An idealized self sounds like a model of self-acceptance. But, if we take a moment let’s listen to what it tells you:
“You’re doing the right thing. You’re in control. No one can hurt you. Just keep being the way you are now. “ Thus shielded, you can hardly do wrong, and if you do your misdeeds are quickly covered up and forgotten. The beauty of having an idealized image of yourself is that you actually do feel good about who you are.
However, the image sometimes substitutes for a painful reality.
As you would expect by now, the shadow self has something to say in this matter.
At regular intervals one icon of righteousness, usually a preacher or a public moralist, falls into scandal. Invariably these individuals have committed the very sins they accuse others of, improper sexual misbehavior being the most typical. Cynically we imagine that these Elmer Gantries are rank hypocrites that they live out the sham of public virtue so they can pursue a vice in private.
In reality fallen icons are extreme examples of an idealized self-image. Their powers of denial were superhuman. The shadow couldn’t touch them.
Then, when the shadow did surface, an enormous sense of guilt and shame surfaced with it. Once they fall, these professional saints indulge in extremes of public atonement. But, even in contrition, nothing feels real.
If you pull back from the spectacle however, the whole drama could have been avoided. An idealized self-image isn’t a viable solution.
Only true self-acceptance is, and when that happens there is nothing for others to reject. This doesn’t mean you will be universally loved. Some one else might still walk away, but if that happens, you won’t feel rejected. It won’t result in an emotional wound.
So, how do you know if you are falling for a false sense of self, which is what an idealized self-image is?
Dismantling your ideal self-image of yourself is a challenge, because this is a much subtler defense than simple denial.
Denial is blindness; the idealized self-image is pure seduction. The way out is to go past all images. There is no need to defend who you really are. Your true self is acceptable not because you are so good, but because you are complete. All things human belong to you.
The most important ally you have is awareness. Judgment is constrictive. When you label yourself or anyone else as bad, wrong, inferior, unworthy, and so on you are looking through a narrow lens.
Expand your vision and you will be aware that everyone, however flawed is complete and whole at the deepest level.
The more aware you are, the more you will accept yourself.
This isn’t an instant solution. You must spend time looking at all the feelings you’ve so diligently denied, suppressed and disguised. Fortunately those feelings are temporary; you can go beyond them.
There’s nothing to reject, just a lot to work through.
This is how a figure like Jesus or Buddha could have compassion for anyone.
By seeing wholeness behind the play of light and dark they found nothing to blame. The same holds true along the spiritual path you follow.
As you see yourself more completely, you will have compassion for your faults, and that will lead to complete self- acceptance.
The One Versus the Many.
The solution: Surrender to being.
Finally we arrived at the war in your soul.
At this level, the conflict is very subtle, which sounds odd because we tend to think that the cosmic battle between God and Satan must be titanic.
In fact, it’s very delicate. As you get closer to your true self, you begin to sense that you are part of everything. Boundaries soften and disappear. There’s a blissful feeling of merging. As beautiful as this experience is, one last resistance crops up.
The ego says, “what about me? I don’t want to die, like the Wicked Witch in the Wizard of Oz, whose last words were “I’m melting, I’m melting!”. The ego has been incredibly useful. It has guided you through a world of infinite diversity. Now you are about to experience unity. No wonder the ego feels fatally threatened; it sees its usefulness (and its domination coming to an end).
The ego mistakes surrender for death. To be whole involves surrender. You give up one way of seeing yourself, and in its place a new way dawns. “Surrender” isn’t a welcome word to the ego, because it connotes failure, loss of control, passivity, the end of power.
When you lose an argument, aren’t you surrendering to the winner? Of course!
Any situation couched in terms of winning and losing makes surrender seem weak, shameful depressing, and unworthy. These are all feelings at the ego level, however. Seen without ego, surrender becomes natural and desirable. A mother who gives her children what they need isn’t losing, even though one could say she’s surrendering her needs in favor of her children’s. That would be a false perspective.
When you give yourself out of love, you lose nothing. In fact, loving surrender is like a gain. Your sense of self expands beyond ego-driven needs and desires—these can never lead to love.
