Dear Friends and Family,
I am brief of letter this week to go directly to the reflections. We begin with the passage I shared last week from mystic, philosopher Peter Kingsley, then weave through a pre-dawn meditation that sets the tone for an exploration on self as we spiral hermeneutically toward beginning.
Wherever you are, whatever your life world, may the purity of being shine through you today and in the days ahead.
Ever in gratitude and with love,
Renée
So many of us today are concerned about [fill in the many blanks]. But there’s hardly anyone who notices the most extraordinary threat of all: the extinction of our knowledge of what we are.
For we are not just twenty or forty or seventy years old. That’s only an appearance. We’re ancient, incredibly ancient. We hold the history of the stars in our pockets.
That knowledge that’s gone missing has to do with the past. And yet it has nothing to do with the past as we understand the past. We are the past. Even our tomorrows are the past acting itself out. We like to think we can step into the future by leaving the past behind, but that can’t be done.
We only move to the future when we turn to face our past and become what we are.
So let’s start at the beginning.1
Winter is giving way, life’s underbelly preparing to part earth to bear sea. Birdsong begins now well before dawn. First comes a shriek in the distance, the towhee a bellringer ringing us all. Now comes the congregation: a cardinal’s lilt drifting toward a blue light not yet. Chickadees chime in, their raspy chords playing the air. And in the distance, a long whorl and seven-beat chirp as one note. Even the crows’ caws hint at something, and not an image of it to be seen. An aliveness quivers in the air.
I am at once asleep and awake, dead and alive, aware and not, and the inside is the outside and the outside, inside; and mater2 is matter—formlessness informing form. All is a promise, a milieu, a womb. All is becoming, and so are we, we humans, germinal cells of this yawning whole. But we forgot. We forgot what knows.
What knows is mater murmuring deep before beginning begins.3 What knows is giving birth to itself, and we are in labor, heaving and panting and groping in the dark. Some might say, we best get on with it, that we’ve come to this place and time to unforget. We’ve come to become what we came here to be. Even as this is so, the words of philosopher and poet, Báyò Akómóláfé, are here for us, “Times are urgent; let us slow down”4 and trust that we have come with what we need.
Kingsley slipped something into that penultimate sentence that could all too easily go without notice. He said, “become what we are.” He did not say, become who we are. Why would he put it that way? The clue is right there in the knowledge that’s gone missing. That knowledge is behind who, behind self. It’s in the what that we are seeking here. That knowledge is scribed in the history of the stars we hold in our pockets. It is primordial. It pulses in our cells. Riding on the coattails of stardust, we are. The mere whisper of us goes back that far.
But we don’t mind that in our day-to-day life. What we mind is what worries us, what’s directly in front of us, what we should and should not be doing right now, what’s for dinner, the horrifying news. The heartbreaking, horrifying news. All the while, we hold something inside that can see us through these altogether mundane with desperately terrifying worries that we can’t help but mind in these uncertain times.
Peer into the stardust with me for a few moments. Not as fantasy. Peer into the stardust from inside the cells that ceaselessly make you. What if that something inside holds the key to another way?
. . .
To be a who is to be a particular someone with an identity. To be a who is to be a per/sona—a sound sounding through
. . . a mask.5
To be a who is to play a part in the grand drama of human being. And there’s the catch. To be a who can all too easily leave being behind. When being is left behind, the present goes unlived, and the future is unavailed. We live an ongoing variation on what has come before, chaining being to an idea of how things should be. This ‘before’ is not the past that Kingsley is pointing to, but it does shape a future, a future, I believe it is safe to say, we do not want.
To look toward a future we may wish to share, let us look back to a certain critical moment in the past. Let us call this moment the emergence of self, the emergence of what we are calling who. And as we do so, there is one thing vital to remember: the emergence of self is already in the stardust we are made of; it’s in the mater that gave us.
. . .
Before the injunction to know thyself, there was no self to know. This is not, of course, because individuals did not exist. It is because self came about as an idea, a construct, some say about 3000 years ago, and with a particular force in the West.6 Not long after the emergence of the notion of self came the Delphic injunction to know thyself, which would echo across the ages and now.
