9 How Do I Think of My Self?
Devon knew that he’d always been a bit of a mess. He was just realizing, though, how seriously his inability to think of himself in an appropriate fashion was affecting his life. Devon was discerning enough to tell that one minute he acted as his life’s master but the next minute as his life’s victim. One minute he was a lost cause but the next minute a sure thing. One day Devon was a relentless striver and overcomer but the next day as helpless as a newborn goat kid. And the hardest part of it for Devon was that he never knew which Devon was going to show up. Just when he expected to be the bold knight, Devon would instead find himself being the damsel in distress. Just when he felt he had nothing left to offer, Devon would instead find himself pulling miracle rabbits out of his hat. Devon didn’t so much mind his wide capacities as his inability to know which Devon was about to show up.
Stance
The prior chapter’s question of how to know yourself, discover yourself, learn about yourself, and evaluate or diagnose yourself relates closely to the question of how to think about yourself, how to regard yourself. When you aren’t actively investigating your condition but instead just navigating the day, what is the attitude you should adopt toward yourself? You may not yet have considered the significance of that question, but your stance or attitude toward yourself can color everything you think, say, and do in a day. Your stance toward the world is of course significant, whether you see your life as an adventure, weary slog, descent into disintegration, or ride into glory. Yet your stance toward the world is also your stance toward yourself. You either see yourself as an adventurer, survivor, sacrifice, victim, or victor. And stances can matter in life.
Others
What others think of you can give you clues to who you are, for sure. We do take clues from others as to what they think of us. The expectations of others surely influence the expectations we have for ourselves. Social influence is important to developing and enforcing norms that have social utility in cohesion. When you live in Rome, you do as the Romans do. You may even soon think as the Romans think and see yourself as a Roman. The influence of others can be developmental. The parent or teacher who treats a child as responsible and diligent helps the child become so. Conversely, the parent or teacher who treats a child as irresponsible and untrustworthy may see the child fill the mold. But what others think of you may not matter nearly as much as what you think of yourself. Indeed, what you think of yourself, the personas and identities you adopt, may be determining or influencing what others think of you. The class clown, the drama queen, the nerd, and the jock are all well-played high school roles, manifesting the actor’s inner state.
State
When we think about ourselves, we often think of our mental, physical, or emotional state. We live in a therapeutic society and state, focused on preserving and improving our physical, mental, and emotional condition. Probably no other people in history thought more about how they look and feel than us. Affluence brings that predilection. Americans are the most affluent people in history, and we base our affluence in consumption. Our consumption is so great that it’s the world’s economic engine. That economic fact alone should tell us volumes about our mental state. To think constantly about how we are feeling and what we are desiring certainly affects our psychological and spiritual state. Indeed, one could say that our consumptive, remedial state is less a psychological or spiritual state than a physiological and material state. When how we are looking, how we are feeling, and what we are desiring is our focus, we disassociate and lower ourselves from a transcendent psychological and spiritual state. Beware therapeutic consumerism. Retail therapy has its limits.
Faith
One needn’t, though, draw one’s stance toward oneself from the society, economy, or nation in which one lives. You don’t have to do as Romans or Americans do, when you’re in Rome or America. Faiths, for instance, are largely transnational. They offer identity and image not from society but from theology, explicitly from the transcendent. Indeed, that’s a large part of the role that faith plays, to stand as a bulwark against the vagaries of national, regional, or local identity. We need something deeper, richer, and more integrated, stable, and ancient than national identity, politics, and ideology offer. Faith supplies that inner structure and stability. The psychological role and purpose of faith is to transcend circumstances, to elevate the mind beyond therapeutic consumption toward something higher than biological urges and material conditions. Faith doesn’t simply prescribe rules, customs, and duties. Faith isn’t primarily a moral stance or tool. Faith is instead the interior stance from which exterior demeanor and actions should flow.
Image
A core tenet, if not the core tenet, of traditional Judeo-Christian faith is that we are the transcendent creator’s likeness and image. That assertion, made at the moment of creation, doesn’t simply mean that we look externally like the ultimate transcendent entity in the divine realm. It more so means that we share the transcendent consciousness, intelligence, awareness, and will. We are responsible beings, accountable to our capacity to elevate our thoughts above our material conditions to the origin, structure, and purpose of those conditions. Thus, when we think about ourselves, we may rightly think first about our original nature, created from material but imbued after the creator’s own image with the creator’s conscious awareness, including his purposeful will and creativity. That realization can alone supply endless insight, as we discern more of the nature and desire of the infinite, eternal, ultimate, embodied, uncreated ideal. If you wish to know yourself and think properly of yourself, then know your creator who made you like him.
