When I was about 4 my grandfather bought a 1951 Wolseley 6/80, exactly like the car on the left, above. Last week the car was loaded onto a trailer and moved from my brother Alistair's garage to somewhere in Auckland where some bloke is going to restore it. I saw the pictures of this end of an era, with a few pangs of regret at not taking up Alistair's offer to give me the car, and thought of my brother, who died this year before he could do the work of restoration himself.
And I remembered a conversation I had with Alistair on the day when Pop brought the new car home. I asked Al when the Wolseley would start to turn square. It was a perfectly logical question. Pop's previous car had been a 1927 Pontiac. I knew that old cars were big and square, like Old Pontie, and new cars were smooth and rounded like the Wolseley. Obviously, like plants, people, cats and many other things in my universe, at some stage cars must change shape, and I was interested to learn about that process. Alistair explained, and in retrospect, I am impressed that an 8 year old could make sense of my question, could take it seriously and could provide a satisfactory and truthful answer. Even at 68 years of age I'm missing the guidance of my big brother - his kindness and his unshakable opinions (often right) on pretty much anything you could wish to name.
There's a strange thing about childhood memories. Everything about me has changed, but I haven't changed. Since I asked that question every single cell of my body has been replaced many times over. Nothing I believed back then has survived unchanged. My knowledge and experience have grown exponentially, so that there is not one single thing - body or psyche - about that little 4 year old boy that remains. And yet he was me. I persist, unchanged. I remember the day and the street and the shiny car and my big brother. The consciousness which saw the Wolseley, and wondered, has pervaded continuously in the 64 years since. Perhaps this sense of continuity is a trick of the light - a strange emergent illusion of human psychology. But perhaps it is not. Perhaps it is a clue to who we human beings are.
Think for a moment about these statements:
- I am beside myself;
- I am beginning to understand myself;
- I don't know what I was thinking.
In each of these, how can we be both subject and object in the same sentence? When I say "I know myself" what is the "I" which is doing the knowing and what is the "myself" that is being known? This is the kind of question for a long night in a student flat when too much wine has disappeared from the bottles, but again, this question may not be just a silly semantic knot. Perhaps it is another clue. It almost seems that there is two of me: the person growing from childhood through adolescence and maturity to old age, changing moods and opinions sometimes by the hour, and developing in all sorts of ways; and the solid, continuous consciousness which looks out at the world through his eyes.
I'm not alone in thinking this. The great mystics of our faith, and of many other faiths, have made this distinction, sometimes (problematically) labeling the two selves the True Self and the False Self. It's a distinction which has been of growing importance to me over the past decade. I think this is the distinction which lies behind Jesus' puzzling teaching that if you want to gain your soul you must lose your soul. I think it is at the heart of Jesus' central message: The Kingdom of God. When I sit in silence on my meditation stool what I am attempting to do is to move my attention away from the place which usually holds it fast: my false self.
My false self is constantly changing. It is circumstantial, rather than chosen in that the overwhelming majority of what I think and feel, and the patterns of my behaviour (that is, all the stuff that I and other people think of as "me") arise from my biology or my culture or my personal experience. My false self won't survive the death of my body and my brain. My true self, on the other hand, is constant and eternal - by which I mean not so much living for a very long time as existing outside of time. I can observe my false self but I cannot observe my true self, any more than I can bite my teeth. Meister Eckhart says that the attempt to examine the true self is futile, but I can be in that place where the true self resides. He calls that place "The Ground" and he says that my ground is God's ground.
And it is this ground to which the New Testament calls me, from my warm chair and my coffee and my view of the lights of the city over the harbour, every morning before the sun rises.
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