Category: The Subject of Selves

Once the whole is divided, the parts need names. There are already enough names. One must know when to stop.

— Tao Te Ching 32 (Feng/English)

Ego is always wanting to ‘make a difference.’ But there are differences enough already. Maybe one should make a connection instead.

Belief is personal; truth is transpersonal.
The aspiration to enlightenment is your own; enlightenment comes to all beings at once.

Sioux healer Black Elk told John Neihardt (1932, Chapter 18):

… many I cured with the power that came through me. Of course it was not I who cured. It was the power from the outer world, and the visions and ceremonies had only made me like a hole through which the power could come to the two-leggeds. If I thought that I was doing it myself, the hole would close up and no power could come through. Then everything I could do would be foolish.

Later in the same chapter:

It is from understanding that power comes; and the power in the ceremony was in understanding what it meant; for nothing can live well except in a manner that is suited to the way the sacred Power of the World lives and moves.

A living system is both whole and part. The whole is differentiated (into parts), and the part is individuated to play a specific role in the larger system. To be a self is to have a world, and to have a self is to be a world. The wholeness of the world is the closure of the process of living embodied; the partiality of every personal view is the differential individuation of cosmic self-knowledge.