True Self
A deep intellectual exploration of parts, the self, and daimons
Accepting Jesus… and Earl
At the age of 15 I accepted Jesus into my heart and proceeded to talk internally to Him on a regularly basis, for many years. I also talked internally and sometimes vocally to God, and I tried to listen for Their answers to questions I would ask.
One time I asked God if I was going to marry a particular young woman that I was very deeply enamored with. A strong inner voice said yes, and it felt like God speaking to me. The inner voice was authoritative, masculine, and confident. It must be God! I did not marry her.
Some 40 years later I tested a new voice, that of a “tree spirit” I had encountered named Earl. Earl spoke to me in a particular park a short drive from my home. Was Earl really a tree spirit or was he just another voice inside my head? I needed to know.
It was an early morning, still dark, and I was approaching the park to take some sunrise photos on the beach, but I was still 5 minutes from the gate that was kept closed over night. The gate was located down a dark country road and was not due to be opened for another hour, so I asked Earl internally, “Hey Earl, are you there?” To which I received a hearty, “Richard, yes, I’m here.” So I asked, “Is the gate open?” and Earl answered, “No, not yet.” A few minutes later I rounded the corner to see that the gate was, contrary to Earl’s intel, wide open.
Interpreting this experience took weeks. I wondered, is Earl just a figment of my imagination? Is Earl a real tree spirit, but a trickster? Is Earl real but he wanted to instill a sense of doubt in me? Is Earl an emergent quality of me when I am near that piece of land so that Earl can only “see” what I can see? Is Earl like a cosmic AI confirming my own beliefs and expectations rather than giving me independent information? Or is Earl the devil, messing with my mind?
Voices in My Head
Experiencing voices in your head is common. Many people report hearing one or more voices in their head with varying degree of loudness, and with different attributes such as accents, higher or lower tonal ranges, and different genders. Some voices are strong and confident, some soft and shy, and some have strong emotional overtones, sometimes sounding angry, disgusted, curious, judgmental, light hearted, and so on.
Sometimes these voices try to motivate us to do something, “Come on, you know that kale is good for you, eat it!” or “Danger Will Robinson, stay away from that nasty person!” Some people say they don’t have any voices in their heads at all, just a silent awareness that doesn’t speak, and some people don’t know what the heck I’m talking about, thinking that voices in the head are a sign of mental illness.
Clearly for me, the voices in my head are often wrong, despite how confident they sound or how convincing their arguments are. Since that early experience of the “voice of God in my head” I take what inner voices say with a grain of salt. They are not trustworthy.
Who can you Trust?
Because of this failure of my inner voices to give me reliable information, I moved, in my twenties, from trusting my internal connection to God, to trusting the scientific method. I looked for what was real and trustworthy, listening to other humans who were experts in a field, but listening critically. Were they also just hearing what they want to hear, seeing what they wanted to see, and finding what they want to find? “The confirmation bias is strong in you, Luke!” It is strong in all of us and this is why the scientific method is more important than any other, it helps us avoid self-deception.
I never completely lost my belief in God, however, and while I eventually stopped expecting any kind of trustworthy answer to my prayers and questions, I still accepted that the bigness of the universe and complexity of life had a lot going on that science couldn’t currently or adequately explain. And even when it could, I often felt something was missing.
Of course “science” is as susceptible to the failings and foibles of any human endeavor, but the method remains valid if followed carefully. I continued to find reliable and trustworthy answers from scientists. Most people in the fields of science seem rational and logical and interested in truth.
So on average, I trust scientists the most.
Oh, and Beauty
Then one time in midlife I had an experience that shifted my thinking again. I was walking through a park near my home, and the sun was sparkling on a lake and I could see the sparkles through a curtain of new leaves. It reminded me of the lights blinking on the bridged of the Star Ship Enterprise bridge, the 1960s version. I wondered if there might be a message in the blinking and so stopped to watch it.
“Trust the beauty,” came unbidden into my mind.
I found this disconcerting and said out loud, “who said that?”
I listened but no answer came, so I turned to start walking again.
Then suddenly, “It’s all going to change,” echoed in my head.
Was this God or the devil I immediately wondered, reverting back to my old Evangelical conditioning. But something about it had the ring of truth and over the next few years I wrote two books on beauty that were fairly popular, and then experienced a profound amount of change, including a divorce I didn’t see coming, and new experiences I could not have imagined.
Were the unbidden words different from the answers to direct questions I had asked as a teenager and young adult? I decided they were, and it opened my mind to the possibility of deeper and more authentic experiences, but with much modified expectations.
What if I did not try to get an answer, I wondered, but instead focused on being open to serendipitous utterances?
Not Alone
The experience of hearing voices in my head with a range of authority and accuracy is not unique to me. Reports of hearing internal voices ranges from those who are barely aware of them to those who “channel wisdom from another realm” and I would place myself somewhere mid-way along that spectrum. My natural skepticism, fear of demonic influence (1960s cartoons of the angel and demon on each shoulder) and my abiding trust in science made me suspicious of the whole experience, but I also knew that my inner critic was one of the louder voices in my head and a fair bit of my therapy revolved around the messages it had for me.
Eventually I discovered the Internal Family System’s theory — a theory that arose out of years of clinical experience. IFS sees humans as having an internal family of parts. These parts are all variations of managers, firefighters, exiles, and guides. The inner family also has a leader known as the Self with a capital S. That Self is not born of trauma like some parts, but exists apart and unwounded. Much of the work of IFS is to unburden parts from the difficult roles they have taken on and allowing the Self to lead and guide.
