Howard Sasportas, in The Dynamics of the Unconscious:
“The True Self is the deepest part of your individual nature — who you are beneath all your frills and trimmings. It is your own personality: who you are as a separate, individual being. Discovering your True Self is a process of freeing yourself from the false self you have adopted while growing up. In order to reach your True Self, you will have to break through and change many old personality patterns. And… this can be quite frightening — to risk showing yourself as you truly are, to lift the lid on your defences. So, naturally, many people resist the True Self because of everything they have to go through in order to reach it.
The True Self, however, is not the same as the Higher Self. Connecting with the True Self does not necessarily mean experiencing mystical union with the rest of life. Perceiving your True Self does not lead to transcending your sense of separate identity and merging with a greater Whole. In other words, the True Self is not the final breakthrough. After reaching the True Self, there is still further to go… Discovering the True Self is what Maslow calls self-actualization. Finding the Higher Self is what he refers to as self-transcendence. The True Self gives you a sense of who you are in yourself; the Higher Self is the perception that, at your deepest level, you are of the same substance as the rest of the universe, that you are part of something much greater than yourself.
According to Maslow, self-actualized people experience an inner sense of liberation and freedom that others do not necessarily experience. But when realized individuals feel this freedom, they often ask: ‘Freedom for what? I can be who I am — but for what?’ It is precisely at this moment that they receive a ‘call’ from the Higher, or Transpersonal Self to use their energy in the service of something greater than themselves. They feel an inclination to serve; they sense that there is meaning in the universe and that they have some role to play in making the world a better place. Instead of simply the freedom to be themselves, they begin to think in terms of obedience and surrender to something higher. They move from self-actualization to self-transcendence.”
I love useful distinctions, and that is why I share with pleasure this distinction between the “authentic Self” and the “Higher Self,” between “self-actualization” and “self-transcendence.” After we develop the authentic Self, the inward journey continues. After we free ourselves from false masks, чужди expectations and prescribed roles, we begin to hear more distinctly the longing for “something more” — the call of the Higher Self.
In Jung’s analytical psychology, these two phases correspond to the two parts of the individuation process. The first concerns the establishment of ego-identity in the outer world; the second concerns its transformation. The latter occurs when the centre of the Self shifts from the empirical personality / ego to the archetype from which it derives (the Self as wholeness, the God within us). In the process of individuation, the more we become ourselves and differentiate from others, the more we realize that nothing human is foreign to us. That we are nothing more than an ordinary man or woman.
Carl Rogers writes of the same: “The more deeply we enter into our own uniqueness, the more we discover the whole of humanity,” and in Sasportas’ book we read:
“If your awareness is stably established in the Higher Self, you could be called an enlightened or realized being. Enlightened people still function with an awareness of their own individuality, but alongside it there is an equally strong sense of their unity with the rest of creation. Universality does not exclude individuality.”
I am also reminded of the words attributed to Yane Sandanski, that “the slave fights for freedom, and the free person fights for perfection,” which likewise reflect the two stages on the path toward the deeper centre of the Self. The paradox is that the next step after freedom is a certain kind of unfreedom — the desire to serve something higher than one’s personal ego-interests. To subordinate the will of the ego to the higher will.
In order to serve in the right way, however, we must first become free.
Kameliya Hadzhiyska
Note: The quotations are translated from Bulgarian and are not presented as verbatim citations.
