Chapter 7: Dim Brightness
“So wise souls
leaving self behind
move forward,
and setting self aside
stay centered.
Why let the self go?
To keep what the soul needs.”
~ Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way, trans. Ursula K. Leguin (Shambhala, Boulder: 2019)
“Out of the dimness,” Walt Whitman wrote, “opposite equals advance.”
Every organism stays alive by constantly policing the boundary between its self and its environment. There are always scouts tacking about the liminal space, the no man’s land between in and out, self and non-self, life and death. But every organism, so far as we know, is spared the ordeal of this osmotic operation—consciousness. Humans don’t just struggle to survive—we struggle with the struggle. We desire an end to the struggle—not death, but heaven, nirvana, happiness, fulfillment, self-actualization, flourishing, retirement, and on and on. “Cuz people believe…that they’re gonna get away for the summer,” as Oasis sang in “Champagne Supernova.” Nihilism, Nietzsche wrote, is the “will to the end.”
It’s all too easy to get tangled in the thicket of terms that frequent our talk about human nature—persona, ego, self, soul, conscious, unconscious, mind, brain, spirit. But if we let go of the terms, or at least relax our death grip of them, it’s pretty easy to sort out. Carl Jung called the conscious self the ego, the part we show the world the persona, the part we hide from ourselves and others the shadow, and the truest part behind and beneath all of that the Self. In this passage from the Daodejing, what Jung called the ego is called “self,” and what Jung called Self is called “soul.”
Building on Jung’s concept of the shadow—the ugly parts of ourselves we disown, repress, and project onto others—Robert X posited the idea of a “golden shadow,” the gifts we project onto others. We give away our gold because we are afraid of what others will think of us and, most importantly, of our own power. More precisely, we are afraid that our own power is not really our own, that some secret cord ties us to the center of the world, that the energy of the cosmos courses through us.
But we aren’t really giving away our gold, we’re just hoarding it. We hoard it because we have mistaken self for soul (or, in Jung’s terms, ego for Self). This keeps us stuck in place—not centered, but floating. The paradox with hoarding, of course, is that you never feel secure and never think you have enough. If you hoard your breath, you’ll die. If you let it go, you’ll live. If we boil down the psychobabble of our self-talk, what remains is spirit, but spirit is just breath—the most bodily business. The Earth, as philosopher Jason Wirth writes, is simply the “conspiracy of life.”
Alan Watts half-joked—the highest truths always trade in humor—that we are really just “tubes.” We’re organisms after all! What a relief.
New to the Dao Du Jour? Check out “Day 0.”