Surrender is not of the mind. You cannot think your way there. Instead, you must journey into pure consciousness, before words and thoughts arise. That’s the whole purpose of meditation, to carry a person beyond the thinking mind, which means beyond conflict.
Eventually one longs to experience the true self completely.
The shadow is a thing of denial, resistance, hidden fears, and repressed hopes.
The spiritual path delivers everything; it can resolve all conflicts. But we expect too much of it when we ask for a panacea. Spiritual unfoldment is delicate. It can’t be reached when your mind is agitated or your attention overwhelmed by stress and other outside pressures. In other words, wholeness is a cure-all, but not an instant cure-all. You need to prepare the right conditions for going inward.
You only have to gaze around you at the world to see the proof of that beauty, form, order, and growth have survived for billions of years. In dealing with your shadow, you are aligning yourself with the same infinite power.
The instant that life is split into good and evil, the self follows suit. A divided self cannot make itself whole.
It is important to understand Islam from a cultural point of view because the basis of much of the current turmoil within Muslim countries and conflict with their neighbors can be attributed to cultural clashes. Consequently, a clear understanding of culture and its derivatives is necessary to comprehend the relevance of Islam to the civilization of Muslim peoples in the twentieth century and beyond.
The word “culture” comes from the Latin cultura, which is a derivative of the verb colere meaning “tending” or “cultivation.” It was first recorded in the Oxford Dictionary of English in 1510 as meaning: “training of the mind” or “manners.”1 However, culture in anthropological usage, may be defined as “the way of life of specific group.”
“Basically, the idea of culture arises from the observation that what human beings do and what they refrain from doing is, in part, a consequence of being brought up in one group as opposed to another. People have a social heredity as well as a biological heredity.”
Biological heredity represents practices common to all human societies, like, sleep, marriage, care for children and smiling, while social heredity refers to customs which usually vary from one society to the next. A simple definition of culture would then be ‘the man-made part of the human environment.’ “Members of the human species are trained in the family and in their education, formal and informal, to behave in ways that are conventional and fixed by tradition.”
While virtually all students of man agree upon the indispensable importance of the concept of culture, no single definition has yet won universal acceptance.
The culture of most of the world today is that of Western Europe and America. It was exported to the remainder of the world during the period of European colonization and continued during the neo-colonial era by way of indirect rule. In the twentieth century Western culture has been promoted on a massive scale through the far-reaching effects of the media. Today, it is not surprising to find in the pages of National Geographic pictures of South American Indian youths in loin cloth in the middle of the Amazon wearing baseball caps with a Nike logo or Mongolian horsemen in the middle of the Gobi Desert wearing striped Adidas sweat pants and Rebook trainers.
Western culture now represents the dominant cultural influence in most countries, both non-Muslim and Muslim. And it is the natural conflict that arises from the clash of cultures, which dominate the social and political policies in both the West and the East. Harvard University Professor, Samuel P. Huntington summed up the essential issues of the cultural clash in his following observation.
“The underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power. The problem for Islam is not the CIA or the U.S. department of defense. It is the West, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the universality of their culture and believe that their superior, if declining, power imposes on them the obligation to impose that culture throughout the world. These are the basic ingredients that fuel conflict between Islam and the West.”
In this statement Professor Huntington dismisses the usual claims regarding Islamic fundamentalist terrorism as the major threat to the New World Order. Western media constantly reduces the world’s problems to this common denominator. The New York Times carried an article stating, “Muslim fundamentalism is fast becoming the chief threat to global peace and security as well as the cause of national and local disturbance through terrorism. It is akin to the menace posed by Nazism and fascism in the 1930’s and then by communism in the 50’s.”
However, Professor Huntington brushes such claims aside and identifies Islam itself as the main problem for the West because its civilization is fundamentally different from Western civilization. He also identified two distinct qualities of Muslims, which, in his opinion, contribute to the problem. The first is that Muslims consider their culture superior to all other cultures. Most Muslims will openly claim that Islam is better than all other religions and philosophies. This attitude is a natural consequence of their belief that the religion of Islam was revealed from God. It is only logical to assume that the culture created by practicing God’s religion must, of necessity, be superior to any culture resulting from human experiment.
