Is Wanting To Transcend Yourself A Spiritual Idea?

Hello Beautiful!

In my opinion, there’s a reason we see so many spiritual teachers/teachings/traditions espousing the idea of ‘transcending ourselves’ in order to reach bliss/enlightenment/ awakening. I believe that for the most part - not in all cases - but generally speaking, this teaching/idea is actually born more out of TRAUMA than it is coming from true spiritual understanding. For the next 3 weeks, I’d like to explore why I think we developed the idea that transcending ourselves will lead to happiness, why I think it’s a response to trauma vs. an actual spiritual truth - and what I propose as an alternative which may actually lead to the bliss we’re looking for.

Let’s dive in and see how we go 🙂

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Chances Are, You’ve Been Told You Need To Dissociate

On the self love journey, on the spiritual path, on the personal growth path - chances are you’re going to run into teachings that encourage you to ‘detach’ from elements of yourself.

To detach from your emotions.

To stop identifying with/believing your thoughts.

To let go of identifying with your personality/body/culture/race/identity.

To release the idea that you ‘are’ your ‘bad habit/coping mechanism/self sabotaging behaviors.’

To see your thoughts, your emotions, your physical body as merely an experience that your TRUE self is having.

To see parts of your past self - the parts of you that got hurt/are hurting/are confused/are traumatized as just things that ‘aren’t you’ - aspects to be observed but not to be given any ‘power.’

To varying degrees, we’re all going to come up against the idea that what we are experiencing as the self/what we are experiencing in our human condition/what we are IDENTIFYING with is the SOURCE of our suffering - and if we want to transcend the pain we’re in, the necessary step to take is to learn to DISSOCIATE from these identifications.

The ‘New Thought’ movement is ripe with these kinds of ideas. 

We’re told through various teachings such as those found in The Secret, the teachings of Abraham-Hicks/manifestation circles that we ‘attract’ to ourselves what we are thinking about/believing in/identifying with. Thus if we’re in pain, if we’re experiencing negative things this is a result of us misidentifying with these painful things. It’s a result of our own flawed thinking and attachment to our negative thought patterns that cause us to be a ‘vibrational match’ to painful things. 

We’re taught by people like Byron Katie and A Course In Miracles that REALITY is perfect - and if we are experiencing pain/sickness/circumstances that hurt us - that it’s our own thought/perception OF these things that is actually causing the pain/the event to take place. These teachers and teachings tell us that our sickness is a choice we’ve made. That to be hurt by someone is to be at war with them/God in our own minds. They teach that it is our identification with the small self that wants to have this or that experience that is at the root of our pain, or it is our own thinking that CREATED the pain - so the remedy is to start detaching from thought/our ideas/the pain in order to connect with that ‘perfect reality’ where our pain no longer exists. I understand that they also offer tools for questioning our perceptions of reality that CAN be helpful - but these teachings specifically around detachment from self/identification is what I’m focusing on in this piece. 

Eckhart Tolle talks about his ultimate liberation experience coming when we finally totally disidentified with his entire personality/being, letting go of all of the ‘identities’ he was holding before - male, university student, having to be this or that - so that he could be fully ‘no one’ for long periods of time. He claims that all of his deep, guttural depression, anxiety and confusion about life was cleared for him when we stopped believing he was ‘himself.’ He now says that he no longer holds any identification with himself as an individual, and this is what’s given rise to his eternal state of peace.

We have self help gurus constantly promoting the idea that we need to transcend/overcome/stop believing the stories of our parts of self that self abuse, that self sabotage, that work against our success - because these parts are just ‘ego,’ or are broken, or are in some way flawed aspects of self we need to transcend and overpower with all sorts of tools in order to truly BECOME what we are capable of. We’re told that our brains are broken, our perceptions are flawed, that we have weak, immature, stupid, lazy, flat out BAD parts of self that are pulling us into our worst nature and we MUST do the ‘hard work’ of taking the reigns of our life BACK from these parts. We’re told that we have to reprogram our broken selves to identify with success, our higher nature, our higher capacities so that we can actually LIVE these higher parts of self out. We’re told that the parts of us that cope, self sabotage, that are stuck in pain from the past or fear about the future, that have addictions and other self destructive behaviors are the parts of ourselves we need to FIX or overcome or get rid of or overpower with will - so that our ‘true nature’ can shine through. Insinuating that these parts of self we don’t like AREN’T a part of our true nature.