Created
We can draw important guides on how to think about ourselves, from our created nature. Creations have attributes and purposes. Don’t consider yourself a formless entity, useless burden upon the planet, or blank slate. When you make something, you give it a form and purpose. As a potter, you fashion a pot, cup, or plate. The plate does not call itself a pot while denying your handiwork and your plate purpose for it. When the creator made us, he gave us both form and purpose. You cannot fruitfully deny either your form nor your purpose. We are not self-created. We neither assign ourselves our own form nor give ourselves our own purpose. That we have a form and purpose should be immensely satisfying to us. Imagine yourself formless and purposeless, and you’ll face far greater challenges. You’ll either live regarding yourself as without form and purpose, which is a difficult and despairing way to live, or you’ll self-create form and purpose, with similar results. If we have a role, and our form fits that purpose, then we do best to acknowledge our form and pursue our purpose. Anything else produces ill fits. To acquire a proper stance toward yourself, discern your created form and pursue.
Discovery
Because the transcendent one created us with his own form and for his own purpose, our process of discerning the proper stance to take toward ourselves is one of discovery, not of self-creation. When we learn who we are, we are discerning what is, what exists for us to reach, on a path of self-discovery. We are exploring a cave filled with mysterious riches but also darkness, dragons, and other dangers. We are realizing things, not making them up. The things that we make up about ourselves may serve us for a time but are not genuine, durable things. Our masks hide our true selves, out of which integrity, authenticity, resonance, peace, power, purpose, and other good things come. Make your effort to discover yourself on a bold journey of exploration. Realize who you are, even as you realize whom you have been pretending to be. Look not for whom you might make yourself into but instead who you are, so that you become durable, sturdy, genuine, real, and impactful rather than shallow and evanescent. Pursue discovery, even as discovery pursues you.
Potential
Do not, on the other hand, take the path of discovery to mean that you cannot change, grow, or mature. The self that you are discovering holds profound potential, far more than you could ever fully or even adequately discern. You won’t discover all of yourself or even likely a fraction of yourself, for the greater part of you will, here in the earthly realm, always be unknown. And the darkness that you discover about yourself, the shadows hidden in your unconsciousness, can under a transcendent light take positive form. The darkness, too, is potential. You do not condemn yourself when you discover something about yourself that has been distorting, disrupting, and destroying. You instead turn the unconscious form into a conscious light, reshaping the distortion into a proper form and redirecting its energies toward their proper end. That’s the nature of potential. When you remain unaware of it, it can lurk in a distorting form. If you discern something in yourself that you do not respect, desire, or value, that even frightens you, don’t push it away where it can continue to do its dark work. Let the light of transcendence turn it into its proper form so that it can no longer darken your outlook.
Representative
Our nature as the unbound creator’s likeness and image is plainly not a static thing. Within that image construct is the sense that we are our creator’s active representative or emissary in his creation. His first role for us was to name the animals, to give order, identity, and category to things. Thus, think of yourself as the creator’s ambassador to your own realm in his creation. In our best role, we extend his rule over our own realm, which we hold under his authority as his delegate. The creator extends himself into his creation through us, experiencing his creation through our own delights. As we recognize his authority, accept our role, and pursue his desire, he extends our rule farther into his creation. Our role is thus to steward his creation, glad to serve under him and with him as co-rulers and co-creators. We are not consumers and takers but instead managers, producers, and overseers for him. Everything before us and within us is his gift to us for us to invest for a larger return to him. The transcendent one takes delight in the greater return, giving more to those whom he can trust to recognize and respect him.
Embodiment
A related way in which to think of yourself is as the embodiment of the transcendent creator’s desires. As we learn more of his purpose, principles, attributes, commands, and wishes, and let his Spirit conform ourselves to them, we draw closer to him. We share his consciousness, giving up our minds and purposes to him so that he may delight in his creation through us, experiencing his creation through the individual you. His mind becomes our mind, as we think of his purposes and desires. His eyes become our eyes, so that we see what he sees. His hands become our hands, so that we do the work in the way that he would have us do. His feet become our feet, so that we go where he would have us go. And his heart becomes our heart, so that we feel what he feels. When you think of yourself, try thinking not of yourself but of what he experiences in you and through you. We know ourselves when we know how he experiences his creation in and through us.