The other quality is that Muslims desire that the laws that govern them be Islamic. Much of the turmoil in the Muslim world today, in Algeria, Egypt, Chechnya, Dagestan, etc., is a direct result of this desire. During the era of European colonization of the Muslim world, the colonial administration substituted European laws for Islamic law. During the neo-colonial era, Muslims who were trained by their colonial masters were given the reins of government of Muslim territories and continued to govern according to European law. Today the vast majority of Muslim governments rule according to British, French, German and Dutch laws, and Muslim law is only partially applied in the area of family law.
Consequently, as the wave of Islamic awareness sweeps over the Muslim world, the aspiration of Muslims for self-determination has exploded in a series of violent confrontations with existing administrations. In places like Indonesia, where since the era of Sukarno (1945 – 1965) and his successor Suharto (1968 – 1998), Pancasilia, has been the state philosophy/religion taught in all schools to the population of some 200 million Indonesians, 95% of whom are Muslims. And, to suggest that Islamic law be introduced was considered an act of treason.
In 1998 Suharto was finally overthrown by popular dissent. All of those who clamored for power, including Suharto’s henchman and substitute, B.J. Habibe, immediately began paying some allegiance to Islam. And in recent elections, Sukarno’s daughter, Megawati Sukarnoputri, was decisively defeated by Nahdlatul Ulama’s Abdurrahman Wahid, who is half-blind and can hardly walk.
On the other hand, Professor Huntington negates the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as the chief enemy of Muslims. Although the CIA has a reputation for toppling governments and assassinating political figures, the professor assures Muslims that it is not their chief enemy. He further rules out the American military complex in spite of its presence in Saudi Arabia, its decimation of the Iraqi army, its launching cruise missiles into the Sudan and Afghanistan, and its open support for Israel.
The real source of the problem facing the Muslim World, according to Professor Huntington, is Western civilization itself. He further explains that the root of the problem lies in the fact that the West considers its culture superior to all other cultures. It considers its civilization and its leading principles what all human beings should aspire for and live by.
Why?
Because, according to Darwinian theory, the evolutionary process refines and improves human beings and their society. From our supposed savage ape-like origins to twentieth century civility, human society has progressed relentlessly. During the last few centuries, the evolutionary principle of “survival of the fittest” appears to have placed Western nations and their culture at the top of the pyramid of human civilization.
Thus, claims the West, the foundational principles of their civilization must be the most suitable for human society. Professor Huntington takes the issue another step further, pointing out that the West not only considers its culture the most appropriate for all nations, but it considers itself duty bound to impose their culture by any means necessary, politically or militarily, on the rest of the world. Professor Huntington has correctly identified these as the essential elements of the cultural clash facing the world as it enters the 21st century.
One of our greatest problems still remains the inability of the religious world to cut through its own orthodoxies to the arrival at some point of common vision or insight.
The goal of religion is to establish an inner strength against all exterior circumstances. The nature of God is truth, beauty, love and joy. These are divine qualities, and the universe in which we live was founded upon these great spiritual principles. Yet we accepting these as true, still do not experience in our own life the wonderful inward composure of spirit that comes from the simple acceptance that God is good.
Perhaps one of the reasons we have trouble with this situation is that we mistake the works of men for the works of God. We live surrounded by a peculiar confusion of our own kind-a confusion that is rooted largely in the inability of devout persons to find beauty in their own devotion. Most religions emphasize a certain stern sense of duty so therefore, religion has come to be a more or less militant dedication.
The individual feels that he must come under a very strict administration by the universe; that his spiritual salvation depends upon the unquestionable obedience to something that is superior to himself, which he cannot and does not rightly define. So instead of religion bringing a great release of spiritual values, it has a tendency to bring submergence, a state of the individual being tied to some credo, and this cannot be entirely the beautiful thing, which we sense it to be.