Read more about my perspective on this here:
Getting to Jung
In my study of the work of Dr. Carl G. Jung and others in the Jungian tradition, I discovered a similar idea. In Jungian terms the Self is an archetype of wholeness for the psyche. In his book Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self Jung wrote: “The self is not only the centre but also the whole circumference which embraces both conscious and unconscious; it is the centre of this totality, just as the ego is the centre of the conscious mind.” Jordan Peterson says that Jung conceived of the psyche as a place, in which the Self resides.
For Jung, the self is not just our sense of identity. Most of what we think of as ourselves, is the territory of the ego and persona. The Self, on the other hand, is a holon1 imagined as an inner sun drawing all the other parts around it like a solar system. While the Self is not actually seen as a separate entity within the system (the sun itself), it manifests at the center of a solar system and the ego is like one of the planets. For more details on this idea check out my longer discussion of the concept in my article Individuation and the Self:
Demons and Daimons
The Jungian idea of the Self shares some qualities in common with the idea of the Divine Double, as outlined by Charles Stang in his book by that name. Both Strang and John Vervaeke point to Henry Corbin's work on the imaginal realm as a big influence on Jung’s conception of the Self.
Corbin and Jung knew each other and they influenced each other through their discussions and participation in the Eranos conferences. Corbin was one of the twentieth century's most important scholars of the divine double idea as it is expressed in Islamic (Sufism) and Platonic traditions.
The Divine Double points to an idea in circulation since before Socrates. It is the idea that every being (not just ever person) has a twin or double at some other level of existence. Stang outlines the widespread expression of this idea and notes that in most cases it seems to emerge from people’s experiences, rather than transmission from one culture to another. In general these ideas center on the belief that each person has a divine counterpart, twin, or alter-ego.
In western culture the divine double idea gave way to a more universal sense of us being made in the image of God. The apostle Paul wrote that “it is not I who live, but Christ who lives in me.2” and he affirmed the idea of being conformed to the image of Christ.3
Growing up in a Christian culture, and living within Evangelical Christianity for many years, I both struggled with but ultimately accepted the idea that surrender to Jesus was an ongoing part of discipleship, allowing Him to live more fully in me each day. By so doing I was to be “transformed into the image of Christ.” This idea of transformation is stated in 2nd Corinthians 3:18:
“And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another, for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.”
This passage is usually interpreted to point to an ongoing spiritual process whereby believers, through the Holy Spirit, are progressively conformed to the likeness of Christ by contemplating His glory.
See also:
Romans 8:29, “For those God foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son,”
1 John 3:2 “When He is revealed, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is,”
Philippians 3:21 speaks of Christ transforming our lowly bodies to be like His glorious body, highlighting the physical aspect of this change.
Colossians 3:10 refers to believers “putting on the new man who is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of his Creator.”
This idea, largely taken from the writings of the Apostle Paul, were used throughout the early years of Christianity to put to rest the idea that each of us has our own guiding entity or divine double. That was a pagan belief, and such influences were seen as evil, hence my suspicion, all these years later, that the voice I heard by the lake might be a demonic one.
Interestingly, the word demon has a colorful history. See “The Evolution of Demons” below:
Buried by the political move to secure Christianity as the dominant religion, the original idea of the Daimon has slowly been revisited. It has existed in Christianity to some degree in the idea of a guardian Angel, and writers such as Thomas Merton and Richard Rohr have talked about something similar when they refer to the “true self,” a presence different from our ego, that draws us into wholeness.
My current View
In reading both New Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton, A Hidden Wholeness by Parker Palmer, and Immortal Diamond by Richard Rohr I have accepted the idea that we have an ego (false self) and a Self with a capital S (true self) and that this way of seeing ourselves lines up closely with both Dr. Carl Jung’s idea of the inner psyche and Dr. Richard C. Schwartz’s conception of the Internal Family Systems (IFS).
I like Merton and Rohr’s term, the “True Self,” because it gets at the trouble I’ve had my whole life listening to my internal voices. Which ones can I trust, and in what situations? Discernment becomes a crucial skill in the inner world.
Never the less, among all these brilliant minds there is agreement — the True Self can be trusted because in some way is connected to the divine. The True Self is, I now believe, a way to talk about Christ or Buddha consciousness. Unfortunately much of the talk about those terms is over spiritualized, without a grounding in the study of consciousness itself, and more misleading than helpful.
My learning edge is here, on the boundary of academic study of consciousness, and the wisdom of ancient traditions who experimented with these idea for multiple generations.
Share your Thoughts
If you are interested in these topics, have scholarly recommendations, or know of researchers, writers, and others who are also exploring this intersection of thought, research, and experience, please share them in the comments.
I’m also interested to know which parts of this topic interest people the most. Is it the sense it makes of your life and experience, the intellectual satisfaction of something that rings true, or the application to your practice and work with others?
Arthur Koestler coined the term ‘holon’ to refer to an entity that is itself a whole and simultaneously a part of some other whole. And if you start to look closely at the things and processes that actually exist, it soon becomes obvious that they are not merely wholes, they are also parts of something else. They are whole/parts, they are holons.
Romans 8:29: “For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers.”