Structure
To think rightly of ourselves, we also benefit from placing ourselves within the cosmic structure in which and through which we live. We are the union of heaven and earth, neither heaven alone like the divine entities, nor earth alone like the things around us. Our transcendent mind is in and from heaven, our nervous system carrying our divine desires down and out through our body, while our lower parts are from earth, planted and rooted while reaching up toward heaven. We draw breath from above to give life to our lower parts. Our airway and lungs, and our brain and nervous system, are inverted trees, reflecting that our life comes from above, carried down into the earth. In psychological rather than spiritual terms, we marry meaning with material. Our consciousness expressed gives order, pattern, and purpose to all of life. We are each thus fractal representations of the cosmic structure, each holding in our own form and consciousness the whole of the cosmic structure, after the image of the transcendent creator who holds together all. Life intermediates the material and transcendent realms, in the overlap of which the creator expresses both his own self and his own love for his created images.
Fallen
The way in which we think of ourselves, though, must also account for our errancy. We are not merely incompletely formed. It is not simply that we need more time to perfect ourselves, as if a little more growth and maturation and we would be sure to arrive. We are not merely limited in sight, capacity, and information, as if given more knowledge, we would be sure to make the right judgments. We are not merely subject to our circumstances, as if given a break here and there we would do significantly better. And we are not merely under the influence of an unconscious darkness, the illumination of which would solve our last problems. We are instead in some way broken, inadequate to the charge. Picking ourselves up and putting ourselves together is beyond our reach, try as we might. We instead sooner or later realize that our wholeness must come from an outside source. Self-improvement is a dead-end project. We have fallen from the height that we know we desire to reach, as our ancestral and future home. And to reach that height, we need a miracle of transcendence. Keep in mind that humble confession, whenever thinking of yourself.
Beloved
Despite our brokenness, we rightly think of ourselves as the transcendent creator’s beloved. We could have drawn that conclusion from his making us in his image and making us his representatives in his creation. Those gifts would alone be enough to convince us of his regard for us. But the transcendent one did unimaginably more than give us creation as his gift, when he gave himself, gave his only Son, in exchange for our transformed life. The proposition is simply too vast to grasp cognitively and must instead be held in faith and trust. We cannot join in perfection without perfection submitting to the imperfect, without perfection dying as if corrupt but then returning to a perfectly ascendant and transcendent life. Keep in mind that sense of the transcendent one’s passionate love for you, at all cost, and you’ll have a proper view of yourself.
Reflection
What is your habitual stance toward yourself? What one-word description would you give to the way that you regard yourself, such as adventurer, discoverer, or victim? What one-word description would others give to you, whether you regard it as accurate or not? Do you give substantial attention to your mental and emotional state? What role, if any, does faith play in how you conceive of yourself? What does it mean to you that you are the transcendent one’s image? What does it mean to you that the transcendent one created you rather than you emerging from a theoretical swamp or creating yourself? Do you have a sense of continually discovering who you are, knowing that you have a genuine and distinct self? Do you see your undiscovered self as a store of potential? What does it mean to you that you represent the creator in creation? Do you ever have the sense of being the creator’s eyes, hands, and feet? How would you describe your place in the cosmic structure? Do you have a sense of your own brokenness and inadequacy? Have you embraced the transcendent one’s Son as your rescuer?
Key Points
How you think of yourself is significant to your psychological state.
How others see and consider you can affect how you see yourself.
We give inordinate attention to our mental and emotional states.
Faith offers a self-image more enduring than national identity.
We are the transcendent creator’s own image in his creation.
The construct of our creation requires us to accept our nature and form.
We discover our nature rather than create it on our own.
Our genuine self holds a vast store of potential from which to draw.
We are the creator’s representative extending his realm.
We embody and reflect the creator’s nature in our mind and work.
We intermediate heaven and earth, giving meaning to material.
Our nature is distorted, needing the creator’s transformation.
The creator treats us as his beloved, rescued sacrificially by his Son.