There’s no point in trying to fix the Extrinsic Self when it gets broken. It is meant to get broken, we could say – it has no future but to be broken. The whole point is that it should be broken; without any doubt at all, if the Extrinsic Self didn’t get broken then that would be an utter disaster… All our efforts are – however – directed towards the goal of preserving the integrity of the ES (even though this is ultimately going to prove impossible, and even though – as we have just said – it wouldn’t be a good idea even if it were). It is no exaggeration to say that the whole of our civilization is geared towards ‘the preservation and celebration of the Extrinsic Self’…
The reason it wouldn’t be a good idea even if we could fix the ES when it gets broken is because it’s hollow, because ‘there’s nothing in it’. The ES is an image, in other words – it’s a flimsy artifact, it’s ‘an appearance that we celebrate as an actual thing in itself’. It’s a kind of ‘false god’ or graven idol which we worship in error. We could say that the ES is a mental image or construct, and we could also say that it corresponds to the body as ‘a tokenistic representation of who we really are’ (i.e., we could say that it’s something that stands for who we are, but which isn’t who we are). Putting this even more simply, the Extrinsic Self is how we appear both to ourselves and others – it is therefore what we might call ‘the Theatrical Self’ (although we take it very seriously indeed).
We could further say that the ES is put together via the influences that have come to bear on us throughout our lives, which essentially comes down to the influence of the cultural matrix that informs our understanding of what it is to be a person, what it is to be a human being. It is ‘the end result of our conditioning’, in other words, so much so that there’s nothing in the ES that does not come out of this conditioning (which is to say, there’s nothing independent in it). One last comment that we could make about this extrinsically originated self of ours is that it is an appearance the value of which is negotiated within the context of the social group that we are part of. What we’re saying here therefore is that who we perceive ourselves to be (when we’re in the conditioned modality) is dependent upon how others see us, so that ‘other people’ (whether they exist in reality or not) constitute ‘the gallery to which we are obliged to play’.
None of the factors which go to make up the conditioned sense of ‘who we are’ are ours – all of them come from ‘the outside’ and this means that our situation is always going to be a dependent one; we are always going to be ‘wholly dependent upon external factors’, whether we consciously realise it or not. This translates of course into tremendous irresolvable insecurity on our part and we try to offset this insecurity – as much as we can – by getting very good at ‘playing the game’ (whatever that game might be). If we prove to be good at playing the game then we’re winners and if not then we’re losers, but the thing about this is that whether we’re winners or losers we’re still entirely dependent upon how we appear to the designated ‘external viewpoint’. We might feel good about ourselves on account of our proficiency at doing whatever it is that the external authority has told us we should be doing, but this doesn’t mean that we are any less dependent, any of the less ‘lacking in autonomy’. Our all-out attempt to find security in a fundamentally insecure situation is only increasing our dependence on the ‘all-determining external factor’, therefore.
Borrowing Carlos Castaneda’s terminology, we can say that what’s going on is that we’re trying to improve our situation by ‘increasing our allegiance to the Foreign Installation’, oblivious to the fact that it is a foreign institution, oblivious to the fact that what we are allying ourselves with is ‘the injurious factor,’ not the sense of insecurity that we are so averse to (which is actually telling us something extraordinarily valuable, if only we would listen to it). The point is that we don’t listen to it, however – instead of listening to it we seek to quell the uncomfortable feelings by rushing headlong into the welcoming arms of the Foreign Installation, which ‘richly rewards us for betraying ourselves’. The rewarding feeling of euphoria that we experience as a result of buying into the External Framework by which we can define ourselves is the coin in which our self-betrayal is paid, and the dysphoria (or despair) that follows is ‘the other side of the coin’ (which is where the awareness of the consequences of what we have done starts to dawn). As Kierkegaard says, ‘Insofar as the self does not become itself, it is not its own self; but not to be one’s own self is despair’.
To talk about ‘the Extrinsic Self’ is actually to be somewhat coy about what’s really going on – in the process of adaptation what is really going on is that we have abandoned ‘who we are’ (the Intrinsic Self, so to speak) and have allowed ourselves to be made into whatever it is that the External Authority wants us to be. It’s not just a case of ‘telling me what to do’ but ‘telling me who I am’. We give permission to the EA to mould us into whatever shape or form it wants, which is – needless to say – an extraordinarily perverse thing to do. We’re inviting the bully to abuse us at leisure; we are willingly – if blindly – entering into an archetypal abusive relationship with the EA. A relationship which – as is the case with bullies – can have one outcome. Bullies – like vampires – don’t need to be invited twice…
There is an unmistakable Gnostic flavour to the scenario that we have just described – we are willingly but blindly handing ourselves over to the tender mercies of the great manipulator, the great deceiver, who assumes the mantle of God whilst actually representing ‘the antithetical principle’. The angry and vengeful Father God is actually ‘Satan in disguise’ – which is, we might say, ‘the core Gnostic theme’. Regular Christians are happy to worship the benign (if stern) Deity that we read about in the Bible, whilst gnostics are ‘paranoid’ inasmuch as they suspect that this whole thing might be a sinister trick… One of the appellations of Satan is the Simia Dei, with regards to which Mark Shea (2001), writing for writing for the National Catholic Register, says, ‘It is a truism of the Catholic tradition that Satan, being only a fallen Angel, cannot create. All it can do is more comparative the works of God.’
