One cannot deal intelligently with any matter about which one is ignorant. If one is to deal intelligently with oneself one must be aware of one’s real motives, of the secret sources of one’s thoughts, feelings and actions, of the nature of one’s sentiments, impulses and sensations and of the circumstances in which one is liable to behave well or badly. In general, it may be said that, on the intellectual plane, good is that which heightens awareness, especially awareness of oneself. No self can go beyond the limits of selfhood, either morally (by the practice of the virtues that break attachment) or mystically (by direct cognitive union with ultimate reality), unless it is fully aware of what it is, and why it is what it is. Self-transcendence is through self-consciousness.
A human being who spends most of his waking life either day-dreaming, or in a state of mental dissipation, or else identifying himself with whatever he happens to be sensing, feeling, thinking or doing at the moment, cannot claim to be fully a person. McTaggart has objected that ‘to call a conscious being a self (or personality) only when it was self-conscious would involve that each of us would gain and lose the right to the name many times a day.’ Moreover, he adds, there is ‘a more serious difficulty.’ We are invited to define personality as being conscious of self. And consciousness of self is a complex characteristic which can be defined only when it is known what we mean by a self. Therefore, if self means the same on the two occasions when it enters into the statement, ‘a self is that which is self-conscious,’ we have a circular and unmeaning definition of ‘selfness.’ It is quite true that such a definition is circular and unmeaning. But the facts of personality are not adequately accounted for in such a definition. Personality is not, as we have seen, an absolutely independent existent; persons are interdependent parts of a greater whole. In the common-sense universe, however, they possess a relative autonomy. There are degrees in this relative autonomy.
Only when it has attained to the highest of these degrees does a personality become able, as all the mystics bear witness, to transcend itself and merge into the ultimate impersonal reality substantial to the world. To say that ‘a self is that which is self-conscious’ is, of course, merely to make an unmeaning noise. But it is not absurd to say that ‘there is an X (the totality of a human being’s animal and conscious life) which emerges into selfness, or personality, when there is consciousness of X.’ That this definition involves each of us gaining and losing the right to the name of a person many times a day is no objection to the definition. Such happens to be the nature of things. The greater part of the life of the greater number of human beings is sub-personal. They spend most of their time identified with thoughts, feelings and sensations which are less than themselves and which lack even that relative autonomy from the external world and their own psychological and physiological machinery, belonging to a genuine full-grown person.
This sub-personal existence can be terminated at will. Anybody who so desires and knows how to set about the task can live his life entirely on the personal level and, from the personal level, can pass, again if he so desires and knows how, to a super-personal level. This super-personal level is reached only during the mystical experience. There is, however, a state of being, rarely attained, but described by the greatest mystical writers of East and West, in which it is possible for a man to have a kind of double consciousness—to be both a full-grown person, having a complete knowledge of, and control over, his sensations, emotions and thoughts, and also, and at the same time, a more than personal being, in continuous intuitive relation with the impersonal principle of reality. (St. Teresa tells us that, in ‘the seventh mansion,’ she could be conscious of the mystical Light while giving her full attention to worldly business. Indian writers say that the same is true of those who have attained the highest degree of what they call samadhi.)
It is clear, then, that if we would transcend personality, we must first take the trouble to become persons. But we cannot become persons unless we make ourselves self-conscious. In one of the discourses attributed to the Buddha, we read an interesting passage about the self-possessed person. ‘And how, brethren, is a brother self-possessed? . . . In looking forward and in looking back he acts composedly (i.e. with consciousness of what is being done, of the self who is doing and of the reasons for which the self is performing the act). In bending or stretching arm or body he acts composedly. In eating, drinking, chewing, swallowing, in relieving nature’s needs, in going, standing, sitting, sleeping, waking, speaking, keeping silence, he acts composedly. That, brethren, is how a brother is self-possessed.’
In the last paragraphs of the chapter on Education I have described a technique of physical training (that developed by F. M. Alexander), which is valuable, among other reasons, as a means for increasing conscious control of the body and, in this way, raising a human being from a condition of physical unawareness to a state of physical self-consciousness and self-control. Such physical self-awareness and self-control leads to, and to some extent is actually a form of, mental and moral self-awareness and self-control.
Of the purely psychological methods of heightening the awareness of self it is unnecessary to say very much. Self-analysis, periodical analysis at the hands of others, habitual self-recollectedness and, unremitting efforts to resist the temptation to become completely identified with the thoughts, feelings, sensations or actions of the moment—these are the methods which must be employed. If they are not already known, they can easily be reinvented by all who choose to think about the problem. There is nothing abstruse about the theory of these methods of heightening self-consciousness. The principle is simple. What is difficult, as always, is its application in practice. To know is relatively easy; to will and consistently to do is always hard.
It is sufficiently obvious that the systematic cultivation of self-awareness may as easily produce undesirable as desirable results. The development of personality may be regarded as an end in itself or, alternatively, as a means towards an ulterior end—the transcendence of personality through immediate cognition of ultimate reality and through moral action towards fellow individuals, action that is inspired and directed by this immediate cognition. Where personality is developed for its own sake, and not in order that it may be transcended, there tends to be a raising of the barriers of separateness and an increase of egotism.
Under the Christian dispensation, personality has generally been developed in relation to the prevailing doctrines of sin and of personal salvation at the hands of a personal deity. The results have been on the whole distinctly unsatisfactory. Thus, the obsessive preoccupation with sin and its consequences, so characteristic of Protestantism in the generations immediately following the Reformation, only too frequently produced an obsessive preoccupation with the separate self and its lusts for power and possessions. Modern capitalism and imperialism have a number of different causes; but among these causes must be numbered the Protestant and Jansenist habit of brooding on sin, damnation and an angry God, arbitrarily dispensing or withholding grace and forgiveness.
It is interesting, in this context, to compare the orthodox Calvinist attitude towards sin with that which was taken up by such mystics as Eckhart or the author of The Cloud of Unknowing. These writers did not minimize the significance of sin; on the contrary, they regarded it as the chief obstacle in the way of the soul’s union with God. But they saw that sin was the fruit of self-will and that self-will, in Bradley’s words, ‘is opposition attempted by a finite subject against its proper whole.’ The important thing, they perceived, was to get rid of self-will and to cultivate, as quickly as possible, a state of being, propitious to knowledge of, and union with, ultimate reality.
Such a state of being, they found empirically, could be reached by the practice of virtue and the raising of consciousness, first to the level of self-awareness, then, by means of meditation, to awareness of God. Obsessive preoccupation with past sins, they perceived, could result only in preoccupation with the self which they were so anxious to transcend. For this reason there is no insistence in the writings of Eckhart and the author of The Cloud of Unknowing upon their own or other people’s sinfulness. They do not talk about themselves as miserable sinners; nor do they advise others to do so. They know, of course, that men are sinners and that sin is a barrier standing between souls and their God. Therefore, they say, men should make themselves aware of their sins and, having done so, proceed to