Here is where that critical moment meets the past that Kingsley is pointing to. To know thyself, truly, was not by way of the self thinking thoughts about the self. It was gnothi seauton, to subject oneself in all sincerity to the true nature of one’s being.
The true nature of one’s being and the self we cling to as an identity are not the same. Subjecting ourselves to our true nature is what the Oracle inscribed at the Temple of Delphi in the age of the Seven Sages was urging. But through the ages, we lost our inner grip. We began clinging to a mirage. Knowing thyself became more about knowing who not what we are.
To be a who is to be an I. Imagine, for a moment, living without knowing that I am. Imagine only am. In our present mode of being, it could seem that am without I is impossible. Yet, we have only to fall into the first sighs of sleep to know am is so without I keeping watch. Something stays awake, else the heart would not beat, the breath would not flow, the body would grow cold.
What is it? That something is not I claimed as me or my (life) so much as it is the inner impulse of am (life). It is a force living through us. If we take this further, we might say that am is the awaring7 (aware-ing) and unfolding self-creating of being?
There it is, the word “self,” only with a different meaning. Even a single-celled being is a “self” in this creative sense, only, without an image of self, without an identity. To be alive is to be an individual always enfolding around the activities of living (autopoiesis) and unfolding with the world (ontopoiesis).8 Living is perpetual creative flux. The same is so of self. If this is so, where is the self?
One clue lies in that word, persona—sound sounding through a mask. The constructed identity of self is a mask, something facing the world. The created “self” is kin to sound sounding through—no thingness to be grasped. No image to be seen. “Hidden” by the mask. Created “self” moves and is moved, enfolds and is enfolded by the world like birdsong sounding the air before dawn. Created “self” sounding through is both I and am. Where does it begin, and why does this matter?
I leave you to wonder this twofold question until next week. . . .
Peter Kingsley, In the Dark Places of Wisdom (Point Reyes, CA: Golden Sufi Center, 1999) pp. 9–10, emphasis added.
Mater is L for mother, the divine creative impulse.
With appreciation here to Catherine Keller, Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (New York: Routledge, 2003) and Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Murmurring Deep: Reflections on the Biblical Unconscious (New York: Schocken, 2009).
Báyò Akómóláfé, “A Slower Urgency.” https://www.bayoakomolafe.net/post/a-slower-urgency
Etymology of person: L. per—through; sona—sound.
Denotes the beginning of the Axial Age, a term coined by 20th-century German philosopher, Karl Jaspers, to denote broad-sweeping changes in human ways of being, the beginning of what 20th-century Swiss philosopher, Jean Gebser, referred to as the onset of the Mental structure of consciousness.
Awaring is the verb form of aware or awareness, a term coined by Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin, trans. Noel Barstad and Algis Mickunas (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1953).
Autopoiesis: G. auto—self; poiesis—creation. The term was introduced in 1972 publication by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Autopiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (Editorial Universitaria). The concept of ontopoiesis denotes the mutual interchanging and unfolding between self and world and world and self. Multiple references. The term was coined by Anna-Theresa Tymieniecka in “The Origins of Life, in ed. Anna-Theresa Tymieniecka, Origins of Life: The Origins of the Existential Sharing-in-Life (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2012). See also Olga Louchakova, multiple titles, especially, “Ontopoiesis and the Self: Phenomenological Investigations of Ecological and Nonecological Condition”; Freya Mathews, multiple titles, a good starting point: “Invitation to Ontopoeietics” and recent guest post with Peter Reason here on Substack.
Your post this morning for me followed a Vanity Fair article about Apple’s new VR headset. With that juxtaposition, I want a reminder of stardust written over the entry to every Apple Store: If you are stardust, now what? Would the reminder blunt the hypno-appeal of the next tech drug? I wish. Ok then, if I am stardust in an age of tech drugs, then what? I hope the question stays all day. Lovely writing, as usual. I love the choir of birds.
I love that you've referenced Báyò Akómóláfé. The work he's been doing feels fresh and very important and I'm joyful to find someone else who knows and cites it. Thanks for the reminder to hold onto that slow and eternal space. I'm remembering Koyama's 'three mile an hour god's here, too. Good to he in this online community.