We’re told in the spirituality world that emotions, thoughts, feelings, sensations - are all temporary. That the BEST thing we can do with these sensations is to ‘watch them pass like clouds in the sky.’ Not to identify. Not to get into where they come from or what they mean. Not to analyze. Just watch, and let them go - returning always to that serene ‘witness’ self that can see everything from that elevated, perfected perspective where nothing hurts and all is as it should be.

These Ideas Are As Old As Time

Now, the ‘New Age’ movement and modern teachers didn’t invent this concept of disidentification with the self. This is a teaching almost as old as human beings.

Ancient yogic and Buddhist philosophy have also been built on the idea that the ‘illusion of self’ is our biggest source of pain, and that to truly ‘wake up’ we must thoroughly disidentify with the physical/ephemeral self in exchange for identifying with unity consciousness. The ‘all that is’. The ‘greater’ ‘I’/God consciousness and so on. The idea that it’s our identification with our identity - our race, our culture, our family role, our bodies, our personality, our talents, our shortcomings and everything in between - that is the root of all evil. The root of all delusion. That this world is ‘Maya’, a figment of our collective imaginations, covering up the TRUTH of God/reality/oneness/peace/joy. That only those who are clever enough to fully detach from ALL OF THIS have any hope of achieving peace in this life.

This idea that it’s our thoughts/perceptions/selves that causes ALL suffering is as old as mankind. It’s been around forever, and it’s been dressed up in all sorts of different costumes - but at its core the message is simple - stop believing you are/are experiencing these things and you will be free of them.

This idea makes a lot of sense if you consider what it’s been like for humanity on this planet.

The reality is, for a LONG time, simply surviving was incredibly challenging. 

Famine, disease, predators, not understanding our own biology or the world around us sufficiently to procure pleasure and avoid pain. Being burned by the sun, eaten by lions, starved by famine, flooded out, infected through drinking water or eating food or being bitten by a bug - being a ‘self’, having all our needs and idiosyncrasies within the context of this planet that is, for all intents and purposes, not exactly the ideal place for us would easily lead us to believing that if we could just detach from all that WE are, we could then somehow sync up with the world around us in a way that would make things easier for us. More pleasure, less pain.

Then on top of that, due to the fact that survival was hard and we experienced SO much scarcity and lack, along with inadequate resources and capacity to devise systems where we could work together in larger and larger communities to provide for all people, we then started to create social structures and hierarchies. These structures were built upon foundations of exploitation, dehumanization and unfair division of labour/access as people groups ‘identified’ with parts of humanity, while ‘disidentifying’ with other parts. The scarcity we experienced put us into a fear state, and from that fear state was born the idea of separation, competition, domination and using the work of others to help ourselves.

As humanity evolved, we became less and less tribal - living in tight communities where everyone played their role to serve the whole - to larger and larger ‘civilizations,’ and for a PLETHORA of reasons, the way humanity functioned began to shift. We moved from cooperation based structures to people wanting to dominate. Wanting to have MORE for themselves. We saw more and more that those who had the capacity to overpower others made the choice to do so, in an attempt to secure more resources for themselves. We started to reject one another based on our ‘differences’ - and there was more and more importance placed on people’s ‘identity’ as this is how we were now deciding who got what in the cultural structures.

More and more of the way the world functioned over time came to be centered around powerful groups using the labor of others to acquire provision for themselves, leaving those ‘under’ them to suffer. Our past and current societal structures are ALL - to some degree - rooted in a supremacist group coercing ‘other’ groups to sacrifice their time, labor and lives in exchange for the production and distribution of resources that makes those at the top ever more powerful, wealthy and in control. 

For a LONG time on our planet, one's identity has determined one's position in life. Society has been structured in ways that mean that your skin color, the place you were born, the religion you were indoctrinated into, the access to education/resources that you had growing up and so many other external factors that are deeply out of our control have determined the kind of life we were going to have - or at least the battle we were up against if we wanted to find a life that felt good.

Who you were WAS the CAUSE of your access, your position in life, what you were assumed to be capable of, the value you were assumed to have and your status. This all had very REAL life implications. 

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Let’s pause here and take this in. We will dive deeper next week.

<3