Practically all-religious people believe that God is love, but they do not believe it sufficiently to find God’s love in the things that are. They believe in some way that an evil power has corrupted God’s love, and that there must be some great process of redemption by means of which it can be restored again. There is a process of redemption but it is nothing but an awakening. It is a waking up again into the life that is eternal.
This whole thing is a strange world of delusions in which individuals try to delude each other with only reasonable success, and manage to delude themselves with greater success. And in this delusion, everything that is really fine and happy and good and joyful is sacrificed. It is like a strange intoxication of the alcoholic, in which his toxicity causes him to finally to fall into the terrors of delirium tremens.
To most people of antiquity, God had the implication of great Joy, and this is something we seem to have lost. In the sense of responsibility and duty, we have in some way lost the happiness, and have been unable to make our faith an immediately beautiful, joyful experience of conduct. We affirm these things we believe that Deity wants us to be happy, but we do not seem to find a way of being happy. The moment it looks as though we might be happy, we become conscience-stricken, for nearly all of our so-called daily happiness is so selfish and self-centered that we can scarcely justify our own attitudes.
God wanted to be made manifest in man. God wanted to know himself in man. God wanted to release all the good, beauty, the truth, the love, and the joy through man. These different releases were not evil things if we understand them correctly and build our lives in which good brought joy, truth brought happiness and wisdom brought peace of soul.
Recognizing that the dictionary is the expression of our usage of words, we can check the word happiness to see what the dictionary has to say about it. The first definition given is “good fortune and prosperity.” Now this is exactly what we would expect, for it is typical of our idea of what constitutes happiness. Happiness is having more than the neighbor, a certain smug sense of satisfaction at some phase of real or assumed superiority. Happiness today comes to the individual who wins in some kind of a competition with others. It also has to do something with luck, according to this definition “good fortune” some sudden unexpected pleasure that comes to us, perhaps out of space which we are all looking for but which the majority of us never find.
This happiness therefore simply means a certain creature reaction it is the individual who says, “I am perfectly willing to smile and be happy if everything goes my way. If I have what I want, do as I please, and influence other people as much as I want to, I will be happy.” One thing that happiness must require today is a vast amount of forgetfulness. If we could forget our own past, forget everything that other people have done to us, and forget all the mistakes that we have made, the result would probably be a colossal peace of mind; but we cannot forget these things.
The idea that happiness is simple the result of status – the larger swimming pool, the better car, the larger home- these things can no longer be regarded as valid. Yet this is where the dictionary takes its first stand, because it means just that to most people, and words have no meanings except the usage that we give them. When an individual tells us they are happy, it almost certainly means that they have been favored in some way by circumstances outside themselves, that something desirable or pleasurable has happened to them from the outside.
The dictionary does however; give us a second meaning for happiness, and that is, “a state of well-being.” Now, if the truth were known, that should have been the first definition, because a state of well-being must precede any effort to be happy. It really does not make much difference whether fortune smiles or not; unless the individual has some experience of well-being within himself, even the greatest gifts that nature can bestow, or the greatest success that can be attained, will not bring any real or lasting happiness. So happiness is a condition that must be cultivated through the establishment of a state of well-being.
We can talk about how to be happy until the end of time, and still be miserable. We can develop all kinds of reasons why we should be grateful, and still remain ungrateful. There has to be something more than in intellectualizing, or even a theologizing, of the idea. In theology, we are constantly reminded of the blessing that we receive from heaven, but very few people are very excited over these blessings because they are really still fighting desperately against the small personal miseries that beset them.
In order to discover happiness, we must have some kind of a vital experience of it within ourselves. There has to be a living kind of happiness, and the only way we can combat the experience of unhappiness is to set up the experience of happiness.
There used to be something of a gaiety, naturalness about growing up something that we have lost. As a result very few people have any vital experience of happiness. They have nothing to hook the happiness concept onto. Broken homes, depressions and insecurity have taken away the laughter, joy and close association with family. Because of these trends, which have become more and more dominant since we have depended so heavily upon artificial sources of pleasure, the average person today does not have the living inner visualization of happiness set within himself.
