About a year ago, I explored the dangers of magnifying and amplifying false selves, in reference to William Arkle’s insights, succinctly summarized by Dr. Charlton below:
One of William Arkle's core insights is that - in normal, everyday life - people act from a multitude of false selves. The true self, which is of divine origin and potentially able to become a god, is what makes us what we are - but it may be completely buried beneath false selves; the true self may be utterly ineffectual.
These false selves are of many types. Some are the collections of traits - hereditary and socialised - that constitute our 'personality' as described and measured by psychology. Others are that mass of automatic, robotic skills and responses that we learn to deal with the problems of living; including skills like typing or driving, small-talk and routine social interaction.
You can see that false selves are the totality of what a person presents to the world; and usually also everything that a person is aware of in himself, insofar as he is aware of anything. So, our consciousness is not the same thing as our true self, because it may be unaware of the true self, may even deny the reality of any such thing as a true self.
False selves are therefore necessary but a problem, because whenever we make an effort to change ourselves in any way, the probability is that this will be a matter of one or more of the false selves trying to change us in a superficial and false direction.
As I noted in that earlier post, the last paragraph above is crucial. People sometimes feel that they need to change themselves in some way; however, more often than not, the changes they attempt or implement emanate from false selves rather than the true self, which is primal and eternal. Changes motivated entirely by false selves usually lead to false or specious orientations that end up maintaining or increasing the distance from the true self.
Dr. Charlton adds:
So, a basic problem is that most people, most of the time, do not know their true selves, and are not living from their true selves; but are instead (more or less unconsciously) simply doing and thinking whatever the process of these superficial selves are churning-out.
It is this which makes it counter-productive always to ‘do what comes naturally’ – since what seems ‘natural’ to us in this modern world is very often artificial, inculcated by propaganda or malicious intent, evil, terrorising, despair-inducing…
The insights above started my thinking about self-promotion, which I regard as the overriding motivation fueling most modern people.
We live in an era of unrelenting and ubiquitous advertising, marketing, peddling, branding, and hyping. Pervasive pinwheels of publicity, plugging, puffery, propaganda, and promotion pummel us at every turn.
None of this is new. It has existed and intensified since the Industrial Revolution. Mass production requires mass marketing for the masses. Simple enough; however, the conventional mass marketing of products now shares the stage with self-promotion; that is, the promoting, marketing, platforming, and branding of the self, amplified and expanded by the ever-increasing accessibility, expansion, and utilization of social media and portable IT technology.
Oscar Wilde once quipped that the only thing worse than being talked about was not being talked about. Modern people have made that witticism their guiding star and engage in levels of self-promotion earlier generations could have barely envisioned.
Yet the obsessive focus on self-promotion immediately begs the question of which selves one is promoting when engaging in self-promotion. Therein lies a great challenge of our time and place.
Our current stage of consciousness development must involve true-self-promotion—the discovery and bolstering of the true self through consciousness and intuition, yet this is predominantly a matter of looking inward and self-observing.
However, given the conditions of mortal life, such introspection and self-observation do not and cannot happen in the vacuum of space or somewhere out there in the ether but within a dynamic and changing world populated by a myriad of beings and the amplification of billions of false selves.
At the same time, it would be erroneous to assume that true-self-promotion could ever effectively occur via false-self-promotion thinking or activities, save perhaps negatively.
Some level of false-self-promotion in mortal life appears unavoidable—I am not blind to the fact that I engage in it myself.
With this in mind, a key challenge of our time and place is recognizing and acknowledging such self-promotion as false-self-promotion rather than regarding or justifying it as true-self-promotion.
Also, we should strive to acknowledge that any false-self-promotion that is artificial, hedonistic, expedient, inculcated by propaganda or malicious intent, evil, terrorising, or despair-inducing reduces the possibility of true self discovery and promotion.
One of William Arkle's core insights is that - in normal, everyday life - people act from a multitude of false selves. The true self, which is of divine origin and potentially able to become a god, is what makes us what we are - but it may be completely buried beneath false selves; the true self may be utterly ineffectual.
These false selves are of many types. Some are the collections of traits - hereditary and socialised - that constitute our 'personality' as described and measured by psychology. Others are that mass of automatic, robotic skills and responses that we learn to deal with the problems of living; including skills like typing or driving, small-talk and routine social interaction.
You can see that false selves are the totality of what a person presents to the world; and usually also everything that a person is aware of in himself, insofar as he is aware of anything. So, our consciousness is not the same thing as our true self, because it may be unaware of the true self, may even deny the reality of any such thing as a true self.
False selves are therefore necessary but a problem, because whenever we make an effort to change ourselves in any way, the probability is that this will be a matter of one or more of the false selves trying to change us in a superficial and false direction.
As I noted in that earlier post, the last paragraph above is crucial. People sometimes feel that they need to change themselves in some way; however, more often than not, the changes they attempt or implement emanate from false selves rather than the true self, which is primal and eternal. Changes motivated entirely by false selves usually lead to false or specious orientations that end up maintaining or increasing the distance from the true self.
Dr. Charlton adds:
So, a basic problem is that most people, most of the time, do not know their true selves, and are not living from their true selves; but are instead (more or less unconsciously) simply doing and thinking whatever the process of these superficial selves are churning-out.
It is this which makes it counter-productive always to ‘do what comes naturally’ – since what seems ‘natural’ to us in this modern world is very often artificial, inculcated by propaganda or malicious intent, evil, terrorising, despair-inducing…
The insights above started my thinking about self-promotion, which I regard as the overriding motivation fueling most modern people.
We live in an era of unrelenting and ubiquitous advertising, marketing, peddling, branding, and hyping. Pervasive pinwheels of publicity, plugging, puffery, propaganda, and promotion pummel us at every turn.
None of this is new. It has existed and intensified since the Industrial Revolution. Mass production requires mass marketing for the masses. Simple enough; however, the conventional mass marketing of products now shares the stage with self-promotion; that is, the promoting, marketing, platforming, and branding of the self, amplified and expanded by the ever-increasing accessibility, expansion, and utilization of social media and portable IT technology.
Oscar Wilde once quipped that the only thing worse than being talked about was not being talked about. Modern people have made that witticism their guiding star and engage in levels of self-promotion earlier generations could have barely envisioned.
Yet the obsessive focus on self-promotion immediately begs the question of which selves one is promoting when engaging in self-promotion. Therein lies a great challenge of our time and place.
Our current stage of consciousness development must involve true-self-promotion—the discovery and bolstering of the true self through consciousness and intuition, yet this is predominantly a matter of looking inward and self-observing.
However, given the conditions of mortal life, such introspection and self-observation do not and cannot happen in the vacuum of space or somewhere out there in the ether but within a dynamic and changing world populated by a myriad of beings and the amplification of billions of false selves.
At the same time, it would be erroneous to assume that true-self-promotion could ever effectively occur via false-self-promotion thinking or activities, save perhaps negatively.
Some level of false-self-promotion in mortal life appears unavoidable—I am not blind to the fact that I engage in it myself.
With this in mind, a key challenge of our time and place is recognizing and acknowledging such self-promotion as false-self-promotion rather than regarding or justifying it as true-self-promotion.
Also, we should strive to acknowledge that any false-self-promotion that is artificial, hedonistic, expedient, inculcated by propaganda or malicious intent, evil, terrorising, or despair-inducing reduces the possibility of true self discovery and promotion.
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