Woo-Zooming
Higher Self's Free Will, True Will of Source, the option of Stillness. Part two of "Zoom Levels of the Self."
Care to join me for some woo-zooming exploration of the aspects of Self that actually have Will and agency?
Last time, we looked at the levels of the self that are at least shakily grounded in materialist science, philosophy and psychology. We explored what I loosely dubbed the Meat Machine, the Plural Ego, The Relational Self, and Selfish Memes. You might have noticed that those aspects of Self are zooming farther and farther away from the material and biological origin we typically think of as the individual. Today, let’s go even farther.
As we zoom farther and farther out—or deeper and deeper into the pool, if you prefer—we can start with The Higher Self and its influence on those more deterministic aspects from the last essay, then zoom even further and look at The Soul Field of which the Higher Self is composed, and the ultimate Emptiness that is said to undergird All.
The Higher Self
Babies often seem to have innate inclinations toward certain dispositions. These are inherited from the Higher Self, which is a collection of thoughts, behaviors, habits and ideas (identities) that incarnates: it wants to express through one biological individual.
The Plural Ego is often created when we express an aspect or identity of our Higher Self that is rejected or scolded by our caregivers. The Ego exists to keep us adherent to our parent’s instruction about what is socially acceptable in society. Aspects of our Higher Self become parts of the shadow in the process: they are unloved and often unacknowledged. Shame keeps the shadow hidden, and when that relationship of self-aversion is replaced with one of lovingkindness, the Higher Self can maximally express.
To be Whole is to embrace all aspects of the Higher Self with radical acceptance. You might also call this the Atman.
The Higher Self’s impact on the Karma that describes the Meat Machine’s processes
Karma is often misunderstood in the West as a sort of “cosmic judge.” It’s typically brought up inspired by a little jolt of schadenfreude—maybe your least favorite billionaire just took a punch to the jaw: “That’s karma!” you might be tempted to say.
A better translation is simply “action and the effects of action.” It’s a single word that captures both cause and effect.
In this way, it’s a good descriptor for all of the biological processes that Robert Sapolsky describes in his book, Determined, in which he argues against the concept of Free Will on the grounds that no one can “show him the neuron that has fired that hasn’t been influenced by the neurons that had just fired nearby it, the hormone levels of the body in the last days to hours, the acculturation of the last few decades of life, or the epigenetic memory passed down through generations.” (To paraphrase somewhat.)
His view is that the future is “determined,” because every single thing we do is a reaction to some reaction in the past, which was a reaction itself to a reaction even longer ago, all the way back to the trajectory of the first particles to split out of the Big Bang.
In a reframing he might possibly consider silly, he believes that our Karma is inescapable.
Pema Chodron handles that in a lecture series available on Audible entitled, Don’t Bite the Hook.
Talking of the exasperating, irritating, action-demanding itchiness that arises in moments of frustration and anger—but applicable to any addictive emotion or substance that creates a craving that can be fulfilled through behavior—Chodron preaches stillness.
We’re talking about patience as getting in touch with the underlying restlessness of the energy. That actually burns up the karmic seeds. By working with patience we’re burning up all the past karmic seeds and freeing ourselves from them.
We might say that the Will of the Higher Self is more deeply in command when we are able to inject a moment of stillness into a situation where we would normally allow our reflexive anger to take over.
Woo-zooming out a bit further, how can the Higher Self impact the Plural Ego, Relational Self and the Selfish Memes that define our moment to moment interactions?
Chodron again:
The way I find this really, really helpful is when I, on the spot, am in a difficult encounter with someone intimate—or just on the street with someone I don’t even know—and I can feel the heat arising, I actually say to myself, “This would not be happening between me and this person if we didn’t have a karmic debt. And the way I relate to this right now can erase this karmic debt, or make the debt deeper, so that I’m just going to still have this debt to them and other people. And it's just going to keep manifesting in my life until I’ve paid this karmic debt. Now is my opportunity.