It becomes very easy for us to be critical and suspicious of other people, to be dissatisfied and rebellious, until finally we have developed one of the heaviest burdens of the present generation – hypercriticism. There is hardly a day when we do not criticize something. We seem to live in a world that suggests criticism, and although we can do nothing about it, still we become critics, constantly dissatisfied.
Out of this dissatisfaction comes a subtle form of self-excuse mechanism. Feeling that we live in a world that is topsy-turvy, in which nothing makes sense, we have a wonderful reasons to be poor citizens. We have every reason to excuse our own failings. We become victims of circumstances, and we say “How can one individual live well in a world that is going to pieces?”
One thing we do not realize in all of our thinking, however, is that this generation is not essentially different, in its basic problems, from the generations in which individuals did find a certain amount of security and peace of mind. We cannot hope that we can create entirely new solutions. We can create new solutions only if the problems that we face are new, but the problems that we face are not new. They are the eternal heritage of our kind.
We all want to live in a world in which we are happy but we also want a world tailored to our desires. We want the world to make us happy, to provide us with everything we need. We want to surround ourselves with situations that will give us happiness and pleasure. Of course, as long as everyone in the world feels that way, the complex gets more and more difficult, because each person trying to fulfill his own ambitions out of the reservoir of world materials ultimately comes into conflict with every other human being and the tensions simply increase and compound.
Happiness is not a matter of environment but of the adjustment of consciousness to the values of life; that the very things that make us unhappy could perhaps be the sources of happiness if we understood them correctly. Always complication destroys peace of mind, and without peace of mind, there is no real hope that any individual can be truly happy. Of course, we have our moments, but even in those moments the heavy burden of destiny hangs over us.
There have always been some who have realized that unhappiness was neither desirable nor necessary; so they have left us rules and patterns by which we could guide our way to a certain degree. A life to find happiness must be a life that has discriminated values. If we use our minds we come to one standard of value. If we use our hearts and our intuitions, we come to another standard of value, and it is this second standard that must come first. In order to know what happiness is, we must finally decide what will make us happy.
We all feel that when we can pay off the mortgage, we will be happy, when we can get that new car we will be happy. We have the simple feeling that if we have what we want, we will be happy. But what do we want? Above all things, we want freedom of fear. We want freedom from ignorance. We want freedom of faith. We want freedom of growth. Of all things we want freedom from insecurity within ourselves, freedom from mental and emotional sickness. We want freedom from the ills and weaknesses, which we recognize in our own natures. The only real freedoms the only real things that can bring us happiness are those attainments within ourselves by which we are free forever from the delusions and illusions that cause misery.
The most difficult and miserable adventure in the world is the desperate quest for personal happiness. The individual, who makes happiness their goal, will fail, because they usually have the wrong concept of what will make them happy. We have not yet realized that we have to be happy from within and that all other things are accidents and incidents- the elements of a providence that may change at any moment.
Pythagoras said, “all men know what they want, but only God knows what they need.” In our desperate effort to get what we want, we are miserable, we must therefore change to the concept of what we need, to what is most necessary to us. We live in a universe in which love and wisdom, and joy are the very substance out of which creation fashioned things. We live in a tremendous potential for good, and to realize this and cooperate with it, is to begin the unfoldment of our own lives.
The ancients believed there was only one life, the life of God. To live with love for this life was to live in peace with it; to live in hate and fear was to destroy God. The individual who hates and fears is the only true atheist. No one can hate, fear, and worship at the same time.
Happiness does not arise from copying other people because the things that make them happy might make us miserable. There has to be a universal happiness- something infinitely beyond the individual patterned pleasures which we recognize; and this happiness is the freedom of life in itself. It is not necessarily a theological state at all. It is the transference of our citizenship, an inner belonging to another world, so that the suddenly the world of realities becomes meaningful and we realize that this material creation floats as a bubble in an infinitely vaster spiritual creation; that far beyond anything we can estimate is the power of infinite love infinitely working.
