True Self

After a night without sleeping at the weekend I am alittle short tempered and exploded into rage at one of my students. Not a professional or personally skillful action... but I realised something

The "nice caring self" that I portray is actually a construction made by... my true self!!

It also means that "my True self" is still highly ignorant because it exploded into rage. Irony, irony since hours before I recognised that to be "provoked" by someone makes you a slave and makes them master of your actions. To have pure choice we must be unprovokable. Patience, tolerance, forebearance etc are key qualities of liberation - Jesus being a prime (but not supreme) example (he got angry and facing the cricifixion involved much doubt, fear and self control - but in the desert he was not provoked by the devil rather than be slave he became master of evil) .

But "my true self " was provoked and so I am not truly wise.

Yet it shows up very clearly the difference between my "actor self" or to give it its psychological moniker my "Ego" and an entity that I do not know called my "True Self".

The first Buddhist I ever met said that Ego is bad because it works for its own benefit at the expense often of the whole self. This was one of the truest things I ever heard.

A Chinese story I heard much later and never made sense of goes like this. Usual man seeks Enlightenment under great master. Nothing happens and there is no instruction. The man disillusioned walks away and the Great Master suddenly calls him by name so that he turns around. That says the master is your true self.

This is where our "self" exists at the horizon of the "self" that we play with like a puppet in our lives. We plan based upon this mental model of a self of Alva in my case. We experience emotion based upon the narratives that we construct for this actor yet that actor has no soul.

More alarming I realised that my True Self manipulates people through the performances of Alva. When I got angry I decided to construct a fearful self that was quite in contrast to the nice self that I work on usually. My tutee said "your mad" as he was confused by the evaporation of the "nice guy" and the sudden skillful creation of the "bad guy". This was my intention! It gave me power.

So the Ego is a tool to trick other people also and enable us to hide our vulnerable "true self" from them. Yet actually such thinking only shows immaturity and lack of wisdom because such construction of self gives the True Self away immediately.

So "I think therefore I am" is true and it passes the SRH because the thinking self is different from the existing self!!! They must be different by SRH anyway - but what we think we are is Ego and what is thinking is empty and non-existent!