7 What Is Wrong with My Self?
Lewis hadn’t felt right about himself in a long time. Oh, his physical health seemed decent enough, and perhaps his mental health, too. Lewis couldn’t say that he was in any way physically or mentally ill, certainly not disabled, nor deluded, deranged, or even depressed. Lewis was functioning pretty much as he always had. He just didn’t feel that was living as he should. And not particularly in immoral ways with bad habits, although he might have one or two of those, but more so in his attitude, outlook, depth, or capacity. Something was off. Lewis just couldn’t tell what.
Diagnosis
You’ve probably had that same sensation from time to time, and maybe for a while now, that something’s off in your spirit or soul. The prior chapter already addressed that question in part, by looking at whether one can grow, change, and mature. The prior chapter even mentioned internal and external obstacles to psychological and spiritual growth, without identifying or exploring them. In this chapter, consider more directly the diagnosis of the incomplete, unrevealed, distorted, and divided self. What, exactly, is commonly wrong with us that we are not ourselves? You might in this instance diagnose yourself, or at least pick up some possible hints, from this chapter’s survey. Of course, if you have something seriously wrong with you that is disabling you from a functioning life, then get the professional help you need. But insofar as discerning and pursuing your opportunity to grow psychologically and spiritually, perhaps an appropriate attitude is physician, heal thyself. And to pursue healing, consider some potential diagnoses.
Resistance
You may feel a natural resistance to psychological and spiritual growth. Your resistance may be cautions and warnings against it, whispered quietly in your soul. Or you may simply have a lethargy and discomfort whenever you take the subject up with yourself. Resistance to psychological and spiritual growth is natural. You should expect it, perhaps even welcome it, although it may not be easy with which to deal. Your discomfort confirms that you are preparing to question, challenge, and perhaps adjust the personas through which you live. Examining yourself from a transcendent stance is a direct challenge to your ego, that persona within you that takes charge, sets the goals, makes the plans for the day, and admonishes you to stick with it, without looking left or right. That persona, your ego, more than anything else resists the call of the inner self, of the transcendent conscience, to change, grow, and mature in your soul and spirit. And your ego isn’t at all to blame for raising the challenge. After all, it got you to where you are. It will even ask you whether you are ready to give all that up. But while your ego will resist, it won’t disappear in the face of your growth and change. It, too, will adjust.
Avoidance
Resistance involves the natural discomfort one feels when taking a new approach. You can feel resistance to change in the smallest things, like getting used to driving a different vehicle or even to using a new toothbrush. Resistance arises in the face of change. Avoidance seeks not to change at all. Avoidance hears the soul’s call but ignores it. Avoidance chalks up to dreaming that nagging sense of missing out on one’s deeper, resonant, and fruitful path for life. Avoidance dismisses the thought that we have work yet to do. Avoidance finds the first available distraction and plunges into it, trying to drown out the call. Avoidance may numb the sensation of brokenness and inadequacy, mixed with opportunity for helpful reform, with sensual or narcotic indulgence or flurries of activity. Identify in yourself signs that you are avoiding the whispered invitation to come closer to who you are in the transcendent creator’s eyes. And when you notice those avoidant behaviors in yourself, put a quick stop to them. Rejoice that you have transcended yourself to notice your avoidance. Rejoice also that you are discerning the call to grow.
Escapism
Your ego is a trickster, having a lifetime’s experience at controlling you. You may soon manage to notice and correct your avoidance of the call to grow. You may then overcome your resistance to change, as uncomfortable as doing so may feel. Yet your ego won’t nearly be out of tricks. Your ego may instead simply take control of the call. You may find yourself diving headfirst into spirituality. You may consume videos and readings, rearrange your home, join new groups, change your schedule, and court new friends, all in vigorous pursuit of this new spirituality. Beware a rush of new activities. The psychological and spiritual growth you seek isn’t to further strengthen the grip of your ego. It is instead to become more aware of and aligned and participatory with the transcendent one’s design of and presence in your deeper self, spirit, and soul. That’s not your ego’s role but instead transcendence’s role, the role of the Spirit with whom the transcendent one gifts you. The path isn’t to escape into spirituality but instead to become sufficiently conscious of your deeper self, and to integrate and express that genuine self, to properly and resonantly engage the world. Escaping the world, even if the escape is into spirituality, isn’t a solution but a problem. Don’t escape. Rather, engage, and not through the ego’s furious activity but through the quiet presence of your transcendent self.
Signaling
Another trick that you may find your ego pulling on you, when faced with the prospect of your psychological and spiritual growth, has to do with its signaling of its newfound spirituality. Your old self has greater concern for what the world thinks of you than for what the transcendent creator thinks of you. Don’t blame your ego. That’s its role, to help you navigate the world in the world’s ways and on the world’s terms. So, as you learn to listen more to the transcendent one’s Spirit and less to your old self, your old self may preserve its role by signaling to others your psychological and spiritual progress. If, for instance, you find yourself eager to describe to others your latest psychological insights and spiritual gains, you may notice that you are virtue signaling. Sharing insights isn’t a problem. The problem develops when the projection of your putative spiritual growth, into your relationships, becomes the point over and above your growth itself or your sharing of insights with others. Your ego wants you to look to others like you are growing spiritually. And you’ve got a problem when your looks become the point. Beware signaling your spirituality. If you find yourself doing so, try to keep it more to yourself.