Using karma as a model for the cause and effect patterns that recur frequently in our relationships with others is useful.
When we make commitments to others, we often find ourselves falling into well-worn ruts. Maybe it's a good thing, and you and your partner are just sampling tasty food together every Sunday… just as often though, the patterns we fall into with others are the result of our IFS style Parts applying coping strategies and defense mechanisms that were appropriate to inescapable circumstances in our past. Applying them, often inappropriately, to the present.
So how does the Higher Self shine through when we’re beset by these innumerable behavioral patterns that act as obstacles to our True Will?
By inspiring the instinct toward stillness.
“Do you have the patience to wait
Till your mud settles and the water is clear?
Can you remain unmoving
Till the right action arises by itself?”
- Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu
The “right action” that the ancient master of daoism is describing, is the action that is in alignment with God. It is the action yoked to God’s will, or in union, or indistinguishable from the will of Source.
In other words, it is both the will of the Higher Self and of the Soul Field of which the Higher Self is just one temporary aspect. Like one of an infinite number of facades of a brilliant energetic diamond.
The Soul Field
Or the Brahman to the Higher Self’s Atman. Or the God, the Father, to the Higher Self’s Son. Or The All in the language of the Kybalion. Or Source, the Divine, or the ontological primitive of the Universe, as you prefer.
All consciousness is an expression of this Soul Field.
The Higher Self is a bit like a finger of the Soul Field that it dips into three dimensional reality in order to have the experiences that are only available to consciousness that has taken a human incarnation.
I like to think of it as an energetic field that permeates all material reality. One that projects matter by condensing itself to a slower, more dense vibration and that expresses through complex biological systems.
Through the maturation of its infinite “Higher Self” aspects the Soul Field seems to be drawn toward a telos of achieving maximum local complexity. They (We) have incarnate experiences that inspire a longing for reunification with Source and alleviation of suffering. These draw us toward practicing reverence, patience, stillness, and radical acceptance and thereby deepen our union with the All.
The Soul Field seems drawn towards a totalizing Awakened awareness. Ubiquitous enlightenment.
Gnostic, experiential comprehension of the universe as alive, as Source, and as Soul.
So we are all this Field.
Again, like a finger of it that has been dipped into a human incarnation. The finger is still part of the body, but while it’s dipped into the puddle, it forgets it’s attached to the other fingers it sees wiggling around in there.
The meditation athletes who plumb the deepest depths of conscious experience, however, report that there is another layer once the Boundless Consciousness and Unconditional Love of the Soul Field is examined with concentrated Vipassana, or “insight meditation.”
These Buddhist adepts take the woo-zooming even further and arrive at a gnostic, experiential understanding that all of this is fundamentally illusory and that the deepest truth to the self is “anatta”: that it doesn’t exist.
Emptiness
The ultimate truth of the individual self is that it is nothing.
If you take your woo-zooming far out enough, even past the Soul Field, there is a vast incomprehensible emptiness.
Past “soul is everything,” which Buddhists refer to as the Second Formless Samatha Jhana, the apparent experience is of “everything as nothing.”
I’ve never experienced anything like ego death personally, although I’ve definitely connected to my Higher Self and maybe even the Soul Field through intuition, inspiration, and epiphany.
How does Emptiness become the Soul Field, which fragments into Higher Selves, that express as Meat Machines?
To hear Ram Dass say it, Emptiness emits the Unconditional Love of Boundless Consciousness naturally, the way that the Sun ceaselessly emits photons that become the irreplaceable source of all biological life’s energy.
Woo-zooming back in, that Soul wants to gain experiences and maximize local complexity and creates incarnate experiences to achieve it, which necessitate the dukkha (or suffering) of driving around a Meat Machine in 3D reality.
Neither end—nor any intermediary point—on this spectrum should be considered the “ultimate truth.” At least not in my opinion.
Instead, let’s just adopt polygnosticism: believe in all of them simultaneously, and pick whichever one suits you moment to moment.