us this December, over the New Year holiday, as we gather on the shore of the great Pacific Ocean to begin a historical five-year journey. This journey will help you realize that no one else alive can make the contribution to humanity that you can. The first year of Integral Spiritual Experience begins with you: The Personal Spiritual Journey, Your Unique Self.
 

Together, with an incredible list of teachers including Diane Musho Hamilton, Sally Kempton, Marc Gafni, Ken Wilber, and Jean Houston, we will take a personal, hands-on guided exploration and practice of your unique life and purpose as it manifests through your passion, talents and personal history. Come alive to your unique service by finding stillness, breaking through resistance and fear, listening to your calling, and ultimately taking full responsibility for the deep dimensions of your being and becoming. For more information and to register for this First Annual International Flagship Integral Event, visit www.integralspiritualexperience.com.
 

 

Defining the Unique Self: A Trans-Lineage Exploration

by Corey W. deVos
 

“A Rabbi, a Swami, and a Lama walk into a bar....”  What sounds like the opening to a bad joke is actually the beginning of an extraordinary discussion between three remarkable teachers. This discussion is not a didactic presentation of spiritual realities or esoteric truths, but instead represents a process of collectively feeling into the contours of the Unique Self, as perceived by three different people standing in three different traditions.  As such, this conversation is a wonderful example of a "trans-lineage" approach to spirituality—one that uses the Integral framework to hold all possible perspectives as a way to keep from entrenching ourselves in any single view of the world.  It is a way to explore spiritual dimensions that can be found in almost every major religious lineage, without glossing over the important cultural and philosophical differences between these ancient traditions in the name of naive perennialism. 
 

This willingness to step beyond our own personal and cultural points of view; to sanctify the common ground between different traditions while fully honoring and celebrating the differences between them; to hold all the contradictions and paradoxes gently in one hand while cutting through the confusion and fragmentation with the other—these are precisely the sorts of qualities that define the trans-lineage approach to spirituality. Shouting William Stern's slogan from the mountaintop like a 21st-century battle-cry—Unitas Multiplex!—we find unity within the heart of diversity, forged deep in the furnace of purpose.

What is the Unique Self?

What do you think of when you hear the words "Unique Self"? Childhood memories of gold stars and "I am special, look at me" nursery rhymes? Stacks of self-help books intended to help bolster and reinforce the ego? The latest New Age The Secret-type fads that place the self at the center of the universe, instead of the universe at the center of the self? A particular constellation of Jungian personality types, Enneagram typologies, astrological signs, and countless "Which Battlestar Galactica character are you" quizzes on Facebook?
 

As Marc mentions, the Unique Self is much more than a Myers-Briggs test with a spiritual overlay. It does not refer to any of these ornaments of the self—though it is immanent to the trials and tribulations of the ego, it utterly transcends the ego, remaining forever untouched by the appetites of identity. The Unique Self represents the deepest possible expression of consciousness, a subject that can never be made object, the union of ever-present consciousness and individual perspective at a radically fundamental level.
 

Imagine four people sitting in a room, each looking at each other. All four of these people are "fully" enlightened; that is, as enlightened as a person can be at this point in history. Gazing upon one another, they see the very same Oneness staring back at them, recognizing the effortless awareness behind each set of eyes. There is an immediate recognition of primordial consciousness, of the radical singularity of being—the singular to which there is no plural. In each other's eyes, they see their own Original Face, echoes of ubiquity emanating from an unmentionable Source. They can all see the radical and universal sameness of reality, each understanding that there is only one single Witness behind every set of experiences. In each other's eyes they see only themselves, recognizing the very same effortless awareness that looks out from behind their own.
 

Now let's imagine that these four enlightened masters are sitting in a circle, each looking at a globe that sits on a table between them. Although they all share the same direct apprehension of Oneness, they each retain a particular perspective of the globe, and therefore each see the world in a completely different way. There is something markedly unique about each of their experiences, from their physical orientation in time/space to their individual experience of the universal. Within each of them lies a fundamental thread of perspective, stretching all the way to the darkest depths of the Mystery—a bottomless drop of the Heart that is unique to each and every one of us.
 

There is only one universal "I AMness" in existence, and as many unique experiences of "I AMness" as there are perspectives in the universe. If we allow ourselves to think of consciousness as "a sphere whose center is everywhere, and whose perimeter is nowhere," we see that, although we all share the same existential center, my center is not your center—my "bottomless drop" is not your "bottomless drop," even if they are laced together in the Heart of the world. There is a seamless union of the universal and the unique that is completely and inextricably your own. It is the very last inch of you—an inch that can never be duplicated, can never be imitated, and can never be taken away.
 

In a certain sense, the Unique Self represents an end to the spiritual journey, the final realization of enlightenment.  But here again we begin chasing our own hermeneutic tails, words bouncing off the face of the Mystery like photons off a mirror. This nondual unification of self and no-self—"final" in it's own right—is as unattainable as it is inescapable. It has no beginning and no end, as it never enters the stream of space/time to begin with—and yet it permeates all space and all time, never separate from the kaleidoscopic carnival of the manifest world.
 

The Unique Self is the substrate of our 1st-person experience, the subtlest patterns of perspective, flavors of love, and textures of spirit that make you exclusively you in this ecology of souls. With our deepest recognition of our Original and Unique Face, we begin to feel the evolutionary imperative surging though our veins—an insatiable drive to simply be ourselves, as freely and fully as we possibly can.
 

This is both the Alpha and the Omega of the Integral Spiritual Experience, the first and final step toward our own awakening, while guiding our hearts and minds at every point along the way.