I is a Myth

It is said the greatest of all human addictions is that to one’s self, which is to say, the addiction to an I that stands separate, alone, and ultimately doomed.

Looking back it’s pretty clear that the way I reinforced and ensured that addiction – the way all of us do – is by snatching up that myth of me created by my early caretakers, and running with it.

Over time I created – and continue to create – new chapters to the story and, not surprisingly, the longer the myth went on, the more fixed and intransigent the story became. I became an old dog immune to new tricks.

Like any addiction, the one to me has its problems. As we create and foster our myth, life keeps getting in the way. Our minds wish for our story to play out one way – perhaps to be rich or physically attractive or heroic – but life’s capriciousness wreaks havoc on such plans.

So what do good mythmakers do? They create even grander fabrications. They bullshit themselves.

Which is why so often when you listen to the story of one you know well the words spoken fail to jibe with the life perceived.  He is bullshitting himself about his relationship; she is bullshitting herself about her children. Lots and lots of bullshit.

Children and animals seem particularly attuned at detecting such discordant messaging. Horses and dogs have been known to buck or bite especially unsavory characters, and children have a sixth sense that steers them clear of life’s oddballs. No doubt why Jesus urged his followers to “be ye as children.”

By adulthood, however, their own myths have grown sufficiently thick to deaden such sensibilities, and most of us parents are able to recognize snippets of our own unconscious storytelling in those of our children.

How do we break the addiction? Joel Goldsmith and many like him counseled surrender, an acknowledgment that “of my ownself I know nothing.” We must recognize that the contents of our story, indeed, the very language and symbology in which it is constructed and stitched, is inherited.

Teach your children well, but in that teaching remind them too to question everything, including that which you teach. Robert Adams advised his students to carefully heed his words, but also to question every one of them. Remember, everything you think, say, or do is nothing more than an echo of what has come before (nothing new under the sun, and all that).

And trust that ‘still, quiet voice within,’ the one that signals caution or prudence if we but listen (a voice nearly vanquished in this age of always-on connectivity, noise, and hper-scheduled lives).

I believe there is a story of you and of me, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the fiction we’ve been telling ourselves.