To Be and Not to Seem

The lower self, all lower selves, they think they are important. They really overrate themselves enormously. It is divorced from reality. The lower self is totally unimportant and imagines it is the centre of the universe. – Robert Burton

A young man ran into an acquaintance after many years. No sooner had they exchanged polite greetings than the man launched into a long diatribe. He spoke of how his privileged position was very fortunate and how his friends in high places came forward to help him when he was hospitalised during the pandemic.

Lewis Carroll said, “I will not talk about myself. It is not a healthy topic.” The young man spoke at length about himself and created his identity around how big he was in the world. The lower self in all of us is a very inflated creature and its existence is built on imagination. 

Walt Whitman: ‘The best of me, when no longer visible.’ 

When one joins the School, one’s station in life is simply not important. Robert Burton in the book, ‘Self-Remembering’ said, ‘The greatest requirement of school is for each person to be true to himself. To do this, one must sacrifice the irrelevant.’

It takes years of effort for the steward to recognise and peel away the superfluous. The lower self believes its lies and is convinced it is real.

Who am ‘I’?

Plato reminds us to form good habits. When I joined the School and attempted to work with negative emotions, I realised that one is up against a formidable foe. The lower self will argue and assert itself repeatedly on one pretext or the other. By making objective classifications, developing right attitudes and using Work I’s, the old sense of self begins to become weaker. However, the Real ‘I’ is embryonic. Much discipline, patience and stillness needs to be cultivated to get behind the veil to the real. 

Who am ‘I’? As one gets more glimpses of higher states, one develops the ability to change location – from the unreal to the real, from the lower self to the higher self. In my own experience, I saw that during this process, the miraculous begins to reveal itself. What was once much theory and knowledge now becomes utterly beautiful and emotional. It pulsates with life as words lead one to the mystery of being. The Work, on the one hand, becomes intensely personal in that one learns how to transform suffering and use the keys to awakening for oneself. On the other, it also starts to become less one’s own, and shifts towards a surrender to higher forces.

Towards Nothingness

Much of one’s inner life is fraught with struggle. But when presence flashes through, there is seldom a sense of ‘me’ – the joy, the wonder or even the solemnity it brings, surpasses the realm of the personal. In brief moments of clarity, transformation becomes an expression of gratitude as one begins to understand that one is tethered to the will of Influence C. 

‘Great changes and shifts occur in me that I cannot describe, but they are very real. Ways open. A fragrance from the divine comes through. No one sees this, but it is the most profound event in my life.’ – Bahauddin 

Radhika Shah is a writer in India, and a student of the Fourth Way for several decades.