Sense of Self

As I was a late developer in social relations, I tend to stop and think about interactions that others carry out automatically, such as who does what when I pass someone in the street. In this instance my starting point is a combination of my (well suppressed) mammalian brain that wants to go up to them and sniff them, or groom them; and a feeling of respect, even awe, at this other being who comes towards me. I’ve already posted about the strategy of leaving the mammalian brain bit to your dog to sort out, but as I’m dogless that doesn’t help me. So let’s forget about that one, and look at the second, the reaction to the sacred in the other person.

I was once told that the greeting, traditional in most parts of India, of bowing my hands palm-to-palm to the other and saying “Namaste” means “the sacred in me greets the sacred in you”. That can be a good thing to do, but it’s not really practical as a way of interacting when getting onto trains in the London Underground, for instance. So what happens in practice is usually pretty random. I find other blokes and teenagers tricky, and more often than not don’t make eye contact at all, which is a sad denial of the little piece of holiness that I feel about the encounter. With older people on  the other hand, particularly women, there is often a shared glance, so that I feel we have acknowledged our presence. With people who wear dark glasses – and I admit this could be for reasons of health – I feel cheated out of the whole process.

In such a glance, almost unconscious, there may be a multitude of instinctive reactions going on. Once, when I was a very open and relaxed state, as I passed someone I noticed that, in the half second or so of the glance, our eyes flicked in rapid mutual response like two butterflies in courtship. I then understood a very strange passage by Rudolf Steiner (from whom stems the spiritual movement of Anthroposophy and Waldorf Schools). He recognised many different human senses in additions to smell, touch and so on, and he called one of these extra senses, very confusingly, “the sense of self”. By this he didn’t mean, as you would expect, the sense of your own self, but the sense of someone else’s self. And he described its operation as a succession of quick approaches and violent withdrawals, just as I had experienced in that glance.

All these thoughts were triggered in practice as I passed someone, meeting each other with a quick open gaze,  on return from my morning walk (into which I’m now struggling to incorporate some jogging – the first deliberate exercise I’ve done in my life). I then started wondering about the other species around me. When passing most non-human animals our reactions are straight forwardly species-ist. I’m either a predator or irrelevant. Fortunately in the UK I’m never potential prey. But I can still be aware of them and take pleasure in their presence, as I can in the case of the trees and plants. A friend once described to me how she succeeded in so focussing her thoughts that she calmed an agitated chittering squirel and established a loving relationship with it. I’ve tried that with squirrels but have never achieved it. But I can take pleasure in the existence of all other beings, and this is a worthwhile exercise to develop.

So maybe the starting point with other humans also could be found in this general sense of the holiness of all beings.