What is Higher Consciousness? - II
We mistakenly believe that our body is the source of our suffering, but in fact it is our suffering that is the source of our body. Our body is “made of” self-pity; that’s what gives it its apparent solidity. Without self-pity when you bang it, it still hurts; but it doesn’t hurt “me;” it just hurts, period. The sense of there being a solid “me” there is simply self-pity, which we have learned from our parents and society.
Self-pity – focusing attention on a “self” – consists of nervous habits like the tensing ourselves up that we feel all the time we are awake; the need to be zipping about, fidgeting and fuming, attending to this or that urgency. Self-pity is the defensive wall we feel up against other people when we’re having sex with them, or even just talking to them. Self-pity is the attitude we put on when we wake up every morning, and the mask with which we greet life and other people all day long. If we were to wake up one day in someone else’s moods and concerns, with a wholly different set of self-pity agendas, we’d feel thoroughly disoriented. We’d think we’d been jettisoned into an alien universe.
Our self-pity – the feeling we conjure up with our customary moods and concerns – doesn’t really belong to us at all. We’ve merely learned it from our parents and society. Yet that is what we identify as our self, and defend with every fiber of our being. Most of us are so wrapped up in our self-pity that we don’t usually understand this vital point: that there is a Higher Consciousness there behind the self-pity. That’s why we cling so hard to our self-pity: we’re afraid that that is all that stands between us and annihilation.
In a nutshell, self-pity consists of comparing ourselves to others: feeling superior to others, judging and criticizing others, and expecting things from others. In other words, self-pity exists only in relation to other people. This is a very important point: what most people consider to be their “self” is a socialized phenomenon. Newborns do not have self-pity. They don’t have a central point of reference, a sense of where they end and other begins. To newborns things are moment-to-moment, and everything is one. There’s no abiding, continuing, separated “me” there.
Self-pity is like a piece missing out of a jigsaw puzzle. It is wholly defined by the others surrounding it. It is precisely the belief that we’re better than other people that makes us no better than other people. That belief is what traps us in our lower selves and hence our bodies. It is the wall that separates being awake from dreaming.
Our self-pity is created by our constantly thinking thoughts of shame and glory. If we analyze our habitual thinking, we will realize that it consists mostly of thoughts about the past and future. Thoughts about the past evoke feelings of shame, of embarrassment, of things which we try to hide from other people and to forget about ourselves. Thoughts about the future evoke feelings of glory, in which we revel in fantasies of approbation and vindication from other people – winning the lottery, or being famous, or finding our true love, or going to heaven when we die. Hiding shame and seeking glory are the engine which motivates all our social striving. Our thoughts of shame and glory make us believe that we are separate and unique and special – that we have self-existence, that the universe revolves around us.
(continued …)