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Your False Self is who you think you are. Your thinking does not make it true. Your False Self is almost entirely a social construct to get you started on your life journey. It is a set of agreements between your childhood and your parents, your family, your neighbors, your school chums, your partner or spouse, and your religion. It is your “container” for your separate self. Jesus would call it your “wineskin,” which he points out usually cannot hold any new wine (Mark 2: 21-22). Your ego container likes to stay “contained” and hates change.
Your False Self is how you define yourself outside of love, relationship, or divine union. After you have spent many years laboriously building this separate self, with all its labels and preoccupations, you are very attached to it. And why wouldn’t you be? It’s what you know and it’s all you know. To move beyond it will always feel like losing or dying.
Perhaps you have noticed that we are not as comfortable with talking about dying as master teachers like Jesus, the Buddha, St. Francis, the “Teresas” (Avila, Lisieux, and Calcutta), the “Johns” (the Evangelist, the Beloved Disciple, and John of the Cross), Hafiz, Kabir, and Rumi. They deeply knew that if you do not learn the art of dying and letting go early, you will hold onto your False Self far too long, until it kills you anyway.
Adapted from
Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self, pp. 36-37
Gateway to Silence:
I am who I am in the eyes of God—
nothing more and nothing less.
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