Projection
As just suggested, projection is a related psychological or spiritual problem for all of us. Projection involves taking your own issues and making them look like the issues of others. You may, for instance, project your own obsessive need for order as if it were instead the slovenliness and insensitivity of family members or co-workers who don’t share your obsession for order. They’re oblivious to your obsession, not at all intending your offense, or simply can’t manage to satisfy your obsession. You may, for another instance, project your own unresolved sense of inadequacy and worthlessness as if it were instead the pride and arrogance of more-accomplished acquaintances who simply don’t feel inadequate. They’re oblivious to your sense of inadequacy, not intending any affront to you, or simply can’t avoid making you feel inadequate. If you find yourself constantly irritated by various attributes and behaviors of others, use that irritation as a signal to study the characteristic within your persona that is generating it. Others can have problematic, even endangering, characteristics, no doubt. And those issues can affect you. But the problems you perceive in others may well be transcendence speaking to you about yourself.
Comparison
Comparison is likewise a common, even ubiquitous, problem. Social norms are certainly useful. Fitting in with the crowd can make for a tolerable society. We can’t negotiate everything all the time. Customs and rituals are enormously useful in helping us understand and respect one another, while we interact continuously with one another in tremendously useful ways. Yet the adoption and adjustment of customs that goes on constantly and fruitfully in our interactions can take a step further into unhealthy and unnecessary interior comparisons. When someone else appears stronger, smarter, fitter, healthier, or better proportioned than us, we may naturally want to reach their level, too. Aspirations can be good, even those suggested by comparison to a model. But unreasonable aspirations can become psychoses. Continual comparison to unachievable standards can distort the mind, body, spirit, and soul. We are each unique not only in circumstance but also in our deepest character. The transcendent one wants to experience creation through us, not through someone else whom we attempt to replicate in us. Beware continual comparison.
Time
Time can also become a problem for us, in the way that we see ourselves through it. Our past can haunt us, not just properly convicting us over wrongs that we commit but condemning us that we will surely recommit them. Our future can likewise haunt us, not just offering us the potential toward which to reach and out of which to grow but demanding that we strive to meet its impossible standard. The social construct of time as a commodity to commit to self-improvement and productivity can itself become a disabling convention, robbing us of the one thing we truly have, which is the sense of ourselves in the present. We truly possess only the now, while everything else is a phantom construct. And we only find the transcendent in our present, not in our past nor in the hypothetical future. To strive for the future is to live in the future, not in the present, just as to live to overcome one’s past is to live in the past, not in the present. Beware the problem of time. Be the transcendent soul, spirit, and self who you are in the present. Only your present self is real and authentic. Everything else is imagination.
Powers
Do not miss that we struggle not just against our identities and personas, nor just against theoretical psychological issues and spiritual problems, but also against spirits, powers, and principalities opposing our transcendence. Conceive of them as you wish. A modern materialist mind might prefer to construe them as non-physical, aggregated thoughtforms arising out of collective emotions and intentions. An evolutionist might construe them as powerful collective social and physiological adaptations. One with a philosophical, anthropological, or literary bent might think of them as hidden archetypes through which we live and with which we do constant battle. One of a traditional ancient faith might recognize them as demons or other divine entities. No matter your preference, you may sense yourself doing battle not just with yourself but with something within you or even outside of you, having a presence, activity, and influence you cannot directly observe or clearly understand. The struggle to pare yourself of artificialities, to reach, embrace, and express the transcendent self, soul, and spirit whom the creator placed within you, isn’t purely a struggle with yourself. You are constantly engaging archetypal entities having intentions for you of their own.
Engagement
You may also find yourself simply unwilling to engage your transcendent call. Sometimes, our psychological or spiritual problem isn’t our resistance, avoidance, or escapism, nor projection, comparison, or a haunting sense of time, nor even a besetting struggle with opposing powers. Sometimes, our problem is simply an unwillingness to actively engage our call to growth and maturation. Perhaps you lack the tools, courage, or imagination to do so. You may never have effectively engaged your mind and spirit in a frank and fruitful internal discourse. Indeed, that drowsy or fast-asleep state is the condition of the unconscious soul. Consciously exercising an active imagination can be one way to acquire a tool, display courage, and sense progress. If you need to become aware of yourself and the way that you mediate and suppress your transcendence, one way to do so is to have an active conversation with yourself. Name your internal speakers, and let them express their character in a frank and even contentious dialogue. Do so in thought and in writing by journal. See what you learn by engaging in an honest internal discussion of the incomplete and unconscious state of your soul.
Reflection
Do you have a whispered sense of having something wrong with you psychologically and spiritually? Something that comes from deep within you more so than a critique from outside? If so, can you distinguish its source from the usual day-to-day demands of your conscience directed to accomplishing external things? Does it, in other words, seem to come from your transcendent self, from the Spirit of the transcendent one within you? If so, what is it telling you about yourself? Can you try engaging it in an internal dialogue? Have you noticed your ego resisting a frank internal conversation about the state of your soul? Have you been avoiding such a self-examination, whether by indulgences or excessive activity? Conversely, are you withdrawing and escaping into a false spirituality while signaling your spirituality to others? Are you projecting your own issues onto others who annoy and irritate you, when your annoyance should be telling you something about yourself? Do you compare yourself to others continually, taking clues from them on how to live your own life? Does your past haunt you, or does your future burden you? Are you struggling with spiritual entities that condemn and oppress you?
Key Points
Be aware of what may be psychologically or spiritually wrong with you.
You may, for instance, find yourself resisting growth and maturation.
You may also find yourself avoiding the call to examine your soul.
You may instead dive into spiritual practices to escape examination.
You may alternatively resort to signaling your spirituality to others.
You may project your issues onto others as their problems, not yours.
You may continually compare yourself to others in an unhealthy way.
You may allow your past to haunt you and your future to burden you.
You may also find yourself struggling with powers and principalities.
You may also find yourself unwilling to engage your transcendent call.