The Catholic tradition does not go so far as identifying the God of the Old Testament with the Devil of course and the Church (under Pope innocent III) severely punished the Cathars for doing so in the notorious Albigensian Crusade, which took place between 1209 to 1229. The current position of the Catholic Church on the doctrine of the Simia Dei may thus be seen as somewhat disingenuous, to put it mildly. The psychological significance of the original Gnostic interpretation is therefore that ‘who we understand ourselves to be in our ordinary everyday lives is a mockery of the truth, a parody perpetrated by the False Creator’. Who we understand to be – in this view – is a gross distortion (or more accurately an inversion) of the truth.
Just as a sand mason worm builds a protective tube for itself out of grains of sand and fragments of seashells, we construct an identity for ourselves out of whatever material it is that the social milieu provides us with. The drawback here is that what we are constructing for ourselves is only meaningful in relation to the framework of reference that we have been provided with (which – as we have been saying – makes us totally dependent upon it for our very existence). In this sense therefore, the system in question is our Lord and Master. No matter how much we ingratiate ourselves with the External Authority it’s not going to do us any good – the more we conform to the dictates of this ‘False God’ the more alienated we become from the roots of our being and – thus – the more vulnerable to abuse we become. As in all abusive relationships, giving way to the demands that are being made on us by the abuser doesn’t make things any better for us – we’re in a ‘lose / lose situation’. The is the very same situation we come across in addiction where the only thing that eases our pain is to take more of whatever it is that is causing us the pain in the first place. If we deviate from the norm then we will punished, and yet if we conform (out of our cowardice) then we’re only storing up problems for ourselves in the future. This is what we might call ‘an archetypal situation’…
There is absolutely no way to escape the situation when we’re trying to do it on the basis of the ES (when we’re trying to do it on the basis of what we might call ‘the Rational Introject’). Whatever we do on this basis is slavery, just as whatever we do out of our uncorrupted Wholeness is freedom. We’re totally hung up on methods, and strategies, but it’s not what we do that’s important, it’s who it is that is doing it. The ‘who’ is everything – we can for example dedicate ourselves to yoga, Tai chi, meditation, prayer, good works (or whatever) but no matter what it is, no matter what we’re devoting ourselves to, if it’s being done for the sake of the mistaken idea of ourselves then – as Jung says – it’s a case of ‘the right means in the hands of the wrong man’.
Another way to talk about this is to say that we always do things for a reason, and this is our downfall. If we do things for a reason then we’ll never go beyond this ‘reason’, we’ll never escape it, and all reasons – without exception – come down to the Extrinsic Self. There is no such thing as ‘a reason that has nothing to do with the everyday self’ (or ‘a reason that has nothing to do with the everyday mind’), and the everyday self (as a construct of this mind) – is – as we have been saying – a hollow shell, an artificial construct, a ‘convenient mask and nothing more’. To do something for no reason is far too radical for us – we can only do what we can understand, and ‘what we can understand’ is only what the External Authority (or thinking mind) allows us to understand. ‘What we understand’ is the leash that we can never escape from.
There is absolutely no logical (or rational) way for us to escape the starting-off point which is our rational-conceptual identity but – then again – this doesn’t actually matter to us because we don’t want to escape from our rational identity. That’s the very last thing we want to do! What we want to do when we run into trouble (mental health-wise) is to fix the Extrinsic Self (or cure it, or perhaps heal it). We want our toys back, as Anthony De Mello says, we want to go back to where our security was. We’re homesick for that security. The ES can’t be fixed however, and it can’t be ‘healed’ either – no matter how good that word magically ‘healing’ might sound to us. Devices don’t ‘heal’. The ES can’t be healed because it isn’t alive; it isn’t an ‘organic’ sort of thing – it’s entirely artificial, it’s an image and nothing more. The Ego Construct is a no more than a ridiculous mechanism or device but when we’re in the identified state then we just can’t see this. The blindness is ‘part and parcel of our identification’ – the whole setup wouldn’t work if we could see the rational identity / self-concept for what it is (i.e., a two-dimensional label). By the same token however when do start to see the image for what it is then we can’t ‘unsee’ it. Something has irrevocably changed and the world we live in will never seem the same again. The glossy ‘super-buoyant carefree confidence of the ego construct’ has been compromised and the naive (which is to say, totally unfounded) trust that we used to have in it has gone forever. The bubble has burst, Humpty Dumpty has met his irreversible demise…
Image credit – flickr.com
