Essay 2
June 3, 2022
The second essay in the series, Our Highest Possibilities, involves a crucial step we must take if we are to get in touch with that which is truly important: Stepping Outside.
A poem by Jalaluddin Rumi:
For years, copying other people, I tried to know myself.
From within, I couldn’t decide what to do.
Unable to see, I heard my name being called.
Then, I walked outside.
One question this raises: What did he walk outside of?
When I am looking out at the world from within my individual point of view, it is usually the “me” that I was enculturated to identify with, an individual separate from other individuals and from the world. This is my normal identity, the person I seem to be to myself during most of my waking hours. The traditional way to describe this person I think I am is “ego self,” and the best short definition I can give of ego is “everything I think of when I think of myself.”
Most of us identify with this image of who we are a great deal of the time. When we do, the ego is the center of awareness as well as our identity. There are, however, times when we are outside this identity. Ralph Waldo Emerson explored this “outside” throughout his life:
“We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes us receivers of its truth and organs of its activity. When we discern justice, when we discern truth, we do nothing of ourselves, but allow a passage to its beams.”
“The great nature in which we rest is that Unity, that Over-Soul, within which every man’s particular being is contained and made one with all other.”
“Standing on the bare ground, my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of Universal Being circulate through me.” Continue reading “Stepping Outside” →