The idea that we have some sort of “true” self that we can discover is in some ways a new phenomenon.
The philosopher Charles Taylor (1931 – ) traced the development of this sense of a deep inner self in his book Sources of the Self (1989). Though thinkers such as St. Augustine pointed to a sort of unique interior world that we each have, it wasn’t until the Protestant Reformation and age of Enlightenment that a deep sense of individuality was established in the Western psyche.
A Hindu Idea?
The notion that we have some particular true self can be found in some ways in Hindu thought. Hinduism is a term that covers countless different sets of philosophy and practice, so it’s fair to say that, especially today, there are many Hinduisms. Within those, there is one strand of thought that says that we can achieve liberation by realizing our true self.
A number of techniques are prescribed in order to achieve this, but meditation is foremost among them. With meditation, we are able to see the impermanence and ultimate unreality of things that are not us, such as our thoughts, our possessions, and our body. According to this philosophy, we can eventually realize our deepest self, which is identical to God.
The Buddha was familiar with some strands of this idea. In one of his teachings, he suggests that we can categorize all of our experiences, or everything we might see or realize in meditation, into five categories. These are thoughts, sensations, physical form, impulses or volitions, and perceptions. Each of these, he showed, is changing and impermanent. Thus, he concluded that we have no “true” self. What is found instead is a temporary bundle on which we assign the label “me.”
Return to the Present Day
So there is at least this one ancient idea of a true self that many people today might know about. But the self-help industry is rarely very clear about what is meant when they offer to help you find your true or authentic self. Presumably, when we find it, we’ll be happy. And people earnestly searching for happiness are sometimes an easy target for ideas and techniques that don’t really go anywhere. After all, if you are chasing something that doesn’t exist, what does success even look like?
One of the points of Taylor’s book is that individuality and selfhood are dynamic and ever-changing things. As he said in 1994:
“We define our identity always in dialogue with, sometimes in struggle against, the things our significant others want to see in us. Even after we outgrow some of these others ― our parents, for instance ―and they disappear from our lives, the conversation with them continues within us as long as we live.”
This is one way we can think about seeing our true self as a something that is ever changing. Our quirks, our desires, our politics, and so on are all formed through our childhood and beyond. In many ways, we may still be working out long-forgotten arguments or feelings from our youth. One instance from my childhood that I remember vividly was going trick-or-treating with a boisterous, funny friend. At some doors, he would joke with the adult in character with his costume. One time, when I tried the same, the adult misunderstood me and took offense. After that, I stuck to the “trick or treat” script and let my friend do all of the ad libbing.
The memory of being “shut down” by an adult who misunderstood me affected me for years after that, and the feelings associated with it still arise sometimes when I’m misunderstood by someone. But now, rather than shutting down, I can note the feelings and choose actively whether to try to work around the misunderstanding in whatever way I can.
Facticity and Transcendence
One of my favorite philosophers is Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 – 1980). He was perhaps the greatest existentialist thinker ever to live. He described our sense of self as a nothingness between our facticity (our past, all of the brute facts that exist about us) and our future, which he called transcendence.
For Sartre, if we fall into identification with our facticity too much, we are living in bad faith. If we doom ourselves to being just the sum of our labels, we ignore the vast number of potential futures ahead of us. Perhaps I could never be a professional rock star, but I could join a local choir or singing group and make singing a big part of my life in the future. This, even though I don’t currently sing anything other than terrible unicorn songs to my toddler daughter.
Of course, the future is not a great wide open, as the Tom Petty song suggests. Our possible futures are limited, but there are still countless ways we might go.
On the other hand, we might also live in bad faith by ignoring our facticity. Our facticity is both a strength and a limiting factor that we should know and accept. As a 42 year-old guy with a job, family, and education, a lot of things probably are not in my future. If I go around ignoring this, by perhaps dressing like a ‘90s punk rock kid, I will be actively denying my reality.
Sartre offers his own version of authenticity or our “true self” in his magnum opus, Being and Nothingness. There, Sartre places in a footnote at the very end of his section on Bad Faith, “If it is indifferent whether one is in good or in bad faith, because bad faith reapprehends good faith and slides to the very origin of the project of good faith, that does not mean that we cannot radically escape bad faith. But this supposes a self-recovery of being which was previously corrupted. This self-recovery we shall call authenticity, the description of which has no place here.”
This radical escape, I think, is something that must happen again and again as we find a balance between our past and our future, and this is exactly what we find ourselves doing again and again in meditation practice.
Justin Whitaker, Ph.D., holds a doctorate in Buddhist ethics from the University of London. He has given lectures, and taught Buddhist studies and Philosophy at Oxford University, the University of Hong Kong, the University of Montana, and at Antioch University’s intensive study-abroad program in India. A certified meditation teacher, he is a regular contributor to Patheos.com, and Senior Correspondent for Buddhistdoor Global. He lives in Missoula with his family.